Microsoft Is Now 'Open by Default', Says Xamarin Founder Miguel de Icaza
forbes.com
forbes.com
In other words, they stopped copying Apple and switched their sights on Google.
The stuff that matters stays closed source. Infrastructure, tooling are published because they bring massive amounts of goodwill and developer mindshare while hindering potential competitors that now have to battle with a free offering.
Frankly I preferred the old Microsoft which wanted your money, not the new one that (also!) wants your data.
Windows isn't free. It just happens to come with the cost of your PC, but the PC manufacturer pays for it (and passes the cost to you).
They just noticed that no one upgrades Windows (and why should they? When was the last time you were excited about a windows release? XP? 95? 3.1? Maybe 7 if you're coming from Vista?)
I fail to see the worst?
I personally was VERY excited for Windows 7 and it proved to be a very solid edition. VERY VERY excited for Ubuntu bash in Windows 10 in the preview edition.
> They're not copying Google. They're taking the worst of both worlds.
Google's model is advertising
Apple's is Hardware
Microsoft is selling services more.
I find it really awesome that Microsoft has really turned into a company I have a positive view of and glad that Steve Balmer is gone.
Maybe, but what I'm saying is that:
Apple costs, is closed-source but (somewhat) cares about privacy. Google is free, (somewhat) open-source but actively doesn't care about privacy. Windows costs, closed source and actively doesn't care about privacy.
In other words, with Google you're not the customer, you're the product. With Microsoft you're the product and you have to pay for the privilege to be a product.
One thing is Apple is not a closed source company. Though it is a mixed bag they have made some good contributions to the Open Sources world. Though their Walled Garden is YUGE
https://developer.apple.com/opensource/
* Bonjour
* Webkit
* Swift
As of now, most of Android APIs are in AOSP. How many Apple APIs are?
You can't compare the need for Windows 7 vs XP and the need for 95 after 3.1 . There was a huge amount of software which simply required 95.
One word about Windows 7
Vista
The open source nature of it seemed to disappear overnight after Oracle bought Sun, but looks like Oracle's not doing too badly with it. I know there's the Open Source illumos (IIRC) but haven't heard of anyone using it in production.
Joyent? OmniTI?
https://www.joyent.com/smartos https://omnios.omniti.com/
SmartOS and OmniOS are both used in modern day production workloads.
We have been broadly happy with it and it has been quite stable after some initial teething problems.
In case of Microsoft, you don't even have to be very imaginative: how much of the stack currently in use by .Net developers on Windows is completely open? How important and hard to replace are the parts that aren't?
And how much of a difference would it make in the end to have had Core open source in the past, when the new and closed version is the only one that works with those billions of Windows10 tablets and those popular Azure services that everyone needs for their startup?
"Microsoft is now open by default and you actually have to make a case on a team/peer review level if you feel something needs to be closed,” said de Icaza."
Should they stay guilty forever for the things done in the previous regime?
Secondly, given the track record, it is fair that it will take a long time before their past is forgiven. At least the same number of years of doubt that they spent misbehaving. And again that supposes they are not doing it right now. Like patent trolling, or moving software you could buy to a rent-only model, or put spywares in their new OS.
I strongly believe MS is not getting better, just getting better at communicating. They are not in a monopoly anymore and they can't get away with a "linux is cancer" like they used to do.
The only thing that bother me is that the Gates are getting away with it. They detached them self from MS, and now make heavy communication on their charity, so everybody seems to think they are saints. People have very short memory.
The Microsoft bias is to always bash them but give a pass to Apple. I think Microsoft has been the good guy for a bit but they still get hate mainly due to Steve Balmer.
Frankly the guy seems very similar to Poettering. Stuff he creates, for the most part, only really becomes usable once the leaves the project.
I was there when GNOME started. Was working heavily with GTK+ and GIMP at the time. Most of GNOME was tossed together haphazardly in a mad dash to catch up with KDE. There were astroturfing campaigns against KDE/Qt, organized on the GIMP IRC servers. The hate on Slashdot towards KDE was crazy, and much of it coming directly from GNOME camp. GNOME 1.x was a total shitshow. The code was horrid, and nothing was stable at all. Luckily their poor standards of code quality never hurt GTK+ much, as the GIMP guys still knew what the hell they were doing.
KDE was indeed much better. GNOME 1.x was awful. I and others like me still used GNOME 1.x, because I wanted a free desktop environment.
You weren't the only one on #gimp; don't pretend GIMP had a much better class of developers. Remember GEGL used to refer to hairy parts of the codebase (Genetically-Engineered Goat, Large) that people were afraid of touching.
Miguel left GNOME before 2.0 shipped, and started working on Mono full-time. If you've ever used GNOME 1.0, it was barely more than a set of ORB-based applications you stacked on top of Enlightenment DR 0.15 (or Sawmill/Sawfish if you weren't cool/used RedHat after Raster left). The panel was awful, the fonts were awful. Themeing (once they moved to gdkpixbuf rather than imlib) was awful. It didn't even have Human Interface Guidelines until Eugenia Loli-Queru basically forced her opinion on the devs.
Sun Microsystems had to dedicate months of programming and useability testing to get the UI to a point that everyone didn't hate it anymore.
Once Miguel gave up the reins, others took GNOME where it is today. This is similar to Lennart Poettering, wherein NetworkManager and PulseAudio became much better/more stable/useable when he left.
A name i have not thought about in a long long time, and why i stopped reading OSNews...
looking back, it was the first time I _really_ understood that sitting down and learning to manage the relevant config files manually was going to be easier than dealing with a GUI app. hell, I learned for both redhat _and_ debian based distros.
I don't know if I would have gone down the path I have if it wasn't for that. that's insane...
You're talking about older things.
I imagine we'll see Visual Studio open sourced sooner rather than later, going off the hint-dropping from MSFT engineers. I assume they have some code cleanup, and intellectual property issues to deal with first.
So it seems "new" projects not older ones are "open by default" with a caveat. That's still a lot better than they used to be.
The classic example being Windows 10 - anyone who is actually not blind to the fiasco of the automatic upgrades/issues around further updates [1] notices that there is a certain brutality in the way the whole thing was carried out. After installing the unwanted Windows 10 OS on probably hundreds of millions of perfectly fine Windows 7 machines, they claimed that some 300+ million computers were now running on Windows 10. [2] My guess is, less than half of those were actually desired by the end users. And a few more iterations of these botched auto-updates, and "happy Windows 10 user" is going to become an oxymoron.
This episode went so much against the spirit of open source that these claims seem a little comical. It is probably true that MS had to make these choices to maximize shareholder profit, but lets just take it down a notch on the supposed openness.
To those who wish to still make this 'open by default' claim, I welcome MS to open source Windows 7 and Windows XP and see if they can sustain the same kind of growth after that point [3]
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=windows%2010%20update&sort=byP...
[2] http://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-300-million-active-d...
[3] http://www.computerworld.com/article/3054528/microsoft-windo...
Progressive enhancement was nice while it lasted.
That actually sounds kinda fun, building your own Windows patches :')
And yes, I know the difference between virtualization and syscall emulation.
You seem hopeful of a thing few people are hopeful of.
> you still can tun[sic] Linux binaries
That does not make a platform open.
Also note that you can't run all Linux binaries. In this respect, my original comparison with VirtualBox gets even better, since with VirtualBox I can run whatever edition of Linux I want, with graphics and total, absolute control, and a faster filesystem.
VS Code is nice but not a full gateway into all of MS's stuff/services.
To OP's point, office online is free without a 365 subscription.
Windows is still 90% of the PC market. If only 10% of those users are developers, that means there are more Windows developers than all macOS users combined. There are a lot of us out here, and I think we're starting to get fed up with being treated like we don't exist, just because of the shame that gets lumped on us from a small cohort of other developers.
They are not. That would mean that more than 10% of the people sitting on chairs in companies are doing software development. That would fail to take into account jobs that don't have a chair, every PC outside an office and even non technical jobs in sw development companies.
Let's check some facts.
http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/s...
Number of jobs: 1,114,000
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0000000001
All employees, end of 2014: 140,402,000
It's less than 1%, still much more than I would bet on. However I think that this figure is lower globally and Windows is sold globally. Hence, much less than 1% of PC users are software developers (Windows, Mac, Linux, anything) and having Windows the larger share its stats are close to the global figure.
Did you find any data relevant to that point?
I tend to think that it's true. There are more developers on Windows. Way more.
OSX has 26.2, Linux 21.7.
They sum to 100.1. There should be some inconsistent rounding somewhere.
If the figures are representative of reality it's true that Windows is less popular among developers than it is among the general public.
If 1% of the desktop users are developers, that's the same as 50% of the Linux users, and a really big share of the Linux users are developers (really, I expected it to be more than 50% what, clearly isn't true). That's also circa 12% of the Mac users, and I bet a biggest share of them are developers than the Windows ones.
That seems unlikely.
The fact that there are a number of programs without real non-Windows equivalents (games, emulators, various commercial packages) probably does suggest a lot of people doing Windows development.
It does certainly not mean that there are no Windows developer. That would just be repeating the same flawed argument, but twisted on the direction where it's the most flawed.
The people here on HN live in a bubble.
People are using Macs because it gives them a preconfigured and stable Linux like environment, almost 100% compatible with the server. Windows tend to have different toolings and different quirks. It doubles the effort. In my experience it's OK if you're using Java, which mostly hides the OS and it's obviously a must if you go with .NET. Basically only large companies use those two technologies, and not all of them. Everybody else is on scripting languages, JS, PHP, Python, Ruby. Btw, Java is almost always deployed to Linux too.
So, it could be a bubble but it's a large one.
Your overall point stands on its own but are you really trying to argue that 1 in 10 PCs are software development workstations?
Also, you should not expect that having a 90% market share overall will translate into 90% market share among any particular subset of users.
Personally I'm very happy with the hardware options available to me on the Mac, but there's a whole world of hardware options over there in PC land I'll never take advantage of. Conversely Linux graphics card driver support is still woeful, but that's really not Microsoft's problem and if Linux didn't have the PC platform to run on it's hardware costs would be much higher. What would be the alternative, Sun-style workstations? It's not that Microsoft did this on purpose, but it's still a fact.
However network effects would have given to another company the position that MicroSoft enjoyed for some 30 years. It could have been a slower growth or a faster downfall, but somebody would have been there. Not Apple because they are interested only in selling their own hardware. Probably some company out of nowhere, not necessarily on a x86 chip. Then everybody would have started building drivers for the OS of that company and Linux and MacOS would be running on the preferred chip of that OS.
Maybe in an alternate reality Visicalc built their own OS to run their spreasheet on a large screen (by the time standards) 8086 computer and replace MSDOS and Microsoft as the OS and sw company of choice. We'd be talking about VisiOffice and Vindows now :-)
We could have gone the slightly-less-compatible route with CP/M-86. Network effects would make the industry gravitate towards a standard platform, but not necessarily a company.
I remember tons of GUI software running on proprietary Unixes on vastly different architectures, all written aiming POSIX compatibility and an X graphics environment.
Yes, CP/M-86 could have played to role of MSDOS but people really needed to buy a box with a floppy disk to install from or a preinstalled OS on their new PC. MS did that right.
All that is not very relevant. Had Microsoft never existed, it'd have been an ecosystem too different to make any valid prediction. We'll have to eventually restore the universe and run a different path to see.
Just like it happens with any standard, we ended up with lots of #ifdef, because many APIs might had the same name, but not the same semantics.
And like in UNIX like OSes, all the cool goodies weren't in the POSIX APIs anyway.
It is quite sad that despite some of the cool GUIs like on NeXT and Sun OpenWindows, the best that they could settle on as a standard was Motif.
Well, we did have Richard M. Stallman, Emacs author, not only create an OS (GNU), but also extend Emacs to the point that it might as well be an OS. More pointedly, Miguel De Icaza created Gnumeric (a fantastic Excel clone) before he started the GNU Network Object Model Environment (GNOME).
Corel attempted something similar to what you were saying, as well; Their Wordperfect/Office/Draw empire was leveraged against Microsoft's Embrace/Extend/Extinguish in order to promote their (debian-based) linux distribution.
As for free drivers, the only one lagging behind is Nouveau for Nvidia users. AMD's free/open driver has made some serious performance improvements in the past few months, and Intel's driver (or just plain modesetting) has performance parity with their windows driver.
I remember 2008, and fighting with AMD/ATI drivers, and occasional reboots on my NVidia systems that led to X not working anymore. I've had exactly one instance of that in the past 4 years (under Arch). Can we stop spreading 2008-era misinformation in 2016?
Because Microsoft has the largest market share and porting drivers from Windows to Unix systems is basically a full rewrite, which doesn't happen?
My personal experience with OpenGL is that all Valve games run faster on it than on DirectX (both on Windows, but I heard Linux + OpenGL also has better perf than Windows + DirectX), but that's about the extent of it.
So how is Vulkan support on Windows these days?