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Boring, repetitive take. Microsoft is a large company with some crap products and some really cool stuff. Their work to bring SQL Server to Linux[1] seemed very

Boring, repetitive take. Microsoft is a large company with some crap products and some really cool stuff. Their work to bring SQL Server to Linux[1] seemed very cool. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13206438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13206438

happymellon 3y ago
Nearly a decade ago they partially ported their database to Linux? I guess that completely invalidates everything else they've done since
- kbenson 3y ago
  It's a technology company with over 200,000 employees, that's in just about every industry, sometimes with bad software, sometimes with good. Are you actually going to double down on your 2024 comment equivalent of "Herr derr, Micro$hit is bad" when there's much more interesting and nuanced takes to be had, which would be much more useful to and entertaining to everyone involved in the discussion?
  - happymellon 3y ago
    You are the one defending Teams. You did actually read the Tweet right? You do know that this is Microsoft Teams demanding immediate response support via the FFMPEG support forum. That this is a multi-billion dollar corporation who have used an Open Source piece of software for one of their most highly visible corporate products after they declined to pay for support. Amazon don't get this because when they use free software they employ people to push back fixes upstream. Google don't get this because they don't demand that the community fixes bugs on their timescale. If they did, they would get the same response.
kafkabenchmark 3y ago
I'm not sure this is as big of a "gotcha" as you think. You do realise that MS SQL Server is their rebranded Sybase SQL Server, which before Microsoft purchased, ran on Unix? So the big innovation was to take Unix software, port it to Windows, and then spend time porting it to Linux?
- kbenson 3y ago
  It wasn't supposed to be a gotcha, just an effort to move the discussion into interesting territory. That said, I wouldn't call a product that diverged from Sybase SQL Server entirely in 1995, was converted to C++ a few years, later, had a complete revision of the old Sybase code in 2005, and has continued to add features over time consistently then being converted to work on Linux as something that could be dismissed as technically unimpressive for the sole reason that 20 years earlier before all that it started out as working on UNIX systems. It started this journey before Linux even existed.[1] The big innovation, which is obvious to anyone that bothered to look into it, is that they provided and optimized system call agnostic layer to provide accurate, performant access to the base system in a way that was OS independent, and was lauded as fairly impressive and interesting at the time. That people are so fixated on the company that own the product that they can't even assess something on its own merits before dismissing it because of its association with that parent company is exactly the problem I was alluding to originally. The whole reason there's a note in the guidelines about avoiding shallow dismissals is because it lowers the quality of the site in general for everyone. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_SQL_Server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_SQL_Server

happymellon 3y ago

Nearly a decade ago they partially ported their database to Linux? I guess that completely invalidates everything else they've done since

kbenson 3y ago
It's a technology company with over 200,000 employees, that's in just about every industry, sometimes with bad software, sometimes with good. Are you actually going to double down on your 2024 comment equivalent of "Herr derr, Micro$hit is bad" when there's much more interesting and nuanced takes to be had, which would be much more useful to and entertaining to everyone involved in the discussion?
- happymellon 3y ago
  You are the one defending Teams. You did actually read the Tweet right? You do know that this is Microsoft Teams demanding immediate response support via the FFMPEG support forum. That this is a multi-billion dollar corporation who have used an Open Source piece of software for one of their most highly visible corporate products after they declined to pay for support. Amazon don't get this because when they use free software they employ people to push back fixes upstream. Google don't get this because they don't demand that the community fixes bugs on their timescale. If they did, they would get the same response.

kafkabenchmark 3y ago

I'm not sure this is as big of a "gotcha" as you think. You do realise that MS SQL Server is their rebranded Sybase SQL Server, which before Microsoft purchased, ran on Unix? So the big innovation was to take Unix software, port it to Windows, and then spend time porting it to Linux?

kbenson 3y ago
It wasn't supposed to be a gotcha, just an effort to move the discussion into interesting territory. That said, I wouldn't call a product that diverged from Sybase SQL Server entirely in 1995, was converted to C++ a few years, later, had a complete revision of the old Sybase code in 2005, and has continued to add features over time consistently then being converted to work on Linux as something that could be dismissed as technically unimpressive for the sole reason that 20 years earlier before all that it started out as working on UNIX systems. It started this journey before Linux even existed.[1] The big innovation, which is obvious to anyone that bothered to look into it, is that they provided and optimized system call agnostic layer to provide accurate, performant access to the base system in a way that was OS independent, and was lauded as fairly impressive and interesting at the time. That people are so fixated on the company that own the product that they can't even assess something on its own merits before dismissing it because of its association with that parent company is exactly the problem I was alluding to originally. The whole reason there's a note in the guidelines about avoiding shallow dismissals is because it lowers the quality of the site in general for everyone. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_SQL_Server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_SQL_Server