19 ms·

Well, here we are then. This now officially the standard play for formerly-dominating computer-platform firms who have fallen on hard times: having before been

by leoc 13y ago

Well, here we are then. This now officially the standard play for formerly-dominating computer-platform firms who have fallen on hard times: having before been proudly hard-nosed and proprietary, publicly see the light and present a new image as a new, kinder, gentler company which totally gets it about openness. Former famous examples: IBM under Lou Gerstner (we love Linux and open platforms!), Apple after the NeXT acquisition but before the iPhone (look how expandable our new PowerMacs are; on the software side, we're now an open-systems-loving Unix vendor, and we'll even open-source our kernel!), poor old SGI (we love Linux now! Or, wait ... actually WinNT, whatever.). Sun of course used to go back and forth between being chill dudes who totally get it and more nakedly hard-nosed. As always in these cases, the questions are how far the bright new era of glasnost actually goes in substance (IBM legal's patent monster quietly thrived through all the kinder-gentler period) and how long it lasts (these eras tend to end with the company either dwindling into irrelevance, or finding renewed success and going back to its bad old ways).

MagerValp 13y ago
I don't think it's particularly fair to lump Apple with the rest since 14 years later [1] the core OS is still open source [2], and they're actively working on several high profile open source projects (e.g. Webkit, CUPS, and clang). They're not exactly irrelevant either. [1] http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2000/04/05Apple-Releases-Darwin-1-0-Open-Source.html http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2000/04/05Apple-Releases-Dar... [2] http://opensource.apple.com/ http://opensource.apple.com/
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- RyanZAG 13y ago
  Given that all of those are already open sourced, do you know how bad it would look to close source them now? Especially Webkit/KHTML - that would be a PR disaster. I don't keep track of what Apple does - have they open sourced anything within the last few years? If not, I think they fit right in with the other companies.
  - bch 13y ago
    Grand Central Dispatch[0] is the latest (2009) I can think of... [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Central_Dispatch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Central_Dispatch
    - justincormack 13y ago
      "We're going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we're going to make FaceTime an open industry standard" 2010. Oh yes, that never happened.
    - Alphasite_ 13y ago
      Their Clang Arm64 back end as well, among other things.
  - wsc981 13y ago
    Apple also open-sourced their boot process software (launchd[0], which was fully developed in-house IIRC. [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launchd http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launchd
- justin66 13y ago
  None of them should be lumped together. There's no evidence that open-sourcing is a "standard play" demonstrative of anything as specific as what leoc claimed or with predictive power. That list of companies seems to demonstrate the opposite, in fact.
  - leoc 13y ago
    > That list of companies seems to demonstrate the opposite, in fact. How do you reckon that?
- danford 13y ago
  Hate to burst your bubble, but the only thing apple has going for them is the iPhone, which is arguably a fad. The reason Rolex never goes out of style is because they never change their style, and apple is no Rolex like a lot of people seem to think. People easily forget about all the hype around the iMac g3. Sure, it changed the company, but they still have yet to over take windows. Now Android is out selling the iPhone because of the business model. No large companies would ever replace current desktops with iMacs except in specialized "labs" where they're needed (mostly for designers). Apple isn't dominating any market. They're not on servers, they're not embedded, they're not on super computers, they're not on mainframes. They're no where, but if you spend your whole life surrounded by graphic designers and programmers and hacker news, they're going to appear to be everywhere.
  - eropple 13y ago
    Only thing Apple has going for them is the iPhone. And the iPad, which is kicking the hell out of Android tablets (to my consternation, because I'm primarily an Android user and their tablets are terrible). And the Macbook Pro, which is making pretty major inroads at leading-edge companies. A buddy of mine is working on *nix software at IBM and they asked if he wanted a Thinkpad or an MBP; that blew my mind. They don't do big iron, but they move a lot of product and very little of it is faddish. They Get It, or have Gotten It historically, and a lot of people respond well to that. They might at some point no longer Get It, but until then, saying that they only have the iPhone going for them is wishcasting.
    - danford 13y ago
      You're right, how could I forget the iPad, the thing is the business model they have for all of their products is unsustainable. The iPad is doing well now, just as the iPhone did initially, but less and less people are buying the iPhone because the Android environment has had time to develop. Even chromebooks out sold mac books [1] in 2013. A lot of companies allow developers to use Linux too. The fact that people working for large tech companies are allowed to develop for *nix on a macbook is kind of irrelevant. The circle jerk on HN around apple is deplorable, but lets let the down votes commence. [1] http://www.ibtimes.com/googles-chromebook-outsells-apples-macbook-us-2013-ipad-leads-tablet-sales-1521998 http://www.ibtimes.com/googles-chromebook-outsells-apples-ma...
- leoc 13y ago
  Yes, although I could pick nits about the significance of each of these (Webkit being open source is somewhat less significant that it appears since web browsers nowadays are de facto somewhat unforkable; the open-sourcing of clang was partly or mainly an attack on the GPL). But while Apple's continued doing many of those things (and done some similar things like GCD), they've also started doing other things they weren't doing back in 1999 or 2003, like breaking new ground in walled-garden application platforms and aggressive use of patents. The iPhone has never been as open to non-native apps as desktop OS X, while even desktop OS X's support for them is declining. (That's especially significant if you take the post-PC-era viewpoint and see phone/tablet devices as displacing or succeeding the PC rather than just supplementing them.) So overall Apple fits the mould pretty well.
  - emn13 13y ago
    Not to mention the fact that webkit itself is a fork of khtml - so while apple's contributions are clearly valuable, it's quite a different story. If apple had not open sourced webkit, given its origins, that would have been resoundingly bad PR at the time. Apple built on oss foundations, and most of what they've open sourced is simply a result of them not closing forks of once open projects, which is very valuable, but nevertheless less impressive that releasing important bits of their own making.
    - tjl 13y ago
      Darwin was based on NeXT, which as far as I can recall, wasn't open source before Apple opened it. While a number of the userland tools were (and are) open source, I don't recall the kernel being open. There's also things like the streaming server which as far as I can tell was strictly an Apple project. I think libdispatch was also strictly an Apple project.
      - adamnemecek 13y ago
        I mean it's based on Mach and FreeBSD both of which are open source.
- scholia 13y ago
  Apple took advantage of things that were already open source. How many innovative, profitable programs has it developed itself and then made open source? The fact that the core OS is still open source doesn't actually mean much when there's a huge layer of proprietary code on top, does it?
  - xcrunner529 13y ago
    Like Android these days...
  - tjl 13y ago
    The Darwin Streaming Server for one. There's also the Apple Lossless Codec. Plus, they're heavily involved in work on LLVM and have been for quite some time. Lastly, There's Grand Central Dispatch (libdispatch). Plus, WebKit is quite far from it's KHTML roots.
    - scholia 13y ago
      Doesn't sound like much for the worlds's most valuable company with $150 billion (or whatever) in the bank. As for the Apple Lossless Codec, it open-sourced a failure. It would have been much better for everyone if Apple had just supported FLAC.
JohnBooty 13y ago
Having followed a fair number of MS bloggers/podcasts currently in and around their web tools (ASP.NET, MVC, etc) teams... I honestly believe they understand the value of open source. Visual Studio and their MVC framework continue to impress me (I mostly work in Ruby today, but have to maintain some .NET stuff) and MS takes inspiration from successful open-source tools and frameworks where needed. Many of their recent advancements over the last 3-4 years have clearly been the work of engineers who enjoy and value the best of the open source world. I'm not trying to tell you that Microsoft is suddenly our warm, fuzzy friend. As even Scott Hanselman would gladly admit, they're ultimately trying to sell you software licenses or Azure services. But it seems to me that they're using open source the right way in order to achieve that goal, as opposed to the bad old "embrace and extend / embrace and extinguish" days at Microsoft. Whether or not Microsoft has earned another shot with us or not is definitely up for debate, and with all the cool shit happening in the open source world it's probably even a moot point to an extent. But they're definitely doing more than cargo-culting in Redmond these days.
- jaynate 13y ago
  Any developer worth his/her salt understands the value of open source these days. Keep in mind that these engineers don't actually run the business.
- NicoJuicy 13y ago
  There's a reason why Visual Studio continues to impress you. I once saw a presentation of the Visual Studio lead in Belgium, where he claimed that there were over 1200 people involved in the Visual Studio project. If that's true, i don't think there is any IDE that can top that number and it explains why Visual Studio is the best tool for (almost any) job. People should realize that Visual Studio is not solely C#, it's NodeJS, PHP, Mono, Python and so much more in one environment.
- Shamanmuni 13y ago
  I don't know, I see this as a good sign but for me it's still "too little too late". At least release it under a copyleft license, make it usable with previous versions of Visual Studio (it only works with 2013) and I'll feel more confident that you aren't setting a trap. Non-copyleft licenses can easily align with the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy. The value of .NET for most developers is closely associated with Visual Studio. They can make the next version closed source and have Visual Studio only accept that one and we are back to the same old Microsoft. Sure, you'd still have the previous open source version, but who cares when most people will probably just move on to the next.
Delmania 13y ago
Subtle difference: Apple and IBM have made use of free software such as FreeBSD, CUPS, Webkit, etc. Microsoft here is taking core technology and releasing it as free.
- bicknergseng 13y ago
  Important. Also, Oracle has bought/absorbed free software and slowly suffocated it (lookin at you, MySQL).
  - MertsA 13y ago
    Don't forget OpenOffice.
  - rimantas 13y ago
    InnoDB was Oracles long before Oracle bought Sun (and MySQL with it). If they wanted to hurt MySQL they had that opportunity before acquisition.
  - TheRealDunkirk 13y ago
    And Ksplice.
- tjl 13y ago
  Apple has made Darwin open source. That, WebKit, and LLVM are pretty core technologies. A good portion of their technology is open. So, it's not just using free software and not giving back.
  - pessimizer 13y ago
    Isn't WebKit a fork of GPLv2 code?
    - tjl 13y ago
      LGPL. But, it's still a core Apple technology. WebKit is far more popular than KHTML.
sneak 13y ago
> Apple after the NeXT acquisition but before the iPhone (look how expandable our new PowerMacs are; on the software side, we're now an open-systems-loving Unix vendor, and we'll even open-source our kernel!) Remember that time (well within the iOS era) that Apple claimed that FaceTime would be an open standard for interoperability?
- tjl 13y ago
  It's my understanding that the original plan for how FaceTime worked was derailed thanks to Apple losing a patent lawsuit.
  - 72deluxe 13y ago
    Which lawsuit was that? I would be interested in knowing which patent they violated, and who the patent belonged to.
    - tjl 13y ago
      See this Ars Technica article, http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/report-after-patent-loss-apple-tweaks-facetime-and-logs-500000-complaints/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/report-after-pate...
bbarn 13y ago
I'm sure I'm guilty of some logical fallacy or another here, but isn't responding to customer demand one of the core things espoused by the startup community? A big company does exactly what we're all saying is good for companies to do and everyone is up in arms with "TOO LATE M$" and the like (apologies for paraphrasing, and this is directed at several comments, not just this one). This is the kind of thing we WANT to see from big players, and while it's easy to say "close but nope", they do offer it up as "this is the direction we're going", and not "fine, this will have to do to shut you people up." Top MS dev team members have long been about open sourcing things, and I for one think it's awesome to see the company as a whole listening to it's best people, and the community that enables it.
- leoc 13y ago
  Well, I certainly can't speak for the startup community, as I'm more strongly affiliated with the screwup community myself. ;) But no, I'm certainly not dismissing MS's new direction: it seems to be fairly genuine, and (some lingering patent/EEE concerns aside) good news, just as IBM's support (in various ways) for Linux or Sun's eventual open-sourcing of Java were good news. I'm all in favour of a kinder and gentler MS (as far as it goes and as long as it lasts). And I'm certainly not singling them out either, as the list of comparisons shows.
  - 3825 13y ago
    Just for clarity, EEE refers to Embrace, extend, and extinguish -- a Microsoft strategy as discovered by the Department of Justice -- "for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to disadvantage its competitors"[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
runjake 13y ago
My impression is that this is a result of the changing of the guard (Ballmer's exit). The underlying people (scottgu, etc) have been pushing for open source for many, many years now. And Satya seems to trust these people and thus announcements like today.

by leoc 13y ago

MagerValp 13y ago

I don't think it's particularly fair to lump Apple with the rest since 14 years later [1] the core OS is still open source [2], and they're actively working on several high profile open source projects (e.g. Webkit, CUPS, and clang). They're not exactly irrelevant either. [1] http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2000/04/05Apple-Releases-Darwin-1-0-Open-Source.html http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2000/04/05Apple-Releases-Dar... [2] http://opensource.apple.com/ http://opensource.apple.com/

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
RyanZAG 13y ago
Given that all of those are already open sourced, do you know how bad it would look to close source them now? Especially Webkit/KHTML - that would be a PR disaster. I don't keep track of what Apple does - have they open sourced anything within the last few years? If not, I think they fit right in with the other companies.
- bch 13y ago
  Grand Central Dispatch[0] is the latest (2009) I can think of... [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Central_Dispatch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Central_Dispatch
  - justincormack 13y ago
    "We're going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we're going to make FaceTime an open industry standard" 2010. Oh yes, that never happened.
  - Alphasite_ 13y ago
    Their Clang Arm64 back end as well, among other things.
- wsc981 13y ago
  Apple also open-sourced their boot process software (launchd[0], which was fully developed in-house IIRC. [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launchd http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launchd
justin66 13y ago
None of them should be lumped together. There's no evidence that open-sourcing is a "standard play" demonstrative of anything as specific as what leoc claimed or with predictive power. That list of companies seems to demonstrate the opposite, in fact.
- leoc 13y ago
  > That list of companies seems to demonstrate the opposite, in fact. How do you reckon that?
danford 13y ago
Hate to burst your bubble, but the only thing apple has going for them is the iPhone, which is arguably a fad. The reason Rolex never goes out of style is because they never change their style, and apple is no Rolex like a lot of people seem to think. People easily forget about all the hype around the iMac g3. Sure, it changed the company, but they still have yet to over take windows. Now Android is out selling the iPhone because of the business model. No large companies would ever replace current desktops with iMacs except in specialized "labs" where they're needed (mostly for designers). Apple isn't dominating any market. They're not on servers, they're not embedded, they're not on super computers, they're not on mainframes. They're no where, but if you spend your whole life surrounded by graphic designers and programmers and hacker news, they're going to appear to be everywhere.
- eropple 13y ago
  Only thing Apple has going for them is the iPhone. And the iPad, which is kicking the hell out of Android tablets (to my consternation, because I'm primarily an Android user and their tablets are terrible). And the Macbook Pro, which is making pretty major inroads at leading-edge companies. A buddy of mine is working on *nix software at IBM and they asked if he wanted a Thinkpad or an MBP; that blew my mind. They don't do big iron, but they move a lot of product and very little of it is faddish. They Get It, or have Gotten It historically, and a lot of people respond well to that. They might at some point no longer Get It, but until then, saying that they only have the iPhone going for them is wishcasting.
  - danford 13y ago
    You're right, how could I forget the iPad, the thing is the business model they have for all of their products is unsustainable. The iPad is doing well now, just as the iPhone did initially, but less and less people are buying the iPhone because the Android environment has had time to develop. Even chromebooks out sold mac books [1] in 2013. A lot of companies allow developers to use Linux too. The fact that people working for large tech companies are allowed to develop for *nix on a macbook is kind of irrelevant. The circle jerk on HN around apple is deplorable, but lets let the down votes commence. [1] http://www.ibtimes.com/googles-chromebook-outsells-apples-macbook-us-2013-ipad-leads-tablet-sales-1521998 http://www.ibtimes.com/googles-chromebook-outsells-apples-ma...
leoc 13y ago
Yes, although I could pick nits about the significance of each of these (Webkit being open source is somewhat less significant that it appears since web browsers nowadays are de facto somewhat unforkable; the open-sourcing of clang was partly or mainly an attack on the GPL). But while Apple's continued doing many of those things (and done some similar things like GCD), they've also started doing other things they weren't doing back in 1999 or 2003, like breaking new ground in walled-garden application platforms and aggressive use of patents. The iPhone has never been as open to non-native apps as desktop OS X, while even desktop OS X's support for them is declining. (That's especially significant if you take the post-PC-era viewpoint and see phone/tablet devices as displacing or succeeding the PC rather than just supplementing them.) So overall Apple fits the mould pretty well.
- emn13 13y ago
  Not to mention the fact that webkit itself is a fork of khtml - so while apple's contributions are clearly valuable, it's quite a different story. If apple had not open sourced webkit, given its origins, that would have been resoundingly bad PR at the time. Apple built on oss foundations, and most of what they've open sourced is simply a result of them not closing forks of once open projects, which is very valuable, but nevertheless less impressive that releasing important bits of their own making.
  - tjl 13y ago
    Darwin was based on NeXT, which as far as I can recall, wasn't open source before Apple opened it. While a number of the userland tools were (and are) open source, I don't recall the kernel being open. There's also things like the streaming server which as far as I can tell was strictly an Apple project. I think libdispatch was also strictly an Apple project.
    - adamnemecek 13y ago
      I mean it's based on Mach and FreeBSD both of which are open source.
scholia 13y ago
Apple took advantage of things that were already open source. How many innovative, profitable programs has it developed itself and then made open source? The fact that the core OS is still open source doesn't actually mean much when there's a huge layer of proprietary code on top, does it?
- xcrunner529 13y ago
  Like Android these days...
- tjl 13y ago
  The Darwin Streaming Server for one. There's also the Apple Lossless Codec. Plus, they're heavily involved in work on LLVM and have been for quite some time. Lastly, There's Grand Central Dispatch (libdispatch). Plus, WebKit is quite far from it's KHTML roots.
  - scholia 13y ago
    Doesn't sound like much for the worlds's most valuable company with $150 billion (or whatever) in the bank. As for the Apple Lossless Codec, it open-sourced a failure. It would have been much better for everyone if Apple had just supported FLAC.

JohnBooty 13y ago

Having followed a fair number of MS bloggers/podcasts currently in and around their web tools (ASP.NET, MVC, etc) teams... I honestly believe they understand the value of open source. Visual Studio and their MVC framework continue to impress me (I mostly work in Ruby today, but have to maintain some .NET stuff) and MS takes inspiration from successful open-source tools and frameworks where needed. Many of their recent advancements over the last 3-4 years have clearly been the work of engineers who enjoy and value the best of the open source world. I'm not trying to tell you that Microsoft is suddenly our warm, fuzzy friend. As even Scott Hanselman would gladly admit, they're ultimately trying to sell you software licenses or Azure services. But it seems to me that they're using open source the right way in order to achieve that goal, as opposed to the bad old "embrace and extend / embrace and extinguish" days at Microsoft. Whether or not Microsoft has earned another shot with us or not is definitely up for debate, and with all the cool shit happening in the open source world it's probably even a moot point to an extent. But they're definitely doing more than cargo-culting in Redmond these days.

jaynate 13y ago
Any developer worth his/her salt understands the value of open source these days. Keep in mind that these engineers don't actually run the business.
NicoJuicy 13y ago
There's a reason why Visual Studio continues to impress you. I once saw a presentation of the Visual Studio lead in Belgium, where he claimed that there were over 1200 people involved in the Visual Studio project. If that's true, i don't think there is any IDE that can top that number and it explains why Visual Studio is the best tool for (almost any) job. People should realize that Visual Studio is not solely C#, it's NodeJS, PHP, Mono, Python and so much more in one environment.
Shamanmuni 13y ago
I don't know, I see this as a good sign but for me it's still "too little too late". At least release it under a copyleft license, make it usable with previous versions of Visual Studio (it only works with 2013) and I'll feel more confident that you aren't setting a trap. Non-copyleft licenses can easily align with the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy. The value of .NET for most developers is closely associated with Visual Studio. They can make the next version closed source and have Visual Studio only accept that one and we are back to the same old Microsoft. Sure, you'd still have the previous open source version, but who cares when most people will probably just move on to the next.

Delmania 13y ago

Subtle difference: Apple and IBM have made use of free software such as FreeBSD, CUPS, Webkit, etc. Microsoft here is taking core technology and releasing it as free.

bicknergseng 13y ago
Important. Also, Oracle has bought/absorbed free software and slowly suffocated it (lookin at you, MySQL).
- MertsA 13y ago
  Don't forget OpenOffice.
- rimantas 13y ago
  InnoDB was Oracles long before Oracle bought Sun (and MySQL with it). If they wanted to hurt MySQL they had that opportunity before acquisition.
- TheRealDunkirk 13y ago
  And Ksplice.
tjl 13y ago
Apple has made Darwin open source. That, WebKit, and LLVM are pretty core technologies. A good portion of their technology is open. So, it's not just using free software and not giving back.
- pessimizer 13y ago
  Isn't WebKit a fork of GPLv2 code?
  - tjl 13y ago
    LGPL. But, it's still a core Apple technology. WebKit is far more popular than KHTML.

sneak 13y ago

> Apple after the NeXT acquisition but before the iPhone (look how expandable our new PowerMacs are; on the software side, we're now an open-systems-loving Unix vendor, and we'll even open-source our kernel!) Remember that time (well within the iOS era) that Apple claimed that FaceTime would be an open standard for interoperability?

tjl 13y ago
It's my understanding that the original plan for how FaceTime worked was derailed thanks to Apple losing a patent lawsuit.
- 72deluxe 13y ago
  Which lawsuit was that? I would be interested in knowing which patent they violated, and who the patent belonged to.
  - tjl 13y ago
    See this Ars Technica article, http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/report-after-patent-loss-apple-tweaks-facetime-and-logs-500000-complaints/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/report-after-pate...

bbarn 13y ago

I'm sure I'm guilty of some logical fallacy or another here, but isn't responding to customer demand one of the core things espoused by the startup community? A big company does exactly what we're all saying is good for companies to do and everyone is up in arms with "TOO LATE M$" and the like (apologies for paraphrasing, and this is directed at several comments, not just this one). This is the kind of thing we WANT to see from big players, and while it's easy to say "close but nope", they do offer it up as "this is the direction we're going", and not "fine, this will have to do to shut you people up." Top MS dev team members have long been about open sourcing things, and I for one think it's awesome to see the company as a whole listening to it's best people, and the community that enables it.

leoc 13y ago
Well, I certainly can't speak for the startup community, as I'm more strongly affiliated with the screwup community myself. ;) But no, I'm certainly not dismissing MS's new direction: it seems to be fairly genuine, and (some lingering patent/EEE concerns aside) good news, just as IBM's support (in various ways) for Linux or Sun's eventual open-sourcing of Java were good news. I'm all in favour of a kinder and gentler MS (as far as it goes and as long as it lasts). And I'm certainly not singling them out either, as the list of comparisons shows.
- 3825 13y ago
  Just for clarity, EEE refers to Embrace, extend, and extinguish -- a Microsoft strategy as discovered by the Department of Justice -- "for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to disadvantage its competitors"[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

runjake 13y ago

My impression is that this is a result of the changing of the guard (Ballmer's exit). The underlying people (scottgu, etc) have been pushing for open source for many, many years now. And Satya seems to trust these people and thus announcements like today.