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Comment by BrissyCoder | Hacker News Reader

I've been a dev for 20+ years now. I don't care about the OSS vs Proprietary argument at all. I care about my productivity and job satisfaction. Microsoft - in every sphere from IDEs to cloud platforms and now machine learning - has done more to make this stuff easier to learn, use and afford than any other organization.

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>I don't care about the OSS vs Proprietary argument at all. I care about my productivity and job satisfaction.

That's kind of like saying, "I don't care about voting, I just want politicians to represent me."

Arguing on the internet isn't analogous to voting. Voting accomplishes things, arguing about OSS Vs Proprietary just wastes time.

It matters when you're involved in purchasing decisions and also when you're deciding whether or not to contribute to a project.

Well Oracle...is a counterexample to that argument.

I think it's saying that "software politics" and productivity are not one in the same.

I would give that title to SUN. Without them, there would be no Java, and thus no Eclipse, and thus no incentive to advance the IDEs to the point they are today.

That productivity and job satisfaction, you have it despite Microsoft. Imagine a world where MS wouldn't have spent their resources on killing Webbrowsers and Java, where you could run a jar file on any operating system with ease. Or imagine a world where exchanging office files between different programs would have been easy.

> Without them, there would be no Java, and thus no Eclipse, and thus no incentive to advance the IDEs to the point they are today.

I don't buy this argument. IDEs would just advance as they're tools written buy the people who use them - there's an inherent drive to increase their usefulness and automate the mundane and repetitive. Also for what It's worth I think before MS really got their shit together in the IDE space it was Borland that was at the forefront.

Of cource, IDEs advance. But at which pace? The bottleneck was the language. When MS got their shit together they just caught up with Java.

Maybe MS has done the most, made the biggest investments. But splitting the ecosystem of managed languages into Java and C# hasn't made life easier for developers nor users.

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