Microsoft joins the MariaDB Foundation as a Platinum level sponsor
mariadb.org
mariadb.org
Have you ever met people who work at Microsoft? The Microsoft engineers are just engineers like you and I. Some of them are some of the best and brightest in the industry. Microsoft has made major contributions to technology that some people just aren’t aware of or don’t seem to care about. The “evil” that existed at Microsoft was largely an upper management issue. There has been significant change in upper management.
But here’s what’s important. Ask yourself where Microsoft’s interests lie today. Their goal is to get people on Azure. They don’t give a damn if you run Linux or Windows Server. They aren’t stupid enough to fail to realize that ship has already sailed. They’ll keep developing and selling Windows Server to the people who depend on it and collect that revenue, but the future for them is Azure. And that doesn’t require that they extinguish or destroy anything.
I would also like to say that members of the open source community have taken jobs at Microsoft, obviously convinced that Microsoft’s private plans match their ideals and principles moving forward.
TL;DR If Microsoft’s profit motive in Azure aligns with open source, why do so many people continue to need to infer sinister motives?
>The “evil” that existed at Microsoft was largely an upper management issue. There has been significant change in upper management.
Recent anti-consumer actions indicate that this may not be the case. Come on, ads on the start menu? Today's MS has done things even Gates' MS didn't.
>They aren’t stupid enough to fail to realize that ship has already sailed.
That doesn't stop them from wanting to go out and turn that ship around.
>They’ll keep developing and selling Windows Server to the people who depend on it and collect that revenue, but the future for them is Azure.
Cloud compute is a commodity, even one of the major things sold by internet Wal-Mart. Is that really where Microsoft wants to go? It's almost implicit that they're going to want to "differentiate" their service, which means developing lock-in but only once you've got people into the fold.
>TL;DR If Microsoft’s profit motive in Azure aligns with open source, why do so many people continue to need to infer sinister motives?
This isn't the first time Microsoft's profit motives have appeared to allign with an open technology. This wouldn't be the first time they moved to capture it, ruining it for everybody, either.
Microsoft has realized that nobody is going to sign up for an unhealthy, rent-based ecosystem. So, out comes the carrot, with absolutely no contract with you that they won't replace it with a stick. We're entering an era were large businesses can treat small businesses like large businesses treat consumers - that is, no negotiation, no contract garuntees, just take-it-or-leave-it on slowly worsening terms.
This describes every major cloud computing provider, especially Amazon. They pull you in with generalized computing, and c then try to entice you to their much more specific locked in PaaS offering.
If you think the direction of cloud computing is heading towards commodification, then it's very clear you don't understand Microsoft's strategy or Amazon's strategy.
Selling VMs and containers are commodity services that every large cloud provider must sell so they don't disqualify themselves, but the margins suck and the lock-in is minimal.
Look at the AWS and Azure catalog. There's a tremendous amount of value added services that go beyond selling commodity systems and they are selling.
They're selling for one simple reason: Most people don't want to build their own cloud scalable architectures, they want to solve their problems. If AWS and Azure can make it easy for an intern to set up auto-scaling databases and Kafka messaging system, then their manager is more likely to will be willing to pay a premium of the company's money so they can meet their deadlines.
As a sysadmin supporting their crap for almost 2 decades now, there is absolutely no need to infer anything at all. Microsoft is not acting in good faith, Windows 10 was the last straw for me, and I've never felt better than since I went completely gnu+linux. The particulars have been hashed out elsewhere, but please, stop trying to pretend "MS is different now". If anything, it's worse.
Which is absolutely fair enough.
Given that they've offered mySQL as an azure managed service (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/mysql/, along with postgres https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/postgresql/) for while now and MariaDB is intended to maintain drop-in compatibility with mySQL as much as possible, the move to supporting MariaDB in the platform too makes sense.
0. "...developers can use their favorite database as a fully managed service on Microsoft Azure that will soon include MariaDB"
I'm not saying you should trust Microsoft implicitly, but I'd put them well above Oracle (MySQL), Google, Facebook, Samsung or most commodity device OEMs.
Once they regain their market share you will see their true character.
I'm not sure you can't actually see their true character though. Look at the deafening silence and corporate opinion on telemetry criticism and the acres of forum posts dedicated to making windows stop calling home. That's an abusive relationship if there ever was one.
What about tomorrow? Their history needs to be remembered.
They play very nicely in areas where they're the underdog, but not when they're on top where lock-in is rife.
Make use of them, by all means.. but never depend on them - ever. Always have an exit strategy.
(same goes for most other companies, but Microsoft especially)
And really, it definitely has changed in some fashions. Time will tell if their rancid business practices have changed, but so far it certainly feels like a different Microsoft.
But would I put them above Google or Samsung? Not really. Their consumer OS feels like it comes with malware built-in. You finish the install and Candy Crush Soda Saga is already installing. Then after you remove that crap, you notice that your start menu has advertisements for other apps in it. After turning that off you install another browser and discover that you have to get past a nag to switch your default from Edge, and if you're lucky sometimes it will even switch back when you're not looking. And don't run Wireshark lest you want to find out your computer is secretly a hub for Microsoft telemetry, sending signatures of apps you run for security purposes, hitting a server for keystrokes in your start menu search. Am I being watched right now?
Not that Google isn't also intrusive, but at least Google often tells you and offers you the chance to say no in exchange for some loss of functionality. With Windows, you get all of this crap even if you uncheck the boxes during setup. The only way around it is Server versions.
So I'd trust any ChromeOS box (including say, Samsung's) to work toward more of my interests than any inexpensive Windows box that might come with SSL root certificates and malware I never asked for. Sure, Microsoft doesn't pre-install superfish, but it amazes me how little they seem to care when others do it.
> .NET Core is optimized for building highly scalable web applications, running on Windows, macOS or Linux. If you’re building Windows desktop applications, then the .NET Framework is the best choice for you.
Nope, it's still the same MS as always.
[0]: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/11/16/announcin...
But Microsoft is a different story. They actively tried to kill off the free software movement. I really hope they have changed now, but only time will tell.
I applauded MariaDB at first, but they almost went bankrupt, merged with another company, changed he business model (release new code parts in a different license).
And on the other side I still remember Cyanogen + CyanogenMOD that got so much worse and died because of a certain "sponsor". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyanogenMod nowadays forked as LineageOS, but many things got lost incl older devices. So a small number of companies with deep pockets are like cancer to open source projects, the good thing is they can be forked.
But see MaxDB for an open source database that never got forked, and there is no open source project anymore, it got closed source, and nowadays powers parts of expensive SAP HANA data store.
It is better to install Percona MySQL fork, or MySQL community edition. Let's hope Linux distros change the MySQL flavor in near future too.
Pre early 1990s, Microsoft had a modest amount of market power and wasn't infamous for abusive tactics. Post anti-trust years, Microsoft's competitive abuses contracted to negligible levels by necessity.
So out of ~42 years of existence, they abused their temporary monopoly position for about ten of those. And you can't let any of that go, even after two decades. That doesn't seem overly dramatic to you?
This isn't a 10 year stretch, it's persistent bad behaviour AND it hasn't actually got any better. Enterprises are still getting screwed and they're pretty much steamrolling everything.
You have to be stupid to trust them at this point.
* Microsoft and node.js
1. Microsoft embraces node.js (embrace)
2. Microsoft forks node (extend) https://github.com/nodejs/node-chakracore
3. Soon! (extinguish)
---
* Microsoft and R
1. Microsoft embraces R
2. Microsoft forks R. Fully compatible, but interoperability is one-way only. https://mran.microsoft.com/open
3. Soon! (extinguish)
---
The old Microsoft:
- Microsoft <3 Apple -> Let's work on Macintosh -> Windows
- Microsoft <3 IBM -> Let's work on OS/2! -> Windows NT
- Microsoft <3 Sun -> Let's work on Java -> .NET
- Microsoft <3 Sybase -> Let's work on Sybase ASE -> SQL Server
It is a leaky abstraction. Your application code will be running on Chakra's version of ECMAScript, which is whatever they want it to be.
It could start the equivalent of the 90s browser wars.
So just like any other browser and JS-runtime. Exactly like v8 actually.
Node chakra is something you can knowingly opt in to use. And they've made efforts trying to get it merged back into mainline, just like any other good open-source citizen.
So how is that a problem again?
For R for instance, the interoperability is one-way only. Microsoft R Open can fetch libraries from CRAN, but regular R software cannot use libraries from MRAN.
It's a superset of features, and once you depend on the extended features you cannot go back. In this way you are driven away from the project.
After the "extended" product gains the largest market share, then comes the "extinguish" phase (the end of collaboration), which has been their final goal all along: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
The "vm neutrality" claim on node is very specific to Chakra. I don't see them trying to integrate other VMs as well. Then, node's NAPI team are almost all Microsoft employees: https://github.com/nodejs/abi-stable-node
If Microsoft are the only people seriously interested in maintaining the ability to run Node on ChakraCore as well as V8, of course the team of people working on the necessary abstractions will be mostly Microsoft employees.
Of course, since V8 runs on Windows, not a huge number of people are going to be demanding ChakraCore support - but Microsoft presumably believe they have, or are developing, sufficiently awesome JS runtime technology to make this worth investing in. And it's not like it's worth Microsoft's time to invest in making Node also run on whatever Mozilla's JS engine is called at the moment (I've lost track). But their work on Chakra support presumably would make that a lot easier for someone who wanted to come along and support a third runtime engine.
And it does benefit the whole ecosystem to not be 100% reliant on V8.
JavaScript code and libraries and other web-standards should not be built on a monoculture.
On the other hand we all know what happened with Microsoft had the majority of the JS market share. No need to go back to that.
Microsoft had a chance and they wasted it. They got the keys of the car for a night and they got drunk in it and crashed it.
Priest: Do you, Ming the Merciless, Ruler of the Universe take this Earthling, Dale Arden to be your Empress of the hour?
Ming: (pause) of the hour, Yes.
Priest: Do you promise to use her as you will?
Ming: (pause, then very slyly) Certainly!
Priest: Not to blast her into space?
Ming: (silence)
Priest: ....Until such time as you get the whim....?
Ming: I do.
---
I think people are blind to the creeping generally. They need way more time before they gain any trust from this space, especially after the Linux is Cancer comments, Halloween documents, general decline in privacy and general decline in ability to accept feedback (hey Scott Hanselman, where's our fix for SCVMM gone? - nothing back from MSFT for 16 days on github AGAIN)
I would rather focus on what they do, not what they say.
e.g:
- Microsoft <3 Linux (what they say) https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/windowsserver/2015/05/06...
- Microsoft makes 2 billion USD collecting patent money from Android manufacturers (what they do)
Then... CEOs cannot do whatever they want. They respond to the board.
I suspect they'll make another effort to break into the mobile device space in the future, but it probably won't be for a while. Where's the marketplace opportunity at the moment? At least until they can distance themselves from the current perception of their mobile experience.
Making sure Office, etc., work well on Android and iOS is perfectly in line with his idea that you can work with competitors to increase revenue for everyone involved.
Contrast this with Amazon, who believes that it is a winner takes all market, and they do not have support for their competitor's products and even refuse to list them in their store.
node-chakracore is an option to change the dependency from V8 (Google) to Chakra (Microsoft). Suggesting the long term prospects for Node would be better if we only have the option of Google's V8 doesn't make much sense. What happens if Google kill the V8 project (however unlikely that is).