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Comment by edpichler | Hacker News Reader

This is very good, with this I learned that it's never too late to a company change. A very slow and large company like MS took decades to make this change, but they did well. And, they do that not because they are "good guys", but because this is the strategy to make them grow on their business. They are thinking on themselves.

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Um, Microsoft has also been a steady producer of academic research papers.

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)

Not to mention, they employ many stalwarts of CS, like Simon Peyton Jones and Leslie Lamport.

David DeWitt, Michael Freedman, Jim Gray, Anders Hejlsberg, Butler Lampson are all Microsoft Technical Fellows

> A very slow and large company like MS took decades to make this change, but they did well.

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?

I suspect that most of their code was probably version controlled in Git anyway, so it wouldn't take that much effort to simply upload it to Github. What really delays stuff is probably the approval process, which for some companies can be really slow.

I'd imagine most of their code was in TFS. However I'm sure they used a tool to move things over. None of these have the full history of the project

Or worse, SourceSafe.

They started this move almost a decade ago, gradually, and just recently the accumulated effort got so relevant, that is evident even for an outsider like me, that they changed their strategy, that is why it seems now it's "visible".

"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.

It's because they're bleeding engineers like crazy. Anyone with offers from Google, FB and MSFT would choose Google or FB 99/100 times

That's because Microsoft doesn't pay well and the benefits aren't as nice as goog or FB.

"doesn't pay well" - source? Remember to factor in insane California cost of living and taxes

MSFT has worse compensation progression and FB/Google Seattle locations pay more than MSFT. MSFT also doesn't have free lunch (as privileged as this sounds)

Seattle's cost of living is not exactly low either.

Taxes are the much bigger factor, but Seattle is certainly significantly cheaper. Of course, other areas are much cheaper than Seattle as well.

I also believe that this is one of the reasons. Open source is "cool" and motivating to work for.

Pity they changed and became even worse in relation to privacy with Windows 10...

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