4 ms·
Miguel and Nat have, ever since the early '00s, been enthusiastic supporters of Microsoft technology and have spent this century doing little other than enablin
by amyjess 5y ago
Miguel and Nat have, ever since the early '00s, been enthusiastic supporters of Microsoft technology and have spent this century doing little other than enabling Microsoft tech to play well with open source.
The takeaways from this are:
1. This is likely a lifelong dream for them. I'm not comfortable with shitting on people's lifelong dreams.
2. I definitely saw it coming. As soon as I saw Microsoft acquired Xamarin and retained both of them, the first thing that popped into my head was "this makes perfect sense". You can draw a straight line from their early work on Mono to their acquihire.
3. They are still spending their lives enabling Microsoft tech to play well with open source; the only difference is that Microsoft is now paying them to do it.
- tpmx 5y ago> Miguel and Nat have, ever since the early '00s, been enthusiastic supporters of Microsoft technology and have spent this century doing little other than enabling Microsoft tech to play well with open source. This seems like obvious Microsoft PR speech to me.
- jrm4 5y agoI think it's possible to find an effort both noble and foolish, which is exactly where I am here. I love that they thought they could shift Microsoft in a better direction, and hoped that they could succeed; but nevertheless was nearly 100% sure that it would never really happen.
- ethbr0 5y agoYou're nearly 100% certain that enabling Microsoft tech to play well with open source would never happen? ... It's already happened. And it's the only reason Azure isn't already dead, and that Microsoft's market share and stock price haven't cratered.
- jrm4 5y agoWe are working with very different definitions of "play well with open source;" Mine favors the ideals of free and open source software and doesn't really care much either way what happens to MS.
- ethbr0 5y agoDo you remember Microsoft of the 90s?
- still_grokking 5y agoSure. Did something substantial change meanwhile?
- jrm4 5y agoI do. That one was much much worse than the one today, I grant you. But also, I've been around long enough to know why; if you think it's because Microsoft "grew a heart" or somesuch nonsense, I bet you also believe that hotels stopped doing small prepackaged bottles of shampoo and cleaning the sheets nightly because they care about the environment. Microsoft warmed to open source because THEY LOST. Their software was so inferior that they were eventually forced to admit it because they would lose money if they didn't. That's all.
- mkr-hn 5y agoLoading up a local instance of a user-friendly CMS to wget mirror for a static site inside an Ubuntu terminal from the Windows store is still a surreal experience.