5 ms·

To answer my own question, I guess it injects life into C# and perhaps enables them to sell more Visual Studio and maybe brings developers back into the Windows

by hoodoof 12y ago

To answer my own question, I guess it injects life into C# and perhaps enables them to sell more Visual Studio and maybe brings developers back into the Windows platform ecosystem. Even so, it does so at the cost of Windows server licences and potentially starts to erode the need to run Windows servers at all. Leads me to think back to when Steve Jobs came back to Apple and one of the first things he did was kill all the Apple-licensed Mac clones.

hobs 12y ago
Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition is a 100% free 100% fully featured VS. They are definitely not trying to sell windows or vs licenses with these types of moves, give away the platform and good tools and they will make it popular and make you a lot of money in other ways.
- petecox 12y ago
  Unless it works flawlessly under Wine, you still need to run it within a Windows desktop. A Windows 8.1 Pro OEM license costs around $150, which if you're building a FreeBSD desktop from scratch won't come included in the purchase price.
  - hobs 12y ago
    Sure, and that is a fair point, I was just responding to the "sell more visual studio", but of course driving the windows ecosystem in some ways (online, os, whatever) is their stated goal.
noelherrick 12y ago
My guess is that they want to sell two things: Azure and Windows Phone via Xamarin. Say open-sourcing .NET convinces a team or a startup to write their new app in C#. When it comes time to deploy to production, maybe they'll use Azure. VS has some Azure integrations to make it easy. Now the team needs to write a mobile app. They have the option of using C# with Xamarin. Conveniently, you write Windows Phone apps in C# too, so maybe the team decides to target all three platforms instead of just the major two since they can get so much code reuse. A phone platform is really about the amount and quality of applications. Sun was never able to monetize Java very well, but MS is in a little different circumstance since it has a cloud service and a mobile OS and hardware.
- cmdkeen 12y ago
  This. It also applies to the enterprise, all those in house data centres that are ripe to be migrated over to Azure. Microsoft care an awful lot less that you migrated your Oracle server to Linux if you run that server on Azure...
  - tracker1 12y ago
    That I my speculation as well.. when the company I work for migrated from rented hosting to cloud for easier growth, they went Azure because the existing software is all in .Net on windows... Even though new software is targetting Linux, we're staying on Azure mainly for entropy. It's a valid strategy for keeping their corporate customers.. they have that developer mindshare, and can reduce the systems employees (SysAdmins, DBAs, etc) to boot... Too many corporate environments have dev and admin groups that are combative to eachother... "The Cloud" offers advantages in many of those environments. I'm not saying it's for everyone, but I can see the appeal on several levels. Though working with some of the azure tools via node, it's not as bright as MS makes it out to be.

by hoodoof 12y ago

hobs 12y ago

Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition is a 100% free 100% fully featured VS. They are definitely not trying to sell windows or vs licenses with these types of moves, give away the platform and good tools and they will make it popular and make you a lot of money in other ways.

petecox 12y ago
Unless it works flawlessly under Wine, you still need to run it within a Windows desktop. A Windows 8.1 Pro OEM license costs around $150, which if you're building a FreeBSD desktop from scratch won't come included in the purchase price.
- hobs 12y ago
  Sure, and that is a fair point, I was just responding to the "sell more visual studio", but of course driving the windows ecosystem in some ways (online, os, whatever) is their stated goal.

noelherrick 12y ago

My guess is that they want to sell two things: Azure and Windows Phone via Xamarin. Say open-sourcing .NET convinces a team or a startup to write their new app in C#. When it comes time to deploy to production, maybe they'll use Azure. VS has some Azure integrations to make it easy. Now the team needs to write a mobile app. They have the option of using C# with Xamarin. Conveniently, you write Windows Phone apps in C# too, so maybe the team decides to target all three platforms instead of just the major two since they can get so much code reuse. A phone platform is really about the amount and quality of applications. Sun was never able to monetize Java very well, but MS is in a little different circumstance since it has a cloud service and a mobile OS and hardware.

cmdkeen 12y ago
This. It also applies to the enterprise, all those in house data centres that are ripe to be migrated over to Azure. Microsoft care an awful lot less that you migrated your Oracle server to Linux if you run that server on Azure...
- tracker1 12y ago
  That I my speculation as well.. when the company I work for migrated from rented hosting to cloud for easier growth, they went Azure because the existing software is all in .Net on windows... Even though new software is targetting Linux, we're staying on Azure mainly for entropy. It's a valid strategy for keeping their corporate customers.. they have that developer mindshare, and can reduce the systems employees (SysAdmins, DBAs, etc) to boot... Too many corporate environments have dev and admin groups that are combative to eachother... "The Cloud" offers advantages in many of those environments. I'm not saying it's for everyone, but I can see the appeal on several levels. Though working with some of the azure tools via node, it's not as bright as MS makes it out to be.