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Comment by Yrlec | Hacker News Reader

So Xamarin buys RoboVM, then a couple of months later MS buys Xamarin and kills RoboVM. Feels like the MS of the 90's is back.

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Sounds like any company that buys another company for X and doesn't need/want Y or Z.

Downsizing isn't a "Microsoft in the 90s" thing.

Killing a well functioning piece of technology instead of open sourcing it is not just downsizing. MS is applying their "Embrace, extend, and exterminate" strategy to cross platform mobile development.

It happens all the time, companies unload unwanted or unaligned assets to focus on their roadmap and strategies. RoboVM should pick a page from Xamarin and buy out IP and support from mothership.

That's ridiculous, what % of software companies open source the software they kill? 0.1% maybe? Did Google open source Reader or Dodgeball when it killed those?

Google was heavily criticized for killing Reader. Why should we not criticize Microsoft?

Criticize them all you want but "Feels like the MS of the 90's is back." isn't criticism it's FUD meant to invoke fears of how closed down software was back then.

It's not FUD if it's true.

Exactly. I think we should wait until they shut down Xamarin before we get out the pitchforks. The simplest explanation is that they want to focus all of their cross-platform development resources on the core product that they acquired, and it sounds like Microsoft is very invested in Xamarin's future.

How does focus on the core product prevent them from releasing the source code?

I forgot all about this, then they're likely doing it because of Oracle likely to avoid a hailstorm.

Or they just want to make Java less competitive to C#.

On the other hand, after what happened the last time they used Java (back in the "embrace, extend, extinguish" days), I think they wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole.

Though I do hope that they'll make the sources available. It's not like just a code dump will suddenly transform into viable competition for Xamarin.

Or they saw what Google just went through with Oracle and decided it's not worth it

I think it's a mixture of: what Microsoft went through with J++ (which is totally not what inspired C# cough) where they got sued for basically turning Java into Windows only, and what Google has gone through, which still makes me wonder with all their talents why they either don't invest in an entirely new language or find an alternative to Java that would be friendlier to be on their platform. I understand legacy apps and what not, but Oracle doesn't even want to help them out which could of been for their own benefit. Anyway, yeah... corporation owned programming languages...

Oracle already did that by not caring one second in providing Java compilers for iOS and WP.

The only thing they are supporting is some hybrid framework that wraps ADP into some Java version of Cordova.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/maf/overvi...

With offers like that, no other everyone that favours native has mostly went C# or C++.

I've seen a couple of mentions of Oracle in this thread, implying Oracle would sue over copying of APIs I imagine. Is there any basis to the FUD here? What APIs did robovm copy?

I agree. The timing of events is no coincidence. This is nothing more than trying to eliminate a competing technology from the cross platform development choices. I hope Google is serious about making Swift a first class language on Android. That would pretty much derail any ambitions MS might have had to make C# the language from cross platform mobile development.

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