Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
I mean Microsoft only has 2561 members (https://github.com/orgs/Microsoft/people) , so it isn't how many microsoft members contribute to open source.
Is it how many contributors their open source projects have? nope, FontAwesome has maybe 100 contributors to all of it's 5 projects but it's listed as having 9000+ contributors.
From what I can gather it's mostly based on the number of people that forked one of their projects (with some padding, maybe by the number of contributors to forks of the project? I have no idea)
This doesn't seem like a metric that is more meaningful then just the number of stars a repository has.
https://github.com/nuget - not sure this counts
plus probable another 100 i'm not aware of.
One of their APIs was missing something I needed so I created an issue on Github. Not only did the devs respond, they thanked me profusely for the input and made the (rather significant) change in days. I don't know if it's true or not, but I felt like their only user whenever I interacted with them (their issue tracker was rather empty...)
It was an Azure team member that spotted the bug and worked with some of the MS SQL guys to resolve the issue.
I can't speak for the larger organization, but will say that the Azure and .Net Core teams have been incredibly open and responsive. And with a huge amount of their devdiv stuff in Github, it doesn't surprise me they'd be one of the largest corporate contributors on Github.
https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge
https://github.com/MicrosoftResearch
https://github.com/DynamicsCRM
https://github.com/MicrosoftDX
https://github.com/microsoft-mobile
https://github.com/thaliproject
.
Please take a look here: https://microsoft.github.io
I work in a .Net shop and witnessing everybody (slowly) move towards this middle-ground between .Net and Linux stacks is like watching history in the making.
So if I open sourced a buggy project, and someone reported a bug by opening an issue, and then 100 other people commented on that issue, my project would have 101 contributors!
The actual people count in https://github.com/orgs/Microsoft/people is twice as much. (I can see the actual number because I'm in the org.)
But it's still obvious that this is not the metric that was used.
Just as an example: http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html
(Scroll to the bottom, and see that MS is #1, ahead of e.g. MIT, which is #3 on the list, and far ahead of Google which is #17 on the list)
From the outside imo it feels like it took ages for them to start this change, but actually doing it once they first started open-sourcing things seems to have been an incredibly quick switch, over just a couple of years. Has there been loads of progress on this in the background that's just only become visible now?
"How I can notice this change of strategy?" may you ask, It's because they always said things like this, per example, that Linux was not good because something open source could never be better than a closed and proprietary system with a company protecting their code.
But a quite decent improvement from the era when the company bribed government officials to purchase bulk licences for pupils and govn't, distorting the job market. This is a less harmful Microsoft than it was 5-10-20 years ago.
Or the era of "Linux is a cancer"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_c...
Nor the stealing of Google's search results.
I'm not ready to bless Microsoft yet.
I still don't trust Sony after the RootKit fiasco, and it might be another decade before I do. Or Sprint after the IQ agent keylogger.
There are simply too many other companies with similar products to ms, sony or sprint that have no public dishonesty on their record. I can just use someone else's product until they have been good corporate citizens long enough that I have forgotten.
Basically there are filesystems out there that are superior to FAT and not encumbered by patents, but device makers are forced to use FAT because of interoperability reasons.
This goes to show that the innovation argument is bullshit.
Most Microsoft shops in my area are now at least 25% Linux these days on Azure.
People confuse Steve Ballmer with present Microsoft. They don't do the patent wars anymore.
Ballmer wasn't stupid he could have been nuanced and precise if he wanted, he certainly knew the difference between a kernel and a license. He wanted to convince people to not use a given technology stack because he was invested in another. If that is not convincing enough at the time there was already a more accurate but still negative sounding phrase "The GPL is Viral", but that wasn't offensive enough and didn't attack the perceived enemy OS.
And it's an invaluable tool. For the indie dev that can't hire a team of lawyers copyleft can be a powerful legal strategy as relates to their IP. It has built entire communities.
Does it?
The GPL increases the user's freedom by forcing developers to contribute back, ie limiting the developer's freedom (to close code down).
Likewise, BSD and MIT type licences increase developer freedom at the cost of end users.
You have got to keep these two roles clearly separated when thinking about licences, even though in lots of cases the actual users will be developers (but of other products).
If you do, there's nothing controversial about that statement.
That begs the question of whether or not one has the right to limit one's users' freedom to use, modify & share code. I don't think that one does.
> Likewise, BSD and MIT type licences increase developer freedom at the cost of end users.
They certainly increase developer power, but power is not freedom; might does not make right.
You're not refuting anything I say, but instead debating the morality around different licence models. And that's clearly a different and subjective argument.
Even with a more permissive license (MIT/BSD) the developer as a user never has the freedom to close down the original source code. Integrating that code into a proprietary offering does not close down the original code base. If there was only one copy of the code, then yes, integrating into proprietary software would close down that code. The original code can be copied indefinitely.
There is certainly a tradeoff. I prefer BSD/MIT to give developers the same freedom as users to use the software as they wish. If I was going to try to make money off the miscellaneous tools I open source I would prefer one that limits unfair competition (coopt and close). At the very least one that requires improvements to the direct code base to be given back (those licenses exist without full copyleft). That said, my go-to is MIT.
I also like license clauses that prevent use in a patented product. That way, regardless of how the code is used (even proprietary) the functionality can be reverse engineered and offered as a free product. Edit: Although embrace, extend, extinguish can be very effective with protocols because of the difficulty of reverse engineering edge cases.
You're trying to make it complex, but this is really simple.
GPL maximises end user freedom. BSD/MIT maximises developer freedom.
By conflating the two terms ("developer as a user") you are trying to make it seem like you can have it both ways at the same time.
But obviously and rationally there's no way for that to be possible.
When you as a user of product A decides to use your freedom and take that code to create product B, you become the developer of that product.
If product A was GPL licenced, you would be forced to provide your users with the same freedom you were granted. End user freedom preserved.
If it was MIT/BSD licenced, you as a developer could make your product closed source, and as a developer be free to take away freedoms from your end users.
Both are fine options, depending on your point of view. I'm not rating one against the other.
I just don't see how understanding these simple differences can at all be difficult.
No, it doesn't. The GPL reduces the probability of the user being offered a non-Free derivative in addition to the original Free software and any Free derivatives, but does not increase the user's freedom.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_compatibility
Note that more permissive licenses (MIT/BSD) allow more freedom for the developer.
IIRC they're still doing that. In India I think?
>This is a less harmful Microsoft than it was 5-10-20 years ago.
The key to that is Microsoft being far less powerful than it was 5-10 years ago. Where MS can throw it's weight around, it still does.
The aftermath of the DOJ case is probably as much as responsible for that as the competition which ended up marginalizing them.
They still do this in France and they are being sued for this. Actually this is in today's French headlines.
I wasn't aware of this. At least the IT textbooks in my home country write about “text processor” and “spreadsheet tool” and not explicitly MS Word or Excel. The programming classes don't require MS Visual Studio project files to be submitted either.
In 2008 Hungary paid $162M for the “Clean Software Programme” for 3 years. In 2011 it became $54M for an other 3 years, in 2014 it was reduced to $2.8M. I don't hear stories any more about their legal bullying team called BSA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSA_(The_Software_Alliance) which with members of the local police they appeared time to time at business offices asking the for proof of purchase. Even they had no search warrant, they used a psychological terror with the presence of the police to threaten the businesses.
This is one of their ads from the past http://img.index.hu/cikkepek/0101/tech/bsaplakat2.jpg It says: “Don't use illegal software! _Users_ of illegal software can sentenced to 2-5 years. _Have you been inspected today?_
Absolutely.
And don't take this the wrong way... I much appreciate the improvements. But there's still a very strong trend that Microsoft code contributions tend to be in MIT or similarly permissively licensed projects. They still tend to avoid the GPL where possible.
(Disclaimer: Have contributed code and patches. I don't personally don't mind permissive licenses)
Of course, their projects does come with a patents license, in addition to the copyright license, but it's unclear to me whether this license applies to derivative works for example. I'm not a lawyer of course and I have a very limited understanding, but interpreting their license as an English text, I really don't think it applies to derivate works. Would like an analysis of somebody knowledgeable, because a project that can't be safely forked isn't open source. Here's their license: https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/blob/master/PATENTS.TXT
Anyway, my point is that I would have preferred something like the Apache License, which is still permissive, but was written by lawyers that know what they are doing and has an explicit patents grant in it. You see, people think of BSD and MIT as being "permissive", but that's only true as far as the copyright law is concerned. Patents are a whole different thing.
As a user, I prefer licenses like MIT that just give the code away with some reasonable strings attached. As a pip-squeak creator, I have to admit the copyleft licenses are attractive - the more viral and toxic (like AGPL), the better! I like being able to show off my clean and valuable code and have some reasonable expectation that no big corporation will rip me off. But then, universities and hobbyists will have full run of my code and that suits me fine.
Am I greedy? Am I stingy to think of my code this way? Should I be happy that anyone would see fit to use my code and thus maximize that chance by licensing with MIT? Or is no value ever generated with all the codes being completely free and open? I wrestle with this.
MIT or the MS-PL is much more practical.
if you are attempting to exploit other peoples code with out giving anything back to the people that created the code then GPL is a cancer
>MIT or the MS-PL is much more practical.
This depends on the project
I normally license my libraries, code I intend to be included in other software under BSD or MIT, but full developed software that is intended to be used as is gets GPL.
That's bullshit - GPL requires you to open source your derived work as well - which plenty of people have a problem with commercially - it doesn't mean you don't want to contribute anything (quoting you) back.
Even with the LGPL there are scenarios where sharing your code is not an option because of real world constraints (eg. NDAs), for example you need to modify the LGPL code to port to a closed platform. That doesn't mean you can't contribute back other improvements, but anything platform specific can't be released and therefore you can't comply with LGPL.
In general GPL creates a lot of problems to which GPL supporters just plug their ears and mantra "if you were truly free you wouldn't have those problems". Liberal licenses remove those problems and incentives to share back are there without the license requirement, you get your stuff maintained in the mainline and don't have to rebase on every update and reduce conflicts further down the development. LLVM is an excellent example of this where even traditionally closed companies OSS stuff because it's such a chore to keep up with latest. An example of a project being choked by GPL is Blender - a tool that has great potential to be a fully featured OSS 3D authoring package is struggling to fund developers because it can only sustain itself from government grants - nobody is interested in investing in it commercially because of the GPL. If it allowed for commercial plugins the OSS core would undoubtedly see significant contributions from those developers as well.
I'm not plugging my ears. I recognize it, and it's terribly unfortunate that one would ever be in such a situation, but the idea there is that the GPL would encourage the liberation of other code, and other platforms. Here's an example:
http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/clisp/clisp/doc/Why-CLISP-is-under-GPL
Otherwise, if modifying free software and in doing so making your modified program proprietary means that it can't be used at all, then that is the intent.
I'm actually in agreement with Ballmer on this one: GPL is cancer. And I love contributing to OSS in general.
If you are not distributing the software personally or outside your organization, the GPL does not apply to you. If what you are doing does not constitute a derivative work, then your software is also not affected by the GPL: if you're invoking GNU grep in your program, for example, your program does not need to be licensed under a GPL-compatible license.
For clarification, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html
If you are only using GPL'd software, there is no compulsion to release your software under the GPL. If you, on the other hand, are releasing a product to other people and you have found a piece of GPL'd software that provides enough value to you to bother including it in your project, then and only then are you compelled to open your source.
I work on a OpenStack project that does DNS. We have plugable drivers for the different software out there - PowerDNS, Bind9, nsd, etc.
One of the people deploying our software wanted (or needed? - there was some weird legal / support issue) to plugin into Nominum.
Now, to even look at the API ref, or use the Nominum python lib, you need to have a support contract, and agree to not release them. If we were GPL, that user would not be able to use our project, but because we were Apache they could write an internal driver, and still have the same API as other OpenStack users.
I'm not sure if by "internal" you meant that they were only using it internally. If they're not distributing outside their organization, they have no obligations under the GPL.
Otherwise, yes, the GPL does not allow for distribution under an NDA, because it adds additional restrictions.
Even if Microsoft, big business and ivy league succeed in subverting the software architecture and environment built on the GPL license, hobbyists and developers will still continue developing on it (GPL code) on their free time.
(tldr; commercialization was never a real priority for GPL licensed software. it was the continued community sharing of works through licensed protected open source.)
edit: some developers are just in it for the love of money like m$, others are just in it for love of the craft.
My only chance of getting out of that is probably building my own products and partnering with a group of people who are good at marketing. I think, in large part, selling copies of software is a dead end business. There are some contrary examples, but I think they probably more prove the rule. Does anyone pay for Sublime Text for any reason other than "to support the developers" (i.e. not "because I need this software")? Video games have to be released on a regular schedule. Adobe has all the image processing patents. I think in all cases, people are buying something other than a literal copy of the software. So why not just sell that other thing directly and skip the noise?
On the other hand, assuming I end up making the libraries any good, someone else with a business of supporting software and the mercenary nature of refusing to help people with problems who don't have any money to pay, could probably snipe me in my own software.
So with that in mind, libraries I write always come out under the full GPL-3.0. Nobody deserves to close their use of my code. It has turned some people off (and I think that has more to do with their misunderstanding of what the GPL is practically about than any ostensible flaws in the GPL), but they can go start their own VR framework project for all I care.
Software that chooses a copyleft license like the GPL cares for freedom more than broad adoption of their software. I would never want you to help you create non-free software---that's antithetical to everything I stand for. Many feel that way.
You say "trace back and make arrangements with the owners of thousands"---why should you? Why would we want you to do that? Why would we have used the GPL to begin with? I would consider that to be an incredible situation! All these tiny libraries on NPM under the GPL that make it virtually impossible to develop proprietary software because of the infeasibility of working out deals with all the authors---some of which will never agree? That is freedom at its finest! That would be a huge success!
It's great that software like jQuery has had the success that it has. It shares a different philosophy. I don't call that philosophy a "cancer", even though it results in what I consider the worst possible outcome: proprietary software, and often SaaSS at that, which robs freedoms even more.
Please be respectful of others' philosophies. The GPL is the embodiment of ideals and the free software movement---it's more than a license.
I'm glad Microsoft is cognizant of the fact that they have legions of partners, vendors, and independent developers that have built their businesses on top of Microsoft libraries and technologies and has chosen appropriate licensing to reflect that.
That is not true at all and this reflects basically a willful ignorance of what the GPL actually says.
>> That's kind of my job, and I have to be pragmatic and practical about it.
Then you are bad at your job, because you do not know what the GPL means in practice.
How can it be that most of the most valuable technology companies in the world--Google, Facebook, Amazon, just to name a few--are built from the core-up on open source software?
Why would you want to release under any other sort of license? Why do you wish to restrict your users' right to use, modify & share code?
> can you imagine the clusterfuck if, say, the NPM community defaulted to using GPL
That sounds wonderful: an entire ecosystem of free software.
Not everyone agrees that this is a right.
You seem confused. The discussion here is about copyright law and intellectual property licensing. Code is a series of 1s and 0s that can be duplicated at almost no cost. Me "possessing" it doesn't deprive anyone else of anything.
The standard way to use GPL v2 is to use this verbiage:
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
While that choice might have been a mistake, it would now be an impossible effort to get all contributor's permission to change, so we are stuck with v2.
Yes, if someone else comes and extends your work and eclipses your production, they're able to decide what to do with it as they want. That's the key point of being open: Letting people do what they want with it.
If anything, I'd contest the claim that copyleft can be considered open source any more than a license that lets you look at the source but doesn't let you modify it. Copyleft controls the source and forces your views on people who want to use it.
"If you write software, proprietary content is a time bomb waiting to kill everyone involved."
Does this kind of language really help anyone? Do you want to be called a toxic waste distributor? Do you like to plant bombs in peoples projects, killing them?
Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license. If this seems surprising to you, please read on."
But many/most will follow the project directly. You can offer the source code to build yourself , or provide a convenient binary/installer for those who either don't want to or can't (for example).
This is especially prevalent for mobile OS's, where building is an unfamiliar task or PITA for many, even hackers.
Would I personally? No. But I respect that decision.
Look, it probably won't matter anyway. Probably nobody is going to use your software.
Now I'm in my mid 30s and I respect them a lot and would definitely work for them.
I guess we both have changed.
"Linux kids" hated Microsoft because of their dirty tactics, exemplified for example in the "Halloween documents" [1], which shows among other things how they sponsored the SCO lawsuits against Linux. "Linux kids" also hated Microsoft for how they always tried to subvert open standards, like for example the Open Document Format (ODF). "Linux kids" also hated how Microsoft tried to push people towards DRM and Trusted Computing.
If they changed, that would mean they no longer engage in such tactics, right?
Yet Microsoft constantly engages in racketeering practices against Android phone makers and against Linux, with their huge patents portfolio, turning into genuine patent trolls. They make more money from Android than from their Windows Phone. They are also coercing computer makers to install Windows on computers, threatening with patents that allegedly cover Linux. If you can't innovate, litigate, right? And on open standards Microsoft is still engaged in subverting ODF, forcing governments that want open formats to accept OOXML as an alternative. And on Trusted Computing, well, they weren't the ones popularizing it, Apple takes the credit for that one, but they surely benefit from it now ;-)
Oh, and the often cited article by Scott Hanselman, titled "Microsoft killed my Pappy", doesn't mention these problems. Convenient, but it feels like a slap in the face.
Yet indeed, Microsoft did change. The Microsoft I know would have never tricked users in giving away their privacy by dark patterns [2]. And I can recognize they now have a wonderful PR department, otherwise this "change" nonsense wouldn't have flied without one.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents
[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/windows-10-microsoft-b...
But this is some sort of fallacy. Does the existence of other companies that engage in bad behavior somehow exempt Microsoft or makes them less bad?
And in case you're not up to date, Microsoft is also collecting your data and they forced that upgrade on all Windows users, in addition to behaving like patents trolls. So what's your point?
If I boycotted every company who played hard-ball politics, I would be living alone and naked in the woods. Your priorities are out of whack if you're railing against Microsoft but still living on the grid.
Scott Hanselman's article is a whole 20 paragraphs long, it wasn't ever supposed to be a comprehensive coverage of every action Microsoft has ever taken.
Like most people, all I ever cared about was high quality software and Microsoft has it in spades...which is why almost every business desktop system on the planet is running Windows.
You've just made an appeal to popularity, an obvious fallacy.
Microsoft killed BeOS and almost killed Apple through anti-competitive behavior. Whether Windows was superior, that's irrelevant to our discussion, because they engaged in anti-competitive behavior, which hurts the market and consequently the people. And this is a fact, because Microsoft is a convicted monopoly and they got lucky with the Bush administration.
> If I boycotted every company who played hard-ball politics, I would be living alone and naked in the woods.
That's odd, given that consumers exercising choice is how capitalism is supposed to work. If you boycotted every company who played dirty, that's called "voting with your wallet" and it works surprisingly well ;-)
> Scott Hanselman's article is a whole 20 paragraphs long, it wasn't ever supposed to be a comprehensive coverage of every action Microsoft has ever taken.
My point is that Scott Hanselman's article is pure PR bullshit because he never addressed any important problems.
I already said that this matter DID NOT affect them because the great majority of people would never have used Linux on their desktop to begin with. So your entire argument is invalid.
Furthermore, the anti-trust case against Microsoft surrounded Internet Explorer, not Linux.
> Microsoft killed BeOS...
Citation?
> ...and almost killed Apple...
Umm, Bill Gates saved Apple is more like it.
> If you boycotted every company who played dirty, that's called "voting with your wallet" and it works surprisingly well ;-)
Yes, but again....you're obviously not doing that because if you boycotted every company who played dirty you'd be living naked in the woods. If you just did it within the realm of technology, you'd be Richard Stallman. LOL
> My point is that Scott Hanselman's article is pure PR bullshit...
In your opinion... Of course he specifically says "I don't speak for Microsoft, I'm not a mouthpiece or a marketer. Sure, I promote the stuff I work on, because some of it is damn cool stuff. I'm a programmer with a blog who likes to speak on technology. But I am not my employer."
followed by
" I like the direction we're heading. I work here to fix stuff. Some folks complain, some tweet complaints, I'm here to fix it. If it was a lost cause, I'd quit, as I truly don't need the job that badly."
Anyway, I don't know why you care so much about that article. There are millions Microsoft fans out there that probably didn't even read it, who don't really care about your politics at all.
Enjoy your crusade though!
Very few open source companies make money and even fewer companies make significant revenue as a consequence of releasing free/open software as their core business (FB/Google, for example, only open source ancillary services or services which devalue their competitors tactical advantages).
Any Github contributions they make are trivial in comparison.
I don't begrudge them a few patents in exchange for that.
I keep saying that for a lot of people there's nothing they could do to change their opinion because people are so invested in them being a bad guy. It's part of a world view.
Edit: to be clear, I know it is in their best interest not to open source those products, because that's where most of their money comes from. But it really looks to me like the want to flood the market with random open source stuff, so that they seem more open source friendly. But in reality they are not actually contributing anything very useful to the community.
Have you looked at https://github.com/Microsoft/monaco-editor
They have examples of what it can do at
https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/
It literally took me a couple of days to integrate their diff viewer into my product. If you go to
http://bitbucket-server-demo.gitsense.com/plugins/servlet/gi...
and click on the last tab (077be8bd -> 966c0823) and click on any of the files in the tab, you can see the diff editor in action. I don't know how much money was spent in developing the editor, but it's FREE for use by the community.
Z3 (https://github.com/Z3Prover/z3) is the Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solver to use. It is such a quality piece of software and it's amazingly easy to find help on StackOverflow from the main developers. Z3 really is the default choice for an SMT solver these days (i.e. you only reach for other solvers when you really have to).
Roslyn (https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn) is the C# (and VB) compiler as a library. Useful for doing code analysis and code generation for a modern imperative language. Roslyn is a whole lot easier to get started with than integrating Clang/LLVM into a project, so it really lowers the barrier of entry for lightweight program analysis projects.
'very' useful is of course subject to debate, but did you even bother to check what they have on github? F#/msbuild/vscode to name some bigger ones, then there's smaller things like ffmpeginterop etc which I was looking into just last week.
Uhm... .NET? Anyone?
Google doesn't open source their search engine, most larger corporations don't open source some key products that they make money from. They are in the business of making money, afterall.
http://www.gh-impact.com/blog/the-most-influential-organizat...
Despite being a latecomer to GitHub, Microsoft has risen to become the 4th most influential organization on GitHub in a very short amount of time.
This is all coming from someone who only uses Windows for Overwatch, Office, and courses that require it.
The issue is the financial health I would be worried about. I haven't seen GitHub as anything special and it is clearly not the most Open Sourced company and their price structure has been all over the place. I am not worried about MicroSoft doing anything with Github they already have VS using git and you can use it dozens of different ways. There is nothing to be made with owning one piece of a dozen.
> At least we'll have GitLab and the like.
At least we have git.
(Many years of confusion, a realization that no company has the engineering chops to pull off such a feat, stagnant stock price, CEO change..)
Nadella 2015: Let's kiss open source's ass
But, as you see if you add Angular and Google's contributions, Google leads the list by a margin. So this looks more like a PR exercise and since when did we start taking BI articles on tech seriously(no offence to any readers).
None taken, BI articles are often poorly researched and written from a Wikipedia search knowledge level.
> The data isn't perfect, since it only relies on GitHub information available publicly — lots of businesses and project teams use GitHub in a private mode to quietly share their code. But it's still a big step forward for Microsoft.
Que? The article is regarding open source, not the use of GitHub as a source control, right? So even though the statement is true, it's not really making any sense. Am I misreading this?
Although they need to show how the numbers are calculated.
Is it the number of contributions and not contributors?
A good example is Docker where, IIRC, Microsoft people were the top non-docker contributor for a while.
What difference does it make anyway?
My impression, having spoken to people from Microsoft involved in OSS, is that they are pretty much entirely driven by what will make them the most profit. Sometimes that means making software "open source" and accepting contributions from the public (free labour!), other times that means keeping their software proprietary. They don't seem to care about ethics, or software freedom. It's a shame, but Microsoft aren't the only ones with that mentality. Big businesses are, more often than not, primarily motivated by profit.
There is always some direct or indirect benefit, but it conts more when community is involved in development of OSS supported by corporation, like GSoC, where actual community is paid to work on selected projects, Clang, where Apple tried to reach consensus with GNU, BSD, Mozilla which creates a lot of fun stuff like Rust and Servo, their full MozLabs and WebOfThings, DuckDuckGo.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statist...
I'm happy that those companies open source more and more code. And Microsoft released some of their key technologies like .Net as open source. Personally i give them credit for that.
Oh and yes, .NET is open source by now, btw. I think it's great too. And I am far less critical of Microsoft than 7-8 years ago. But opening .NET is also a strategic descision. In essence, it remains a Microsoft platform, and if more software for linux is written with .NET, good for Microsoft. If more software for windows is developed on linux machines with .NET, good for Microsoft. If more linux devs switch to windows, because of the better .NET integration, great for Microsoft. It's a win-win situation either way.
I'd love to see a development, that might be a net-loss[0] for Microsoft but a net-win for systems interoperability or the open source community.
[0]: Opening NTFS might not even be a net-loss...
The problem I see with OSS folks is that they think if a company isn't all in, they are corrupt. This polarized view doesn't work in the real world.
At some point, some of us engineers like making money, we do need a place to live and eat after all.