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Comment by m0xte | Hacker News Reader

Their intent is still entirely market share. We need to be vigilant on how they get there. History has taught us a lot of lessons we seem to have forgotten because shiny and new layer of marketing. There is still a massive cultural and technical impedance mismatch.

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It is interesting to me that I read people criticizing Microsoft for their open sourcing code as doing it for marketing reasons---which seems accurate---but not criticizing Google or Apple or whoever else when they open source code.

Apple doesn't release code under Free licenses for marketing purposes: I'd be surprised if anyone in the marketing department of Apple even realized that they were doing so.

Apple releases code under free licenses because they are required to and do exactly that minimum required.

That's not entirely true. launchd was released under a free license, and it was one of the most interesting innovations in software in a long while, for example.

So now copying what Sun, Aix, Tru64 and HP-UX already did is an innovation, I guess it goes with the muster of many Apple "innovations".

You're completely wrong in Sun's case, SMF is nothing like launchd.

It looks quite similar to me in concept.

There are plenty of people on this very forum regularly criticizing Google and Apple's open source efforts...

I agree. A lot of what they are doing now looks like EEE when you peel back a couple of layers.

I say this as someone who happily uses a lot of the stuff they produce in the process. I really, really, intensely hope I'm wrong and my fears aren't realised.

Well, it's the EEE I'm comfortable with. I hope it stays this way.

> A lot of what they are doing now looks like EEE when you peel back a couple of layers.

Doesn't look like; they are doing EEE, just of a more 'benevolent' nature.

.NET between around 2010-2016 was a pretty boring/dire time for the community. Things were so bad that the Community started solving their own problems. This wound up giving us a bunch of great projects that the community stepped up and provided.

But now, when we fast forward to Today, .NET Core (Or, to put not too fine a point on it, ASP.NET Core) is doing a whole lot of what is at best steering developers away from good practices, at worst (un?)intentional EEE:

- EF Core: EF6 was terrible for a lot of reasons. EF Core tries to get people to access relational and nonrelational databases via the same API. Why? (Of course, with Cosmos the answer becomes obvious...)

- MS DI: Microsoft looked at the best examples of DI the community provided, and wound up deciding that breaking a number of established paradigms made it easier to build ASP.NET Core, even if folks who have written the best libraries/literature on DI in .NET explain why it's a bad idea.

- Serialization: 'System.Text.Json will be better than the other libraries out there' I heard that from multiple voices. It's still not really that good, but people try anyway because MS Stack.

And that's a bit of the problem. Many of these things _are_ needed for the 'safe shops'. I've been at places where deviating from MS Stack was specifically discouraged because they were worried about longer term support. Broadly speaking, if it had a big backer/sponsor (i.e. StackOverflow's Dapper) it was a non-issue, and it wasn't a -bad- way to make sure developers weren't just using $"{blogToolOfTheWeek}". Later on however, we shoved that mindset aside as much as we could. Instead we made it our goal to find the best libraries to solve or problems... and our productivity went way up.

If it's open source, how does extinguish work?

It's the same corporate entity, but Microsofts incentives and the majority of executives have turned over. So I don't see any reasons why Microsoft would be any more likely to EEE than another company. In fact I think they would be less likely because they they have more to risk reputationally.

Given the new mission statement of Microsoft, I think if the community is more vocal about the things they want to accomplish it will become imperative that people at the company will be assigned to making those desiderata a reality. So if you want more visual tooling, find a way to become more vocal about it. If you want more support for this or that tech fad, make it known.

The community have been very vocal on a number of issues and thoroughly ignored and steamrolled over. Or the direction changes once the desired outcome is established.

> Their intent is still entirely market share.

So like essentially all other corporations?

Precisely.

On the other hand, a company just has to come out with propaganda like "Do no evil" and everyone rails behind them.

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