Open-source developers: "Microsoft should embrace open source, it's the one true way!"
Microsoft: embraces open source
Open-source developers: "They're trying to control us! They're trying to control us!".
Microsoft: embraces open source
Open-source developers: "They're trying to control us! They're trying to control us!".
And yet, the hue and cry is "Unless you open source every byte of GitHub's code and infrastructure you're just evil monopolists trying to smother us!" Given all that Microsoft has done to embrace and support open source I think the onus is now on the Open Source community to justify their distrust of Microsoft because "Duh, it's Microsoft" simply doesn't fly as a legitimate argument anymore.
How does Microsoft make money? They make money by renting from a platform which is monopolistic and enforced. What do they do to maintain this? They deliberately force people onto their platform by abusing their market position, and try to crush any opposition by any possible tactic, including dubious legal cases designed just to bankrupt their opposition. What else do they do? EEE, and also just blatant unnecessary reinvention /ripping off and lock-in when they get the chance.
They didn't abandon some of the visible tactics and start paying open source because they had a moral revelation, it's a company with the same business model it's not possible. Those tactics were just inneffective and co-opting, more subtle EEE has to be the game plan.
Why does that make me angrier than equally evil Facebook/Apple? Well if I was a farmer driving around one of those trucks with source code preventing me from fixing it I'd be pretty personally furious. But I'm not, I'm a developer and those guys are the ones trying to make everyone drive the coding equivalent. But it's worse, because coding isn't just my livelihood, it's a lot of how I think and express my thoughts. They're not messing with my job they're trying to restrict the way I think, so their shareholders can make a buck.
"Microsoft is running Github for charity" have a word with yourself.
Feel free to show me which part of the criminal code "not making money" falls under. You want to rant about EEE (irrelevant for decades now) or some other silly plan to undermine open source development, feel free. But expect to be called out for your pointless drivel at the same time.
I'm fine with being cautious about Microsoft. I think at this point it's no longer necessary, but sure I can understand that. But the EEE plot-line is a 20 year old joke. It's not funny anymore.
"We are pro open source except our entire business model which is build around a closed source platform on which we sell closed source products"
Yeah they're worse than they could be but that's not really the central point.
The legal thing you asked for a source on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co. Some people dissent from this reading of the case but it's also not that important, in practice they act like this.
It's never time to stop being cautious about megacorps.
To think that Microsoft spent $7.5 billion for altruistic reasons, without a plan to actually turn a profit on the purchase, is dangerously naive.
You thinking tech companies don't have loss-leaders is naive.
I don't really know anything about US laws, but I think they do have to act in the interest of their shareholders, i.e. make them more money.
(My view of capitalism meshes with Churchill's view of democracy: It's the worst except for all the others)
This is true, but "long term interest" for Microsoft means 30, 50, or 100 years from now. People seem to forget that people actually liking your company is important for long term profits, and therefore doing good things is quite easy to align with the notion that companies only do things that make them a profit.
I find myself saying this a lot - companies are by definition amoral (lacking a moral sense or understanding), not immoral. Just because they are driven by profits doesn't mean they don't do things that are moral or good, as many good things are in the interest of a company's profits. Especially their long term profits.
This hasn't been the case with Microsoft. They had their most successful era, and created (at the time) the richest man in the world, all while we hated them.
They aren't the biggest player right now, so their main focus is getting people to switch from a different provider (AWS) to Azure. A great way to do that is for the developers to like using Azure more than AWS.
After all, most of Microsoft's "evil years" were when they were on top, not in a distant second place.
I also think that developers have a lot more power in companies, especially smaller and newer companies, than they used.
Who's "we"? The open-source advocate reviled Microsoft in their own clique but the vast majority of the software industry just quietly went on with their lives.
That assumes that this situation is a zero-sum game. It's not. Microsoft clearly benefits from this, but so does everyone else.
As I asked a few days ago: "Do proponents of Free Software, on the whole, assert that the concept of intellectual property should not exist?"
If so then I can see why a closed-source supporter of open source is an abhorrent concept.
I have viewed GitHub as a net negative for Free Software for a number of years, this Microsoft deal amplifies that...
"Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches"
Times have changed, however it's reasonable to question if the Microsoft DNA radically changed or "not really".
[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_...
Free Software is a ethical movement and position around software and information
Open Source is a business model for collaborative development where most often the end product is not open but the tools used to create the end product are. Thus you can not use Copy-left Licenses if you intend to close source your final product.
Free Software is about Developer and User freedom
Open Source is about developer freedom exclusively
Ballmer's Microsoft disliked both Open Source and Free Software. Today's Microsoft sees the profitability that can some from Free labor of open source, but continues to be Hostile to Free Software
> Today's Microsoft sees the profitability that can some from Free labor of open source, but continues to be Hostile to Free Software
Microsoft donates more dev time to open source then they will EVER get out of their own use of it. But sure, let's pretend the multi-billion dollar company is spending billions upon billions on open source in order to save money. That makes SO much sense!
One primary example of them "donating" dev time is their Advancment of the Linux Kernal of which they have "become a top contributor" like the article says.
Why did they do this? To make Linux a First Class citizen on Azure so they can take on AWS... they did not "donate" this work out of some ethical kindness or wanting to "give back to the community" they did it to make money on Azure.
Every single one of the Open Source projects and initiatives can be traced to the same monetary reason, and largely traced to get Linux to work with some MS Commercial product of some kind, be is Azure or some other product.
Are you as virulent towards people that donate their time for recognition or their resume? Nobody doesn't anything altruistically. Microsoft doesn't have to either.
> Every single one of the Open Source projects and initiatives can be traced to the same monetary reason
VS Code and open sourcing their closed source .NET modules? Those are about building trust in the dev community. They have no direct correlation with profit. And even if they did that's ok.
> Azure or some other product.
So?
I nave claimed they did. That is the claim that was made, MS is "donating more time then they will ever get out" that was the claim
That is factually incorrect. They are getting more value from the Dev time they are putting into open source projects thus it is incorrect to say they are "donating" it, nor are they "giving more than they are getting" which was the comment I was replying to,
You can attempt to strawman and move the goal posts if you desire but it does not change reality
This can't be true, or they wouldn't be doing it. They put dollar signs on positive attention. Obviously.
Oh please.
Microsoft has not embraced open source.
Is their web browser open source? No.
Is Word, Excel, or Powerpoint open source? No.
Do they even push for open standards of those products? No.
Is Windows open source? No.
Is the C# compiler open source? No.
Microsoft may have taken some positive steps to support Linux on Azure & other things -- things possibility necessitated by market demands -- as well some contributions to open source.
But to say they have embraced open source is patently false.
Their Edge browser engine is proprietary but is built to work with open standards - no more pushing their own proprietary standards like ActiveX.
> Is Word, Excel, or Powerpoint open source? No > Do they even push for open standards of those products? No.
The default file format for recent Office versions is based on Office Open XML which is a published standard that anyone can interoperate with. Also, Office apps can save to the OpenDocument format too. Yes, there is a lot of proprietary stuff inside of Office, but they also have 20+ years of backwards compatibility to deal with.
> Is Windows open source? No.
Are there any examples of a company taking something as large as Windows OS and converting the whole thing from closed to open source? It's not like they can just flip a switch and let the whole world see the source code?
> Is the C# compiler open source? No.
Look at what they are doing in the .Net Core space for an indication of where this is going...
> But to say they have embraced open source is patently false.
I disagree with this and most who have followed Microsoft's actions over the last few years would also disagree with you. They have embraced open source way more than could be expected of any other company with a huge portfolio of closed source software.
Maybe when Sun Open Sourced Solaris?
It took them quite some time to get it done, but with significant effort they got it over the line.
That being said, we have no way of knowing what the true motive of the move is - being sceptical/critical is indeed the correct reaction.
Is that your belief, or do you know that to be true?
Microsoft buys GitHub and says we're going to let them operate independently as they see fit.
Where do you see the profit motive?
They were missing CI/CD tools, and source control. They had VSTS and Team Foundation Server but there's no way theyd beat the ubiquity of git.
I'm betting they're going to now start offering CI via GitHub like Gitlab (or offering a unified marketplace to allow other companies to fill this role and they take a cut) and then folding GitHub Enterprise into their suite of developer tools. Just like Visual Studio is vscode++, GitHub Enterprise will be invested in to where it does a whole lot more fancy things, and free GitHub is the onramp. And then Microsoft will have a portfolio that spans the entire code development pipeline.
Did you realize that your Java/Android Studio project in GitHub could be connected to App Center such that for every source check-in the project is built, unit tested (code-level), UI-tested on physical hardware (Xamarin Test Cloud), and if all tests pass the build is pushed to beta testers via HockeyApp which also captures reams of telemetry and debugging information? App Center can even be set up to automatically push the app all the way to Google Play automatically when you merge down to your release branch.
Ditto iOS apps written with Swift in Xcode.
If you think Microsoft doesn't have massive amounts of CI/CD tooling that is agnostic to language and platform you should check it out.
But I think that sort of makes my point. If a company makes world class tools that people don't know about or don't want to use, are the tools that valuable/good? Microsoft just spent $7.5 billion to say "we don't think Team Foundation Server can cut it for the developer population at large". By doing that, they threw themselves into the center of millions of developer workflows around the world. I think it was a great buy for them, and is definitely a strategic move.
I never wrote anything abut profit motives. You just made the same leap of logic again.
Do you know factually that , "Microsoft is committed to losing money from now until they cease to exist to continue GitHub as a going concern."
There could be a direct (selling subscriptions / additional addon products) or indirect (marketing dollars, community goodwill, 'mindshare) profit motivations.
I think Microsoft sees this as a way to get into businesses that would have never entertained a relationship with them. When those github enterprise contracts come up for renewal, I expect large discounts for trying Azure and other Microsoft products to come with them.
You can opt in to using .NET.
This purchase makes you decide whether to opt out of your existing Github use. Or at least worry whether its usability (on whatever dimensions matter to you) will decline.
I'd be interested in seeing the source for microsoft's Telemetry, if you have a link? :)
You confuse embrace with replace.
Btw, you can make your point without bringing in Red Hat. It sounds absolutely silly to me :)
I'm trying to think of some, and drawing a blank so far...