4 ms·

Microsoft is the largest open source organization in the world today. What else do they need to do to gain some kind of trust? I love what they do with Github s

Microsoft is the largest open source organization in the world today. What else do they need to do to gain some kind of trust? I love what they do with Github since the acquisition. VSCode is amazing. They've open source most of their programming language. Github is free for open source org and there are no limits to the CI usage. Trusting Gitlab more than Github is naive at this point. They are in the position of needing to generate as much revenue as possible to satisfy their investors. Github is not in this position anymore.

ekianjo 5y ago
Largest open source organization based on what metrics ? They havent open up any of their bread making products.
- atonse 5y ago
  Open sourcing .NET under an Apache license was a great move. And so was making it cross platform. I surely missed C# my first few years without it. Open Source isn’t some weird religion where it only matters if you open source the stuff that makes you money.
  - harry8 5y ago
    How does that work with their patent threats? Eg against mono, gnome, tomtom(?) for using a Free implementation of the fat filesystem? I haven't been following it but is all that renounced so it can't possibly come back or be applied to the next people? My first reaction is "How do we know that releasing the code isn't just bait?"
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    > Open Source isn’t some weird religion where it only matters if you open source the stuff that makes you money. Yet they love Open Source so much they use patents aggressively to extract resources from the Android project. Don't believe all the BS made by the Microsoft PR.
Mikeb85 5y ago
> What else do they need to do to gain some kind of trust? Stop doing shady shit. The whole .NET Foundation kerfuffle from last week... Or concerns about how Copilot trains its data... I like some of the open source work they do. It's nice that they opensourced LSP and built VSCode. I like some of the language research they do (their contributions to Haskell, Pony and F* more or less originated there, plus their mainstream languages) but can't shake the feeling that they only embraced open-source to get developers back on their side after losing out on mobile and much of the initial cloud rush. Anyhow, I use some of their stuff, but I only trust the licenses, not the company. Not huge on having them lock me into a platform.
- lmm 5y ago
  Like any big company, they have no ideology beyond making money. That actually makes it easy to trust them in a certain sense: they're not going to do things that don't benefit them, but they're not going to do something utterly crazy the way ideology-driven organizations can. I agree that the main reason they're doing good things for developers is to get developers on board. But that doesn't negate that they're doing good things for developers.
  - GoblinSlayer 5y ago
    It's just business, nothing personal, no trust involved.
  - JoelMcCracken 5y ago
    But that's the whole problem with "trusting" microsoft. Their stated motto used to be "embrace, extend, extinguish". How do we know that has seriously changed on all levels? I do not believe that Microsoft is fundamentally on board with the open source model. Its an alliance of convenience. If suddenly they think they can make more money some other way, they'll do that. They might not even actually destroy anything explicitly, merely ruin things out of indifference.
GoblinSlayer 5y ago
Microsoft doesn't ask for trust, just minds its business.

ekianjo 5y ago

Largest open source organization based on what metrics ? They havent open up any of their bread making products.

atonse 5y ago
Open sourcing .NET under an Apache license was a great move. And so was making it cross platform. I surely missed C# my first few years without it. Open Source isn’t some weird religion where it only matters if you open source the stuff that makes you money.
- harry8 5y ago
  How does that work with their patent threats? Eg against mono, gnome, tomtom(?) for using a Free implementation of the fat filesystem? I haven't been following it but is all that renounced so it can't possibly come back or be applied to the next people? My first reaction is "How do we know that releasing the code isn't just bait?"
- ekianjo 5y ago
  > Open Source isn’t some weird religion where it only matters if you open source the stuff that makes you money. Yet they love Open Source so much they use patents aggressively to extract resources from the Android project. Don't believe all the BS made by the Microsoft PR.

Mikeb85 5y ago

> What else do they need to do to gain some kind of trust? Stop doing shady shit. The whole .NET Foundation kerfuffle from last week... Or concerns about how Copilot trains its data... I like some of the open source work they do. It's nice that they opensourced LSP and built VSCode. I like some of the language research they do (their contributions to Haskell, Pony and F* more or less originated there, plus their mainstream languages) but can't shake the feeling that they only embraced open-source to get developers back on their side after losing out on mobile and much of the initial cloud rush. Anyhow, I use some of their stuff, but I only trust the licenses, not the company. Not huge on having them lock me into a platform.

lmm 5y ago
Like any big company, they have no ideology beyond making money. That actually makes it easy to trust them in a certain sense: they're not going to do things that don't benefit them, but they're not going to do something utterly crazy the way ideology-driven organizations can. I agree that the main reason they're doing good things for developers is to get developers on board. But that doesn't negate that they're doing good things for developers.
- GoblinSlayer 5y ago
  It's just business, nothing personal, no trust involved.
- JoelMcCracken 5y ago
  But that's the whole problem with "trusting" microsoft. Their stated motto used to be "embrace, extend, extinguish". How do we know that has seriously changed on all levels? I do not believe that Microsoft is fundamentally on board with the open source model. Its an alliance of convenience. If suddenly they think they can make more money some other way, they'll do that. They might not even actually destroy anything explicitly, merely ruin things out of indifference.

GoblinSlayer 5y ago

Microsoft doesn't ask for trust, just minds its business.