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Having seen a tiny little slice of the requirements of open-sourcing code at a (different) Big Software company, I really hope people give MS and other companies their deserved props for stuff like this.

As a 3rd party it's very easy to think "oh they should just release the source for X and if they don't it's because they don't want to", but if X is big and it didn't start out public, it usually takes a pretty herculean effort to get it released, often meaning someone burnt a lot of capital (of whatever sort) to make it happen.

I believe it will pay dividends for Microsoft that they're being more encouraging of this kind of thing. There's a few reasons so many of the best developers work at Google (for example), and one of them is that Google opens a lot of stuff, and actively encourages open development. I, personally, wouldn't work anywhere where I couldn't contribute to Open Source communities at least part of my work day.

Microsoft knows how important developers are for a platform company, both inside and outside of the company (as evidenced by very good salaries, real offices, etc.). I just think it took them a few years to notice that one of the things good developers value is community. Now that they've figured it out, they've begun making changes. If you'd asked me 10-20 years ago, "Hey, would you ever consider working for Microsoft", I would have laughed. Today, I'd probably still say no, but I wouldn't laugh, and I'd probably even think about it for a minute or two.

>I, personally, wouldn't work anywhere where I couldn't contribute to Open Source communities at least part of my work day.

With respect I don't think that the gist of your post is solid, you seem to forget that Microsoft has no problem whatsoever to attract good developers. They could even afford to turn down someone as talented as the creator of Mono.

What developers - like other employees - look at is the corporate package, and - sometimes - the company's mission. This is why Oracle still has employees.

"This is why Oracle still has employees."

That's not a very high bar, is it? "Has employees"...well, so does Walmart. Does Oracle have the kind of engineering talent and passion that will see them through future decades as a market leader?

I believe we've seen a shift that won't revert. And, I believe Oracle has only a long slow decline ahead of them. Microsoft, on the other hand, may have averted that fate.

This is not to say that Open Source is magic (companies still have to ring the cash register), or that engineers are in charge of the ship now (though that, too, has been happening). I just think we live in a different world from the one where Microsoft and Oracle rose to dominant positions.

Would you want to work at Oracle? More importantly, would you prefer to work at Oracle over, say, Google or Github? Oracle has always been, and remains, anti-OSS. They sue over Java APIs, they close Solaris development after Sun had opened it, they piss off MySQL developers so much that they leave the company and fork MariaDB, they piss of Hudson developers leading to Jenkins fork, OpenOffice forked into Libre Office, etc. The best developers hate working with Oracle. The same was once true of Microsoft; at least it applied to many Microsoft products.

I think that means something. It's not a simple equation, but if I were betting on companies that will stand the test of time, I'd bet on the ones that have deep company loyalty (both inside and outside) and have passionate people who want to be involved in what the company is doing.

Eh. Oracle has a huge amount of engineering talent in certain areas (i.e. the database and SPARC). It would be pretty fun to work on the database I imagine. I would personally never be able to bring myself to work there, but maybe working on a decent team + good money could still attract talent.

> I wouldn't work anywhere where I couldn't contribute to Open Source communities

Okay, but note that that's not at all what my comment was about. Contributing new code to an open project isn't a hard problem, in any company I'm familiar with, but taking a large closed project that your company wholly owns, and getting it released as MIT is a different matter.

Even if the project was begun under the assumption it would be opened someday (as I imagine may have been the case here), momentum is against it and it tends not to happen unless someone is passionate about making sure it does.

This is so true. When I worked at Yahoo, there were a couple of people dedicated to helping people open source projects, and would help us make the right choices (eg, don't open source for the sake of it, etc).

Can you talk a bit more about why it is expensive?

Relicensing oss is difficult because you might need consent from all contributors, but I imagine that is easy for in-house code.

You have to convince n-layers of management, who often don't even know what open-source software is and think that "if we give it away for free then our competitors can also use it."

You have to pass legal review, which can take months, possibly rewrite parts of the code that cannot be opened.

Fundamentally, big corps are inertia accumulators. Noone wants to change the status quo, and as a low-rank engineer you have to fight every step of your way.

The props in this case also go to the management, all the way to the top. As someone doing F/OSS at Microsoft, it has become immensely easier to do in the past couple of years - and this is largely due to a concerted push from the top to make it a part of the company culture, and get all players (from devs to lawyers) to understand that it's a good thing to be embraced, not something to be avoided.

When I joined back in 2009, I certainly didn't expect to end up shipping newly written code under GPL, of all things. And yet, here we are.

but it is really nice to see a much more open MS

...which at the same time are collecting huge amounts of data ("telemetry") on and locking down their OS against users, as well as blatantly advertising to them within that OS. The openness is just a facade to entice people away from seeing that other side. IMHO they're basically saying "we're open-sourcing our IP because it's not worth much anymore --- monetising our users is worth much more, and they might trust us more if they think we're friendly and open."

Google and Facebook are other examples of companies doing a similar thing --- they contribute to and maintain lots of open-source projects, but that's not where their profit comes from.

From that perspective, I'd rather have the old MS back. Windows was sufficiently open to develop applications for (I've been programming in Win32 since the Win95 days), a little RE ala Russinovich went a long way towards "opening" the darker parts, and Microsoft wasn't hell-bent on tracking users and turning their PCs into advertising platform that MS controls.

> The openness is just a facade to entice people away from seeing that other side.

Excuse my language but I don't know a better or more direct way to say this but horseshit. You have no idea that's true. That's a pretty slanderous claim. I _hated_ the old Microsoft but I'd never let that hate distort my judgement the way it obviously has distorted yours.

> "we're open-sourcing our IP because it's not worth much anymore ---

Equally horseshit.

> Google and Facebook are other examples of companies doing a similar thing ---

Again, horseshit. My feeling is that devs have seen the success of Linux and come to the correct conclusion which is that open-source is pragmatically a better engineering practise than not.

> From that perspective, I'd rather have the old MS bac

Are you out of your mind? I can link to comments of people quipping about flying porcine objects and chilly days in hades when Microsoft started open-sourcing .Net. The new Microsoft was literally unimaginable even six years ago. I think it's incredible and Microsoft is to be encouraged. Guess what, they're not a monolithic malignant entity. They can be giving with one hand while taking with the other without there being a causal relationship.

You failed to address OPs arguments, dismissing them as 'horseshit' instead. The following statements are faact, not slander: Microsoft has made it well nigh impossible to disable telemetry in Windows 10. Microsoft has also resorted to pretty underhanded ways to trick people into upgrading to windows 10 (since when did dismissing a window mean the same as clicking on "OK"?)

Commoditizing your complement is not a new concept - open sourcing your complement is just a recent twist. Without passing judgement, I can safely say Google will not open source its search algorithms in the foreseeable future.

I used to work at Microsoft, so take this with a grain of salt, but the company really runs (or at least ran) like a bunch of smaller companies than it did like one giant corporation. There were people in leadership in some verticals that really detested the way other verticals ran. E.g. none of us in the web side of things would touch an architect that came from the Office team.

So it may be possible that the teams releasing OSS have relatively good motives while the people running Windows have relatively misguided ones. Different verticals have different-- possibly conflicting-- aims.

Personally, I think we can encourage the right behaviors and discourage the wrong ones. Use their OSS stuff, don't use their closed source/adware stuff. I don't think I'll be using Windows again (unless something drastic changes), but I do use VSCode, and I'd love to use Visual Studio again, if it ever arrives on Mac/Linux.

MS doesn't have such strong verticals anymore. The end of the consent decree, the "One Microsoft" initiative, and the massive reorg from a couple years ago all went a long way towards breaking down barriers internally.

Windows releases OSS projects as well, it's not only the dev div team that values open development.

> ...which at the same time are collecting huge amounts of data ("telemetry") on and locking down their OS against users

They've only begun catching up with Google and Apple in this regard, though.

What's your point? Does that make it okay or something?

I thought we could leave the "hurr durr, evil M$" stuff behind, considering that today, Microsoft is technically so far behind Google and Apple that it does not even come close to matching them in invasiveness.

Note that SQM telemetry is separate from any ad tracking. I think part of the problem is declining PC sales. I recommend that you read this: https://hal2020.com/2013/03/07/what-if-microsoft-had-done-wi...

Except they haven't changed that much. Windows is now malware and they are bullying Android and Linux device makers with their patents, so they aren't really that different from the Microsoft that funded the SCO lawsuit.

Microsoft is a very large organisation, and many parts behave differently.

Did you know the president of the Apache Software Foundation is also an employee at Microsoft?