My Windows license doesn't feel "Open by Default", nor SQL Server license audits ... I like the guy, he created Mono, Xamarin, Gtk and co. But only a tiny subset of MS products like the .NET ecosystem are open.
"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.