“Truly disappointing that Microsoft would subvert an active open-source project” | Hacker News Reader

“Truly disappointing that Microsoft would subvert an active open-source project”

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19 pointsghuntley8 comments

That weird guy that everybody loves to hate (RMS) has been talking about this for at least 3 decades, but instead of listen to him, people prefer to ignore him and pretend Microsoft is a "friend" of open-source.

Why do people keep telling themselves lies?

See https://isdotnetopen.com/ for a concise summary of open problems in the .NET ecosystem and a detailed account how the .NET platform is becoming closed to ensure it is only useful if you are a customer who pays for Visual Studio.

It’s so depressing to see Microsoft suppressing open source seemingly to prop up Visual Studio sales. The truth is Visual Studio is bloated, dated, slow, and clunky and the experience in the modular and customizable VS Code is much better.

I know HN frowns on meme responses, so I won't say "No one could have predicted this would happen. /s". Has Miguel de Icaza not been paying attention to how Microsoft has operated since the 90s "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish" era? Did anyone really think that the company had completely abandoned the practice?

As the 'new people' come on board, they have no knowledge of Microsoft's criminal past, and are constantly surprised by the things that Microsoft does, and need to be educated on its past activities.

In the days of the Usenet, that kind of thinking was embodied as "The Eternal September" where older members continually had to educate the never-ending new people on the required Usenet etiquette.

Miguel has been told again and again that Microsoft would inevitably stab him in the back. He wouldn't listen. Tough titties, Miguel.

The new name for "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish" is "Control, Alt, Delete".

> Has Miguel de Icaza not been paying attention to how Microsoft has operated since the 90s "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish" era?

At the risk of emulating a stopped clock (one that is invariably right twice a day) I'll note that many folks have been pointing this out to Miguel ever since he first hopped on the Open Source MS Platform train with Mono et al.

He got paid plenty of money both directly and indirectly to provide MS with a credible open source developer (ie. "No platform lock-in") story. The toys MS created and funded along the way were, I'm sure, nice for a while as long as you trusted them not to pull the rug out, but some of us have long memories and avoided taking the candy from the man in the van. The platform may have been "open source enough" for sufficiently low values of "enough", but, well...

Not to put too fine a point on it, Miguel sounding the alarm and acting offended is a bit much. Frankly he should be apologizing to everyone he lured into the MS ecosystem over the years (and given that his investment into the platform continues to pay dividends by attracting new developers, still is luring). As it is, I hope the developers inside that ecosystem are listening to him now and leaving, but I doubt it.

> many folks have been pointing this out to Miguel ever since he first hopped on the Open Source MS Platform train with Mono et al.

Absolutely. I remember when Novell acquired Ximian, but I had not paid much attention in many years. It doesn't seem likely that Miguel would really change his tune now, if he has stuck with it for going on two decades now.

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