Can we trust Microsoft with Open Source? (2021)
dusted.codes
dusted.codes
Having all of my GPL code ripped out of MonoDevelop so it could become Visual Studio for Mac was the straw that made me write GNOME Builder, GNOME's flagship IDE.
I've been completely deaf to GNOME dev tools for a few years. What are the plans (if is there any) for a reasonably good RAD or ui builder tool (besides cambalache)? Is there any hope for blueprint + workbench turning into something to fill this gap? Was there any progress or plan on the "designable" interface for GTK?
For the record, I wrote this comment some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35632761
It's been on my radar for a long time and I have prototypes for one that are bitrotting on gitlab. There are three major design pieces of it.
First, It has an executable that runs in your development container (environment/etc) which means you can load libraries/typelibs/girs/etc just like the app would without crashing the IDE (or Glade in the old days).
Second, everything is an AST node so doing fun manipulations, unlimited undo, etc is just tree mutations.
Third the worker process does the rendering to a render node tree which is then shipped over to the Designer process to render.
The cambalache author and I are friends, so we occasionally talk about how we can make things work to integrate from Builder.
As for blueprint, that is outside of my knowledge area. I still do everything in XML and would prefer a designer to work with trees anyyway. Not sure I'd go the route of mutating a blueprint AST, but I hear it has back-and-fro to XML so that would probably be fine.
Also, if you want to make this a higher priority, lobby my employer (Red Hat) to make sure they know it's important to you.
Secondly, help me with _any_ of my other projects so I have some cycles to dedicate to it. People rarely notice but Builder, Sysprof, Text Editor, D-Spy, Manuals, Ptyxis, etc... are all one-man (split between many) projects and libraries.
If you are talking about "drafting" I even had a few contributions in 2021. Would love to see it evolve.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MonoDevelop#Visual_Studio_for_...
https://killedbymicrosoft.info/
Also, that article about .NET drama is from 2021.
What did changed since Microsoft used ACPI as tool against Linux?
Enforced Auto-Updates, Ads, Cloud Account enforcement, Blocking Firefox partially in Teams [1], Setting Teams as Browser (Edge?), WSL (intent is not compatibility, it is to prevent migrations to Linux), Azure is a giant security problem and finally the deal with Qualcomm (hinder Linux on ARM) like we are in the 90ies?
The crap named Secure Boot with Microsoft as Certificate Authority. After certificates proofed to be miserable on the internet for 25 years. What about signing with a user generated private key (stored in a keyring or similar) of the superuser and storing the public key in the UEFI? Which would be simple and reliable. No. Microsoft opted for the solution which depends on their goodwill and the biggest possible attack surface.
And Pluton looks so awkward that Lenovo and Dell turned it immediately off.
I will not trust them. Their business model is greed, making the users itself hostile actor against all others. Using something intentionally incompatible and borked isn’t “your department”. You harm others with incompatible APIs, ABIs, weird “Word” files and Teams.
I didn’t considered to use DotNet. GNOME removed it a long time ago and it is fine (Tomboy/Mono -> Gnome/C++). The only thing which seems good is LSP. But the hard work is done by CLANG and others. Not Microsoft.
[1] Teams worked six months ago flawlessly with Firefox. Even screen-sharing on Wayland. But they greyed out and blocked the video-call button. Until I figured out that I can initiate calls through the calendar…lol. It is like 2001.
I watched my computer reinstall edge, reinstall/hijack my drives with onedrive, re-add ads... But I left Windows for Fedora.
I felt offended that I didn't know about Fedora before. Like, there was some hatred toward Microsoft and Canonical for hiding a 10/10 OS. Angry at M$ for bribing schools. Angry at Canonical for free CD marketing that made crappy Debian-family the standard for 10+ years. Likely irrational.
But Fedora has been an option and I didn't even know.
Had something similar happen when I finally relented to all the constant pestering to upgrade to Win11. I did so reluctantly. Suddenly, I needed to link everything to my onedrive account. Oh, you have an MS365 account? We need that too to set up your onedrive. Oh, you should use teams, let me make Edge your default browser and connect all your accounts to your edge account.
I didn't have any of this on Win10 and now it was just hijacking all my stuff, setting every MS program as the default and after I switched it, it would hijack them all back when I ran the updates. I purposefully keep all my stuff siloed for security reasons and here it was forcing them all together without my permission.
The last time it reset Edge and Teams and forced me to use my MS365 for Teams, that was it. I uninstalled it and then installed MX Linux (Debian based) and have been much happier since. I still have a Win10 desktop and I'm not surrendering that until I absolutely have to now.
That was enough for me to switch some of my machines.
You should check out Fedora.
WSL is the proof how Desktop Linux isn't happening, while everyone keeps pushing for their snowflake distribution.
They aren't alone, Google on Chromebooks, Android, and Apple with Virtualization Framework, are all variants of what WSL achieves.
None of them has bothered to actually support the Year of Desktop Linux.
Search doesn't freaking work anymore. I can't even find an app that I just installed seconds ago - the search instead would take me to the web, opening Edge. Which is another damn pestilence alongside OneDrive Cloud. "No, Microsoft. I don't care about your damn browser, let me use whatever I want to use... And no, I don't care about your cloud." There's now built-in telemetry everywhere, and they're making it real hard to use the thing on your own computer without logging into an MS account.
I like my Linux. It makes me feel liberated from bullshit. Sure, it can feel brittle, but it doesn't feel "broken all the time". Windows feels like it's fundamentally broken beyond repair.
If the question is actually "Can we trust Microsoft with an Open Source Community?" then it get's more interesting.
There is also the issue of sheer code size/complexity that means even if you have the code, do you have enough people to verify it or is it a case of just waiting until it breaks/gets exploited? That second point is a larger issue of open source nowadays, not just Microsoft.
It gets a bit more fishy when that company does stuff like lobbying governments to make their shitty open source document format the standard, etc
Same thing for Nvidia, big browser projects like Chromium, and Android. Many Chromium forks died because they couldn't keep up with upstream, except for ungoogled-chromium.
Free software is committed to sharing values.
Hell, you could have a GPL project that is developed entirely behind closed doors, as long as you always give users a copy of the source code when you release a new version.
That's not always true, particularly for things where a company is the primary developer.
You can prevent takeovers by using GPL license with no CLA.
Any open source project can only thrive if the community puts the effort in. Choosing GPL does not prevent or even lessen the risk that a company will decide to stop putting forth the effort.
True, but it prevents the scenario where a company makes a well supported closed version leaving the rest of the community at a disadvantage in terms of development resources.
Suppose a project has 10 commercial developers and 2 hobbyist developers. The company decided to close source and the open source version is forked. The commercial version now has 10 developers while the open version has 2. That's going to be hard to compete. Now if the same project was GPL with no CLA and the company decided they don't want to contribute to open source, they'll cease contributions but there is no closed fork. The project still exists with 2 people working on it but no competing project. Users will stick with the open version as long as it is viable.
Look at MariaDB. It was forked from MySQL once oracle decided they didn't want to invest heavily on a competitor from their product.
In the same vein Percona built a succesful product and company on top of MySQL
People need it. People fear it, or fear losing it. People suffer it. Or they have no choice due to pressure or policy. Or they don't know any better. Or they are tricked into believing something about it. But in the end, the often forced choice to use Microsoft is a strategically created imposition by a company with billions to spend on manipulation and political manoeuvring.
Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28968231
MS' docs have been on a steady decline ever since they moved away from MSDN and went to an "open source" "community project" with them. For some of the newer stuff, a page without any spelling or grammar errors or unnaturally odd phrasing is exceedingly rare, and I have heard that they are attempting to use AI to write and edit them. I've seen older pages from MSDN era get destroyed and turned into a mess due to their edits presumably to optimise for SEO (and thus not humans.) It will only get worse. They of course beg people to contribute fixes, as that article alludes to, but there's no point in doing that when you know your contributions are just going to get mangled into AI-generated muck.
Microsoft are profit driven and if any opportunity comes where they can trap you, they will. Same with Amazon. Same with Google. Etc.
I do not hate them... I accept the world we live in where they will dominate and control whatever they can. I just do my best to limit using their tools.
I work for companies using google or microsoft. At home, I keep to free software as much as I can.
They don't see the value of OSS. Stop developing in M$ related technologies if you value your time and your DX.
I agree that C# is Java done well, but there are plenty of languages with feet on more solid foundations than a company with a track record of writing crap code and playing games with their developer community.
Linux contributions, Github, node/npm, Visual Studio, OpenJDK contributions to JIT and ARM, finally performance matters to CPython, Haskell,..
Turns out open source devs do have bills to pay, and Microsoft gives good checks.
Anyway, it doesn't really go to the point, but it's funny to me that I've had this hot-reload feature the whole time, and just have never found much use for it. Or maybe I just don't trust it.
Not like my C++ projects which take several minutes to build because Windows Defender wants to use 50-80% of my CPU to monitor the compiler for malware. Wish I could hot reload one TU or something.
There are some FOSS alternatives to GitHub, but they have had more problems staying online.
What happened to using multiple applications each best suited for their domain?
Somehow they were also capable of killing Skype, Nokia, and Yammer, among some other things. They've also made LinkedIn less user-friendly and overwhelmed with ads.
GitHub (I feel) never had so much downtime before the acquisition. I'm dreading the day when they finally make something so stupid that would drive hundreds of thousands to move their repos someplace else.
Apple is winning, somehow.
How is it winning? Apple employees generally need approval to even contribute to any open-source projects that are not their own products.
Apple is only "winning" by selling Macs to devs, but about 90% of devs using Macs don't even write software to run natively on Macs and iOS devices.
I wish that it were simply a Microsoft problem, because that would be easy. Don't do business with them (or build open source efforts around them) and you would be good. But unfortunately, bad actors abound and they will screw you if they get the chance. So you have to make sure no one organization gets the power to cripple you, no matter who it is.
That's not to say Red Hat is infallible. The internal organization of things does create misalignments around approach, path, and incentives. But it's not drastically different conceptually from any other business. There's just an inherit foundational hurdle of needing to convince potential customers that their products provide enough value over the upstream projects they derive from to agree to pay money for something they could, in essence, obtain at no-cost.^ Almost everything Red Hat does in the FOSS projects they contribute to can be a double edged sword.
^ No-cost can be a very, very loaded term. What you save on subscription costs may come back to bite you when trying to assemble or use something complex and rapidly developing. Your cost/risk tradeoff becomes staff with expertise, upstream communication, and operational reliability.
When you deal with deceitful people, credibility matters.
The only time credibility does not matter is when you can independently verify what is being said, such as through a framework like Descartes Rules of Method, Logic, or some other epistemological method that is appropriate. Only then does credibility not matter because you can judge for yourself because it has appropriate rational backing.
When you are solely down to an entity that does not use such a framework; credibility matters.. and by extension reputation and past actions take on more importance than hollow words.
Microsoft, especially when it was run by Bill Gates, was never a credible entity. Today, it is run by accountants seeking to ride the knifes edge of what the market will bear, and in the process provide as little value as possible for creations that were made decades ago, ride the gravy train until it goes into the ocean.
While the people at Microsoft certainly have come up with some neat features and projects, when looking at these features/products and the history behind them (i.e. looking at Powershell), these were largely complete accidents, and/or significant internal politicking that could have gone either way because there was little to no profit in it. Their engineers used to be some of the best, but it matters little when the Accountants are in charge and see everything in a risk averse lens.
Once you lose credibility, it is almost impossible to get it back because you have to do so much more than it would have cost originally just to tip the scales back to even. Perception is sticky like that.
To get back to the core question, can we trust Microsoft with Open Source... No you can't, not ever, because they are solely concerned with making profit and stealing whatever they can under the color of law. Open Source doesn't make profit.
The rise of open source is the natural outcome when barriers to entry in a market impose costs so high that you can't do business without those features, (excluding participants from that market, monopolistic ally), and open source is exploitive free labor that's been used to create an alternative to those products when no business can compete due to the simple mathematics of costs.
Even the big players can't compete with free for long without diversifying which is why FOSS is still around today. Volunteers, and some non-standard funding routes which aren't really all that viable at scale. This is also why Microsoft as an entity has been trying to poison pill Linux for awhile, they want to be the only game in town and read everything you write in Office; build a dossier, and sell it to the highest bidder. What could be more valuable then the thoughts of every single person using their product.
Of course they'll claim they aren't doing this (deceitfully), just like Google claims they don't wiretap and listen to surrounding endpoint devices they don't own to show you ads related to what you were talking about in your own home.
Microsoft's Python language server extension for VS Code (Pylance) has been crashing on launch on one of my machines for twelve months or so.
One day, I got fed up with it and opened the extension in a JS debugger to investigate. Immediately after opening it, the extension fully deliberately DoSed [0] the CPU core with a full-on ReDoS [1] attack, leaving it spinning at 100% forever.
How is it not intentional?
I wouldn't trust Apple with anything open source, but Apple's not trying to look like an open-source-friendly company. Microsoft is.
Apple has never tried to look like an open-source-friendly company, but has never really been actively opposed to it either. Their whole business model, for a long time now, has been to sell overpriced iDevices to users. Anything that supports that goal is OK by them. More recently, they've been making money with online services: Apple Music, Apple+ streaming TV, etc., but these aren't really affected by FOSS.
Microsoft is different from both of these. Their business model for ages was to sell packaged (or preloaded) proprietary software to end-users, and to control the OS that all users used. They've moved more into the cloud services realm in recent years, but they're still pushing Windows and Office. They were actively hostile to FOSS for many years: "Linux is cancer", "pacman-like", etc. Don't forget the Halloween documents. They've been trying to project a nicer, friendlier-to-FOSS image in recent years, but a tiger can't change its stripes.
How are people so naive to think that a colossal corporation with a capitalization comparable to the GDP of Germany is spending an enormous amount of resources to build "a free" code editor, and that they are doing so with absolutely the best and benevolent intentions?
Also I am confused, with many corporations getting into poisoning products for financial gains (enshitification) why are people still talking about engaging with companies that have a proven historical track record that they do not have good moatives?
There is no scenario under which some ghoul comes to Stanford, tells you you're Jesus Christ with a MacBook Pro, offers you millions of dollars to pursue your passion project if you drop out, and doesn't expect unending increases in returns even at the cost of the core philosophy of the software development community you came up in. That's literally their job.
It’s not your Dad’s Microsoft
The day AWS and GCP migrates their workloads to hyper-v will mark the end of microsoft's upstream contribution on Linux.
of course the workers are pro opensource etc. Their income is totally divorced from company profit, but through opensource they can at least build a public image that improves employability in a landscape of zero-trust relationships with your employer.