Microsoft Open Source | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Open Source

opensource.microsoft.com

70 pointsGarbage31 comments

I don't know about you youngsters, but I'm in my thirties and it's amazing to watch Microsoft evolve since the 90s. As a teenager I would never have imagined the words 'Open Source' would ever be in a <h1> tag on a Microsoft-branded website.

Unless perhaps when compared to some kind of disease. Looks like even Ballmer himself did a 180 on the whole "Linux is a cancer" thing (thinks he was still "right" at the time becaus ethe stance made them money): https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-ballmer-linux-i...

It's not the prettiest word, but just saying he called it cancer leaves out important context. He wasn't trying to bash Linux itself so much as (his interpretation of) its GPL license. If its license had been different (say, MIT or BSD) I don't think he would've described it like that.

https://www.theregister.com/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_ca...

Oh absolutely he was more targeting FOSS software in general than Linux specifically.

True, but on the other hand, did Microsoft any MIT/BSD Software at that time?

I think it was especially against the GPL, but against a complete different Business model too.

No, but I didn't claim they would've actively embraced MIT/BSD either.

Afair the first IP stack of either Windows 95 oder Windows 98 was the one from FreeBSD(?). They rewrote it later, but there was an acknowledgement in the docs for a while. So, they at least used it when needed.

(My memory may be fuzzy, it's been a long time after all ..)

Yes, the IP stack was derived from BSD as well as Internet Explorer was derived from NCSA Mosaic however they didn't publish those things under open licenses. (Which isn't required by BSD etc.)

> Did Microsoft any MIT/BSD Software at that time?

Many of the TCP/IP utilities (telnet, nslookup etc) in earlier versions of Windows were based on BSD code.

I did not say they where allergic against free code/work, i said they where allergic against a complete different Business where you sell just the service and not the code.

EDIT: And i wrote "the made no mit/bsd code" but adapting it...just like Apple

I agree (not a youngster). I guess that Microsoft has also changed business model. Nowadays they are way more into hardware, cloud and services than just selling software.

Still a nice move. Other similar companies (Oracle, Amazon) are less kind with Open Source. So, kudos to the new Microsoft.

Oracle certainly has a different approach, but they contribute to the Linux kernel (i.e. bttrfs originates from Oracle), Oracle also runs MySQL, OpenJDK, GraalVM, Fn Project, ... https://github.com/oracle/ has a few more projects.

I'm in my thirties too and I'm not at all amazed by the way MS evolved. The three MS open source offerings I have tried where MS has something that resembles a non open source competitor - Azure MySQL, Azure Postgres and WSL are all horrendously slow (I'd go as far as to say deliberately crippled). It's a trap.

Every time they've released something big as open source or on Linux (e.g. .NET/vscode) it's been something where they're losing ground quickly and fighting off irrelevance.

Moreover it's just as irritating as ever to get Linux installed on laptops (the OEM stranglehold is still there).

I am amazed that Microsoft did a PR push on how they've turned 5 or so years around and people bought it. They acknowledged some new realities but they didn't fundamentally change tactics. They still (correctly) view open source as a threat to their profits and act accordingly.

Can confirm; tried to use Azure PG in a project at work and we were shocked at the terrible performance. It was basically unusable. This was < 1 year ago.

Microsoft is over 163,000 people. While I don't doubt that executives tend to be motivated by profit, I doubt that everyone shares a singular focus on it. Someone in charge of an open source project at Microsoft today might have been working with Mozilla or Apache yesterday.

I know executive leadership sets trends and influences culture, but I don't agree with the idea that a corporation is nothing more than the extension of the leadership's ambitions.

I'm not disagreeing, but there's plenty of microsoft closed-source efforts that have been horrible too. It's possible microsoft just isn't very good at everything.

I'd be receptive to that view if hosted Microsoft SQL server were also crippled.

Hanlon's Razor... I highly doubt they've intentionally crippled the open source ones just to promote MSSQL. So many things are bad on azure, the slow databases are just one part.

It's not just the crippling slowness. There's other hints as well.

I probably will move to MS SQL, too. I'm virtually obligated to use azure and it's the only non crippled database available on azure.

I don't think the list of projects is complete.[1] I specifically know Microsoft's open source initiatives through Microsoft R Open[2], which is not listed on that page.

[1] https://opensource.microsoft.com/projects/explore/

[2] https://mran.microsoft.com/open

Oh PowerToys, you’re back, I’ve missed you so much https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

Any word on when we can host our own Windows Package Manager repositories?

They're implementing a very basic version of a package manager. There's a whole saga about the creation of that which you might also have seen, was on HN. (Called winget)

Edit: Just realized that's probably what you're referring to, didn't know they were officially calling it Windows Package Manager. I thought you were being sarcastic vis-a-vis the lack of a windows package manager.

Haha I was in fact referring to WPM - the thing that winget gets from.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com