Open source has won. Microsoft surrendered | Hacker News Reader

Open source has won. Microsoft surrendered

computerworld.com

30 pointsohjeez14 comments

While I appreciate the things MS has done recently with OSS I think this article is overly optimistic.

I agree they have changed and in a lot of ways for the better. But MS is a huge company and it seems to me that one hand doesn't always realize what the other is doing.

I will remain cautiously optimistic about "winning" over MS for now.

Microsoft is adept in the art of embrace, extend, extinguish. And they still have enormous resources compared to most open source projects (as opposed to open source deployments).

Open source still has what may be critical, focused points of failure. Low bus number (as in, taken out by) focii and junctions.

I'm not up to speed on the latest changes. But if actions speak louder than words, there's a lot of past -- and contemporary -- action to counter-balance, before I and I think many others will put trust in MS initiatives.

I hope Microsoft turns out to be a spineless, inmediate profit-seeking corporation it's always been so far. It has just been turning its sails towards the wind in the past few years. Their hegemony was gone, bundling wouldn't work anymore. If they want me to use SQL Server it must come without the baggage of Windows.

MS is getting off their ass after 25 years! It's the year everybody congratulated GNU/Linux for their achievements!

edit: s:ggg:gg:g

Maybe because I'm not very knowledgeable about this topic, but I do not get the argument here.

Microsoft isn't a threat to Linux because they say so? Or did the market really change that fundamentally? I'm a bit lost here..

Microsoft used to only lose money from people choosing Linux instead of Windows. Now the fastest growing part of their business is Azure servers. 40% of them and growing are Linux. Their CEO is from the Azure branch of the company, the platform-agnostic part. More and more, Microsoft is going to rely on Linux servers and Android phones as their profit centers. Instead of hurting their business, it's helping them.

It almost sounds as if Microsoft is the next IBM. Rather than crush everyone else, they're finding out it's very profitable to service everyone else's hardware and software.

At the same time, though, Microsoft is selling Surface bundled with its OS despite overall market declines in new laptops. I'd bet the likes of Dell, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony, HP, and Toshiba aren't very happy about that sort of encroachment from a vendor upon whom they've come to depend. They advertise it against the Macbook using largely features a tablet or phone has, but many of their customers' laptops are also touchscreen and lightweight.

They've set themselves up as a game publisher alongside the people to whom they used to just sell OSes and developers' tools. Don't they even have a couple in-house development studios for games? So now you buy your X-Box, your Windows, your Visual Studio, and your X-Box SDK then write your game and give Microsoft a cut to sit on a shelf next to content of theirs.

SQL Server on Linux might interfere some with Oracle and IBM's DB/2. It's also likely to try to take share away from Postgres, MySQL, and SQLite. There are lots of extensions to SQL Server already. Don't be surprised if they after a few years they make it really easy to come from other DBMSes but hard to leave.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

They haven't changed their philosophy one bit.

That's the Ballmer Doctrine and he's toast. His scorched Earth policies lead to things like the Zune, products like Bing getting almost zero traction, and the endless, futile struggle for Windows Phone to register at all on world-wide usage metrics.

Nadella has a different approach. He built Azure, a platform that could have been Windows exclusive but wasn't. I think he understands what open-source can do for Microsoft, and what Microsoft can do for open-source.

Gates wasn't an extinguisher, he was a hard charger that would try to make best-of-breed products. Where others slowed down or got distracted, Microsoft would stay focused. That's how Visual Studio beat out Borland C++, how Word prevailed over WordPerfect, how Excel trounced Lotus 1-2-3.

Once Microsoft had taken a commanding lead in those markets the influence of Ballmer started to be more severe. He was blood-thirsty, he wanted to crush anyone left. This became clear in the anti-trust trials where it was Ballmer that wanted to crush, kill, and destroy anyone in the way of Windows achieving 100% market share.

Remember, Gates was a programmer who happened to be CEO. He was driven to make products that people wanted, to win by simply being technically better: More features, more modest system requirements, more backwards compatibility.

Then Ballmer took over and that all went out the window.

Gates was quite a cut throat business man. He might be the warm philanthropist gates now, but he was quite the cut throat business man back in the day. How do you think Netscape market share went from like 90% to pretty much 0?

I think the point of having an Internet browser preinstalled when you bought a computer had some merits. I can't think of many consumer computing devices that don't come with a pre installed browser these days.

In retrospect the whole DoJ trial seems rather quaint to be honest.

Plus it wasn't as if you couldn't install Netscape and decide through personal choice to use that over IE.

Compare that with iOS where not only does it come with Safari pre installed, but if you install any other browser it HAS to run WebKit and cannot provide functionality Apple doesn't allow.

Objectively that seems to be a lot more protectionist and subject to anti-trust laws than anything Microsoft ever did.

He was a competitive person, he was driven to succeed. For a while there it was (sadly) the case that Internet Explorer 6 was the best browser.

Netscape dropped the ball, ironically they were slow to pick up on open standards. Their JavaScript implementation was notoriously buggy, that alone probably held back development of the modern web by almost a decade. They were also trying to monetize the browser itself which slowed uptake considerably.

Netscape dug their own grave on this one. Microsoft just pushed them into it.

Now don't get me wrong, Internet Explorer 6 turned out to be a serious scourge, and Microsoft has done some very, very dirty things, but their actions in that particular era did two things: Made browsers free for consumers and laid the foundation for AJAX because of their quirky XMLHttpRequest stub meant to help Outlook run in the browser.

We don't know that.

But we remember.

Microsoft will have to continue to be a good citizen for years, probably decades, before we trust them again.

Although it would be churlish and counterproductive to not give them their due for what their current actions.

"Microsoft & Linux & Patents & Tweets"

https://meshedinsights.com/2016/11/22/microsoft-linux-patent...

Sincerely asking, how long would it take for Microsoft to release their own distro or would they rather buy SUSE or Canonical?

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