9 ms·
Can we trust Microsoft with Open Source? (2021)
- cwales95 2y agoNo one company can be.
- bigstrat2003 2y agoI think that this is spot on. Microsoft can't be trusted with open source... and nor can any other company. The exact logic that the author of this piece (correctly) uses to scrutinize Microsoft also applies to every other business. As soon as the right/wrong person gets sway in the company, the companies will be only too happy to burn their reputation for a short term profit. I wish that it were simply a Microsoft problem, because that would be easy. Don't do business with them (or build open source efforts around them) and you would be good. But unfortunately, bad actors abound and they will screw you if they get the chance. So you have to make sure no one organization gets the power to cripple you, no matter who it is.
- r0ckarong 2y ago[flagged]
- mikerg87 2y agoCan this be marked 2021 ?
- shrimp_emoji 2y ago[flagged]
- Dachande663 2y ago(2021)
- 486sx33 2y agoNope, and they’ve proven time and time again that we can’t trust them in any way shape or form
- ho_schi 2y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20230315200925/http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/3000/PX03020.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20230315200925/http://antitrust.... What did changed since Microsoft used ACPI as tool against Linux? Enforced Auto-Updates, Ads, Cloud Account enforcement, Blocking Firefox partially in Teams [1], Setting Teams as Browser (Edge?), WSL (intent is not compatibility, it is to prevent migrations to Linux), Azure is a giant security problem and finally the deal with Qualcomm (hinder Linux on ARM) like we are in the 90ies? The crap named Secure Boot with Microsoft as Certificate Authority. After certificates proofed to be miserable on the internet for 25 years. What about signing with a user generated private key (stored in a keyring or similar) of the superuser and storing the public key in the UEFI? Which would be simple and reliable. No. Microsoft opted for the solution which depends on their goodwill and the biggest possible attack surface. And Pluton looks so awkward that Lenovo and Dell turned it immediately off. I will not trust them. Their business model is greed, making the users itself hostile actor against all others. Using something intentionally incompatible and borked isn’t “your department”. You harm others with incompatible APIs, ABIs, weird “Word” files and Teams. I didn’t considered to use DotNet. GNOME removed it a long time ago and it is fine (Tomboy/Mono -> Gnome/C++). The only thing which seems good is LSP. But the hard work is done by CLANG and others. Not Microsoft. [1] Teams worked six months ago flawlessly with Firefox. Even screen-sharing on Wayland. But they greyed out and blocked the video-call button. Until I figured out that I can initiate calls through the calendar…lol. It is like 2001.
- resource_waste 2y ago"yOu cAn cHaNgE sEtTinGs" I watched my computer reinstall edge, reinstall/hijack my drives with onedrive, re-add ads... But I left Windows for Fedora. I felt offended that I didn't know about Fedora before. Like, there was some hatred toward Microsoft and Canonical for hiding a 10/10 OS. Angry at M$ for bribing schools. Angry at Canonical for free CD marketing that made crappy Debian-family the standard for 10+ years. Likely irrational. But Fedora has been an option and I didn't even know.
- HKH2 2y ago
- fabiensanglard 2y ago[flagged]
- recursive 2y agoI've been using some of the most expensive Visual Studio subscriptions for probably decades. This thing is so jam-packed with features, I'll probably never know what half of them do. But I definitely have access to hot-reload. Anyway, it doesn't really go to the point, but it's funny to me that I've had this hot-reload feature the whole time, and just have never found much use for it. Or maybe I just don't trust it.
- mystified5016 2y agoIME it can be unreliable and just doesn't end up being all that useful. C# compile times being what they are, it's not such a burden to stop and rerun for minor changes. Not like my C++ projects which take several minutes to build because Windows Defender wants to use 50-80% of my CPU to monitor the compiler for malware. Wish I could hot reload one TU or something.
- NikkiA 2y agoI have used it a few times for debugging, as long as you are aware that it's not a guarantee that your changed code works perfectly when run from scratch, it can be useful to iterate changes to a single function without a whole compile>build>debug cycle, just edit the code and see if it changed the behaviour in the debugger.
- bb88 2y agoRemember the quote from Steve Ballmer? "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!" Apple is winning, somehow.
- iLemming 2y ago> Apple is winning, somehow. How is it winning? Apple employees generally need approval to even contribute to any open-source projects that are not their own products. Apple is only "winning" by selling Macs to devs, but about 90% of devs using Macs don't even write software to run natively on Macs and iOS devices.
- RobotToaster 2y ago[flagged]
- throwaway9502 2y ago[dead]
- bmitc 2y agoMore than who? Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, etc.?
- compiler-devel 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- ffhhj 2y agoWait, they already ran away with it. ChatGPT.
- nonrandomstring 2y agoTrust is a complex thing. It's much more than a rational, game-theoretic or economic equation, it's emotional. Nobody "trusts" Microsoft. People need it. People fear it, or fear losing it. People suffer it. Or they have no choice due to pressure or policy. Or they don't know any better. Or they are tricked into believing something about it. But in the end, the often forced choice to use Microsoft is a strategically created imposition by a company with billions to spend on manipulation and political manoeuvring.
- JackSlateur 2y agoGullible people trust microsoft. I work with some of them, sadly.
- audidude 2y ago> Yes, that is right, Visual Studio for Mac is a closed source version of the formerly open source MonoDevelop IDE after Microsoft acquired Xamarin. Having all of my GPL code ripped out of MonoDevelop so it could become Visual Studio for Mac was the straw that made me write GNOME Builder, GNOME's flagship IDE.
- marcodiego 2y agoOh! So you are Christian Hergert, right? I've been completely deaf to GNOME dev tools for a few years. What are the plans (if is there any) for a reasonably good RAD or ui builder tool (besides cambalache)? Is there any hope for blueprint + workbench turning into something to fill this gap? Was there any progress or plan on the "designable" interface for GTK? For the record, I wrote this comment some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35632761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35632761
- dangsux 2y ago[flagged]
- loloquwowndueo 2y agoGNOME. Originally an acronym GNU network object model environment. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Project https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Project
- dangsux 2y ago[flagged]
- audidude 2y agoI am. It's been on my radar for a long time and I have prototypes for one that are bitrotting on gitlab. There are three major design pieces of it. First, It has an executable that runs in your development container (environment/etc) which means you can load libraries/typelibs/girs/etc just like the app would without crashing the IDE (or Glade in the old days). Second, everything is an AST node so doing fun manipulations, unlimited undo, etc is just tree mutations. Third the worker process does the rendering to a render node tree which is then shipped over to the Designer process to render. The cambalache author and I are friends, so we occasionally talk about how we can make things work to integrate from Builder. As for blueprint, that is outside of my knowledge area. I still do everything in XML and would prefer a designer to work with trees anyyway. Not sure I'd go the route of mutating a blueprint AST, but I hear it has back-and-fro to XML so that would probably be fine. Also, if you want to make this a higher priority, lobby my employer (Red Hat) to make sure they know it's important to you. Secondly, help me with _any_ of my other projects so I have some cycles to dedicate to it. People rarely notice but Builder, Sysprof, Text Editor, D-Spy, Manuals, Ptyxis, etc... are all one-man (split between many) projects and libraries.
- zaphar 2y agoThe thing about open source is that you can just fork it. You don't need to trust them. If the question is actually "Can we trust Microsoft with an Open Source Community?" then it get's more interesting.
- phkahler 2y ago>> The thing about open source is that you can just fork it. You don't need to trust them. That's not always true, particularly for things where a company is the primary developer. You can prevent takeovers by using GPL license with no CLA.
- bigstrat2003 2y agoNo license, GPL or otherwise, can prevent the situation you describe. If the project is licensed under the GPL, and the company decides it's not turning sufficient profit while remaining open source, then they'll simply stop working on the project and the outcome is the same. Any open source project can only thrive if the community puts the effort in. Choosing GPL does not prevent or even lessen the risk that a company will decide to stop putting forth the effort.
- elviejo 2y agoBut with GPL you are warranted the freedom to fork and even build your own company on top of that. Look at MariaDB. It was forked from MySQL once oracle decided they didn't want to invest heavily on a competitor from their product. In the same vein Percona built a succesful product and company on top of MySQL
- slaymaker1907 2y agoAfter all the fiascos of companies changing the license on stuff, I’m a fan of what Linux. No copyright assignment and lots of contributors so relicensing is nearly impossible.
- phkahler 2y ago
- synergy20 2y agoMicrosoft embraced open source not because it liked it, but it had to, "if you can't beat it, you join it", it is a poison pill if history tells us anything.
- nomoreusernames 2y ago[dead]
- ekvintroj 2y agoNo, just fork it.
- yoyohello13 2y agoCan we trust Microsoft with anything? I certainly trust them to put profit above all else in every situation.
- travisgriggs 2y agoThis the crux of the issue. And it’s why you can basically ask “Can we trust <insert profit motive> with open source?” and always answer definitively No. one is collaborative “commons” economy, the other is an attempt to make a deal between a baron and their serfs. Ultimately, each is striving against each other.
- anticensor 2y agoWouldn't a for-profit company like legalised free labor coming from open source project? Or does the control motive interfere with profit motive there?
- rvz 2y agoCan you trust an alligator with your head in its mouth not to eat you?
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago(2021) put years on your submissions if they're old please! Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28968231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28968231
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- animanoir 2y ago[flagged]
- firesteelrain 2y agoI know a lot of Microsoft people who work in Azure who are big on open source. They know all about KeyCloak, Kubernetes, HashiCorp Vault, Terraform, etc It’s not your Dad’s Microsoft
- Salgat 2y agoMicrosoft has also been one of Linux' top contributors. The old days are over, and the shift has been from selling a product to selling a service and making sure those open source projects work best on your service. Ironically both Elasticsearch and Redis didn't like this in spite of having dedicated AWS employees contributing to their projects. At least Microsoft and AWS have a financial incentive to maintaining open source.
- JackSlateur 2y agoYes. And why ? Because some heretics are not using hyper-V as hypervisor. So microsoft works with Linux to make sure windows can be run as guest. The day AWS and GCP migrates their workloads to hyper-v will mark the end of microsoft's upstream contribution on Linux.
- Grimblewald 2y agoits not the workers and wealth creators people worry about, rather, its executive leadership and its ability to stand up to investors. Take xbox, phil spencer, gamepass etc. Look at the direction phil was taking things, the direction he wanted to keep taking things, but then compare against the direction it ended up having to take because of investors. of course the workers are pro opensource etc. Their income is totally divorced from company profit, but through opensource they can at least build a public image that improves employability in a landscape of zero-trust relationships with your employer.
- wvenable 2y agoThis situation from the article is interesting because it was one of the last obvious "old school Microsoft" vs. "new school Microsoft" battles. And, ultimately, old-school Microsoft lost this fight.
- trod123 2y agoThe problem with discussions like these, and one that goes nearly always unspoken, is the problem of credibility. When you deal with deceitful people, credibility matters. The only time credibility does not matter is when you can independently verify what is being said, such as through a framework like Descartes Rules of Method, Logic, or some other epistemological method that is appropriate. Only then does credibility not matter because you can judge for yourself because it has appropriate rational backing. When you are solely down to an entity that does not use such a framework; credibility matters.. and by extension reputation and past actions take on more importance than hollow words. Microsoft, especially when it was run by Bill Gates, was never a credible entity. Today, it is run by accountants seeking to ride the knifes edge of what the market will bear, and in the process provide as little value as possible for creations that were made decades ago, ride the gravy train until it goes into the ocean. While the people at Microsoft certainly have come up with some neat features and projects, when looking at these features/products and the history behind them (i.e. looking at Powershell), these were largely complete accidents, and/or significant internal politicking that could have gone either way because there was little to no profit in it. Their engineers used to be some of the best, but it matters little when the Accountants are in charge and see everything in a risk averse lens. Once you lose credibility, it is almost impossible to get it back because you have to do so much more than it would have cost originally just to tip the scales back to even. Perception is sticky like that. To get back to the core question, can we trust Microsoft with Open Source... No you can't, not ever, because they are solely concerned with making profit and stealing whatever they can under the color of law. Open Source doesn't make profit. The rise of open source is the natural outcome when barriers to entry in a market impose costs so high that you can't do business without those features, (excluding participants from that market, monopolistic ally), and open source is exploitive free labor that's been used to create an alternative to those products when no business can compete due to the simple mathematics of costs. Even the big players can't compete with free for long without diversifying which is why FOSS is still around today. Volunteers, and some non-standard funding routes which aren't really all that viable at scale. This is also why Microsoft as an entity has been trying to poison pill Linux for awhile, they want to be the only game in town and read everything you write in Office; build a dossier, and sell it to the highest bidder. What could be more valuable then the thoughts of every single person using their product. Of course they'll claim they aren't doing this (deceitfully), just like Google claims they don't wiretap and listen to surrounding endpoint devices they don't own to show you ads related to what you were talking about in your own home.
- trinsic2 2y agoIm not an active developer with Microsoft products, but I have questions. Why is this relevant now being this was written in 2021? Is something similar happening again? Also I am confused, with many corporations getting into poisoning products for financial gains (enshitification) why are people still talking about engaging with companies that have a proven historical track record that they do not have good moatives?
- jokethrowaway 2y agoHow much more do you need from Microsoft? The answer is no, it's always been no and it will always be no. They don't see the value of OSS. Stop developing in M$ related technologies if you value your time and your DX. I agree that C# is Java done well, but there are plenty of languages with feet on more solid foundations than a company with a track record of writing crap code and playing games with their developer community.
- userbinator 2y agoMS is still ultimately a company that values its profits, so "open source" to them is just "free labour".
- matheusmoreira 2y agoRelevant article: https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/ https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/
- userbinator 2y agoI'd originally told them "just follow the docs" because normally Microsoft's documentation is top notch, but this time I was dead wrong. MS' docs have been on a steady decline ever since they moved away from MSDN and went to an "open source" "community project" with them. For some of the newer stuff, a page without any spelling or grammar errors or unnaturally odd phrasing is exceedingly rare, and I have heard that they are attempting to use AI to write and edit them. I've seen older pages from MSDN era get destroyed and turned into a mess due to their edits presumably to optimise for SEO (and thus not humans.) It will only get worse. They of course beg people to contribute fixes, as that article alludes to, but there's no point in doing that when you know your contributions are just going to get mangled into AI-generated muck.
- rqtwteye 2y agoApple’s docs also have gone downhill since the 90s. Does anybody still make good documentation?
- haradion 2y agoI've found MDN and the Rust programming language docs to be pretty solid.
- playingalong 2y agoI enjoy and appreciate Slack API reference. https://api.slack.com/ https://api.slack.com/
- cottsak 2y ago`dotnet watch` works fine. Why is this current news?
- debacle 2y agoUnfortunately, you can trust MS about as much as any company in 2024. The core ethos of OSS is, in many ways, a thing of the past.
- lenerdenator 2y agoThe FOSS community raised a generation of VC darlings who loved parroting the "we'll just do the hosting and keep the data, that's where the money is!" line, and who never considered (or ignored, or perhaps knew but didn't care about) the fact that the number must always go up. Not "must go up to a certain point and then everyone's happy", "always". There is no scenario under which some ghoul comes to Stanford, tells you you're Jesus Christ with a MacBook Pro, offers you millions of dollars to pursue your passion project if you drop out, and doesn't expect unending increases in returns even at the cost of the core philosophy of the software development community you came up in. That's literally their job.
- pipeline_peak 2y agoMicrosoft still gets shat on for their 90s reputation, yet I rarely hear open source people complain about Google or Apple…
- HKH2 2y agoGoogle still distributes AOSP. The Android ecosystem is quite diverse and healthy. They've done a great job IMO I wouldn't trust Apple with anything open source, but Apple's not trying to look like an open-source-friendly company. Microsoft is.
- skeledrew 2y agoGoogle has been slowly poisoning AOSP for years, ensuring the antidote is to include their services. AOSP now is mostly just a shell. This was reinforced just a few days ago when I downloaded and setup Android Studio for the first time in years: the default AVD with their APIs integrated works really well out of the box, but when I tried creating a couple AVDs without them, they wouldn't even boot (AVDs in my old setup still work fine, but that's on my previous computer).
- shiroiushi 2y agoIt's more than that. Google started out as an open-source-friendly company. Furthermore, their business model has never been to sell proprietary software to end-users, so supporting or opposing FOSS has never been an existential issue for them. Apple has never tried to look like an open-source-friendly company, but has never really been actively opposed to it either. Their whole business model, for a long time now, has been to sell overpriced iDevices to users. Anything that supports that goal is OK by them. More recently, they've been making money with online services: Apple Music, Apple+ streaming TV, etc., but these aren't really affected by FOSS. Microsoft is different from both of these. Their business model for ages was to sell packaged (or preloaded) proprietary software to end-users, and to control the OS that all users used. They've moved more into the cloud services realm in recent years, but they're still pushing Windows and Office. They were actively hostile to FOSS for many years: "Linux is cancer", "pacman-like", etc. Don't forget the Halloween documents. They've been trying to project a nicer, friendlier-to-FOSS image in recent years, but a tiger can't change its stripes.
- lenerdenator 2y agoGiven some of IBM RedHat's shenanigans, I'd say they can probably be trusted as much as anyone else at this point.
- mroche 2y agoAny particular shenanigans from IBM and Red Hat aside from the EOL and transition of CentOS that was widely viewed internally within Red Hat as an absolute train wreck? For an open source and free software steward, I would side with Red Hat over Microsoft in most (if not all) situations. That's not to say Red Hat is infallible. The internal organization of things does create misalignments around approach, path, and incentives. But it's not drastically different conceptually from any other business. There's just an inherit foundational hurdle of needing to convince potential customers that their products provide enough value over the upstream projects they derive from to agree to pay money for something they could, in essence, obtain at no-cost.^ Almost everything Red Hat does in the FOSS projects they contribute to can be a double edged sword. ^ No-cost can be a very, very loaded term. What you save on subscription costs may come back to bite you when trying to assemble or use something complex and rapidly developing. Your cost/risk tradeoff becomes staff with expertise, upstream communication, and operational reliability.
- jrochkind1 2y agoSo, anyone in that community want to give an update of what's happened since 2021, regarding what was discussed?
- RadixDLT 2y agoWhy don't programmers like nature? Because it has too many bugs!
- grugagag 2y agoYou cannot trust Microsoft or any other big company with a similar track record.
- avidseeker 2y agoCan we trust Facebook with Fediverse (2024)?
- xet7 2y agoMicrosoft is able to keep GitHub and npmjs.com online, despite all the DDoS attacks. It requires a huge amount of servers, bandwidth etc, to have all the repos, downloads, etc online. Having those online makes coding FOSS possible. There are some FOSS alternatives to GitHub, but they have had more problems staying online.
- AlexandrB 2y agoFOSS existed and worked fine before Github and even before Git itself. It's certainly a convenient tool, but not irreplaceable. Git is also well suited to being used in a decentralized way (with no centrally hosted master) compared to older VCSs like SVN. Again, less convenient but not the end of the world.
- eviks 2y agoGit is not well suited since it lacks one of the most important part of collaboration - communication
- User23 2y agoGit was designed to be used with email, which adequately solved for communication and decentralization (at the time at least).
- sqeaky 2y agoAnd even if it doesn't wouldn't to Dedicated communication tool solve communication better than a dedicated revision control system? What happened to using multiple applications each best suited for their domain?
- eviks 2y agoLife happend and led to the concentrated "best suited github.com app for the domain" which spawns sister articles to the one posted here
- tkubacki 2y agoYou can’t trust Microsoft about open source which has de facto monopoly on the desktop market with its closed operating system if you say it’s about ’values’.
- skeledrew 2y agoThe answer to that is in the number of community *GPL (not permissively licensed) projects they're actively supporting.
- ddfx00 2y ago[flagged]
- widea 2y agoThe question implies the answer...
- RadixDLT 2y agoYou can’t trust them as far as you can throw them.
- pjmlp 2y agoDoesn't matter. Linux contributions, Github, node/npm, Visual Studio, OpenJDK contributions to JIT and ARM, finally performance matters to CPython, Haskell,.. Turns out open source devs do have bills to pay, and Microsoft gives good checks.
- Hackbraten 2y agoMy personal moment where Microsoft briefly showed me its true form: Microsoft's Python language server extension for VS Code (Pylance) has been crashing on launch on one of my machines for twelve months or so. One day, I got fed up with it and opened the extension in a JS debugger to investigate. Immediately after opening it, the extension fully deliberately DoSed [0] the CPU core with a full-on ReDoS [1] attack, leaving it spinning at 100% forever. [0]: https://darmstadt.social/@claudi/112866065489514979 https://darmstadt.social/@claudi/112866065489514979 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReDoS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReDoS
- usui 2y agoYour first reaction is to attribute this specific situation to intentional malice?
- Hackbraten 2y agoHave you looked at the regular expression in the linked screenshot? How is it not intentional?
- fransje26 2y agoWell, it is Microsoft we are talking about, with quite a track record on the topic..
- masfoobar 2y agoI have doubt for any of the big tech companies - not just microsoft. Microsoft are profit driven and if any opportunity comes where they can trap you, they will. Same with Amazon. Same with Google. Etc. I do not hate them... I accept the world we live in where they will dominate and control whatever they can. I just do my best to limit using their tools. I work for companies using google or microsoft. At home, I keep to free software as much as I can.
- mediumsmart 2y agoAbsolutely and about as far as you can throw a Steinway.
- defrost 2y agoWith or without a trebuchet (the standard tool for piano tossing)?