Microsoft begins “Extinguish” phase of dealing with Open Source
lunduke.substack.com
lunduke.substack.com
Edit: Yeah, see https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/08/microsoft_store_open_...:
> In response, Sardo, who oversees the Microsoft Store, insisted Microsoft is just trying to prevent abusive store listings, like app clones.
> "We absolutely want to support developers distributing successful OSS apps," he said. "In fact there are already fantastic OSS apps in the Store! The goal of this policy is to protect customers from misleading listings."
> Sardo said Microsoft would review the policy language to make sure its intent is clear.
Would it be normal for any project to depend on the good will of Microsoft for them not to enforce their conditions on them?
In addition, you have the right to sell most open source softwares, that is one of the right given by open source licenses.
Isn't it even against antitrust laws for Microsoft to decide of the financial conditions of third party software they don't own a right on?
If they have a problem with paid clones, they could just put a rules against parasitism, and put some apps as top in search results or with a special 'official' tag.
When they change it, it is a favor they do to you, to not enforce it for you. You can't complain. They can hold you hostage to revoke this exception if you do something they don't like or if you offer an Oss stack that is in competition with their own things.
It's just a minor policy change on the Microsoft Store which says you can't create an "app" for a free open source product as if it's your own. So, you can't create an app of Ubuntu Linux and charge $5 for every download on the Microsoft Store.
Reasonable. Sound.
If there is nothing legally stopping them from doing that, then how is Microsoft going to arbitrarily enforce these new rules?
"Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission."
But Microsoft's store is a private marketplace (despite costing nothing in dollars to use/view). They can make whatever rules they want for the software they distribute or allow to be distributed there. First amendment, etc. doesn't apply. If Microsoft decided only software with unicorns and bunny rabbits could be distributed on their store, they are pefectly within their rights to mandate and enforce it.
I don't care if microsoft's store is a private marketplace. People should have the right to run whatever programs they want on their own hardware.
IANAL, just asking the question, I might be super wrong.
“Does the GPL allow me to sell copies of the program for money?
Yes, the GPL allows everyone to do this. The right to sell copies is part of the definition of free software. Except in one special situation, there is no limit on what price you can charge. (The one exception is the required written offer to provide source code that must accompany binary-only release.)”
On the other hand, there’s https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLRequireA...:
“if someone pays your fee and gets a copy, the GPL gives them the freedom to release it to the public, with or without a fee. For example, someone could pay your fee, and then put her copy on a web site for the general public.”
App Store rules may make that difficult to do for the buyer.
This is just one of many ways of doing it. They are getting so clever at it, not many have seem to have noticed but instead played along and thought it was all fine, until the complaints finally came in.
More examples of recent ‘extinguishing’ or typical EEE: [0] [1] [2]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29686076
The funny thing is, it is still true to this day.
how much does mircrosoft have to do with steam beyond having an app? how could valve be made amenable to serviceing linux platforms in general, in addition to curating ported games? i know these guys were MS at one time but the past tense may be a benevolent condition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation
What other candidates for FOSS "store" exist beyond repositories? I dont think github is in that pool anymore.
if valve provided a linux onboarding platform, in addition to games and repos, that just may have beneficial consequences for FOSS and valve
This plus the stuff they're doing with Minecraft recently has me very much wanting to get away from them. They've made it clear that they will abuse any power they have.
However, none of the alternatives seem that good. Python is slow, dynamic, and a pain to write large projects in, JavaScript is reliant on typescript and TypeScript is Microsoft.
Go is Google. Enough said.
Rust seems cool, but I'm not really on the system's side of programming so it's not super suited to the sort of things I want to do.
Is the only alternative Microsoft doesn't have their fingers in right now Kotlin? It's going to be expensive, but jet brains even provides the IDE so I can get away from VS code.
Java, As far as I understand, is still very object-oriented and very clumsy.
Kotlin, as far as I understand, fixes those issues.
How much modern Java have you read or written recently?
Modern Java supports functional programming and is not as clumsy as it used to be:
https://betterprogramming.pub/functional-programming-in-java...
Java also has better cross-platform support than C#.
Xamarin - RoboVM was a Java-based competitor to Xamarin which Xamarin acquired in 2015, but it was shutdown in 2017 after Microsoft acquired Xamarin. There are some Java-based toolkits such as https://www.codenameone.com/ that target mobile, but they are probably not as well funded as Xamarin has been under Microsoft. From what I hear Xamarin will be deprecated and replaced by MAUI.
Avalonia - Java has had multiplatform windowing for much longer than C# has. The Java Swing toolkit has been part of Java for more than a decade and is still supported in OpenJDK. JavaFX (https://openjfx.io/) is a newer toolkit that was originally part of Java and was later spun out into its own project.
How well are Xamarin and Avalonia supported if you are doing C# development on Mac or Linux?
>> How do I run Java on iOS?
As stated above, some tools such as https://www.codenameone.com/ and https://github.com/google/j2objc that convert Java code to target iOS.
I have never tried using those tools so I am not sure how good they are.
Neither codenameone nor j2objc seem to be anywhere close in terms of features (including tooling).
That said, there's actually some interesting stuff in that link. The ability to assign an anonymous class to an interface is super fascinating.
But if I'm starting new, My understanding is that Kotlin is superior in almost every way.
How is Javascript reliant on Typescript? I've written an enormous volume of Javascript without ever having touched Typescript.
I don't want to use JS without types. You 100% can do that, I just don't want to.
Java is probably one of the most similar in terms of capabilities and use cases.
Rust is popular, but targets more of the same use cases as C++ does. Unlike C# and Java, it does not use garbage collection which might be an advantage or disadvantage depending on what you are trying to do.
Not sure what the hate on Google is based on; solid engineering goes a long way.
I'm sure their engineers are great, as is the code they write, but that makes them what you might call a tasty poison.
I know people on HN are tired of hearing the same drumbeat over and over but Rust really is an exciting space and community to develop in right now.
As far as IDEs, you can try Atom or CodeBlocks or something (I'm not sure... I use VSCode because I used it before MS made it evil and I'm not going to let them make me stop).