You’re confusing open source and open to contribution. Is SQLite not open-source?
I don't know how you can extinguish something that's MIT licensed and has a million copies around the world.
I wouldn't trust Microsoft near my open source code base in 3 centuries
They can extinguish it by just stealing all the code, and using their bigger marketplace advantage to become the defacto standard.
gestures wildly at the MIT-licenced VSCode codebase
Yes, they are not rug pulling the VSCode source but by locking down the marketplace (and never giving a truly open source VSCode, what developers think of as "VSCode") they are in the processes of locking out forks.
Fair point! good example of an attempt to extinguish.
Like seriously - I haven't heard of them doing it in quite a long time. I know they were atrocious in the 90s and 00s, I'm not disputing that at all. Are there any examples of them continuing this behavior in the last decade though?
Further, a huge percentage of the people making those decisions back then are no longer with the company, different people are in charge, etc. The industry has changed it's relationship with open source - company board rooms aren't scared of the consequences of loading open source onto a server, the legality and liabilities have been hashed out, and MS isn't really even capable of pulling those fear levers anymore. MS itself has repositioned in the industry - their dreams of total computing dominance have been shattered: there's no chance of a windows derivative owning the server market any more, there's no money in browsers or consumer OSes (heck even MS's domination in gaming is showing cracks due the the efforts of valve). Point being - would it even make strategic sense for them to try to EEE anything anymore?
Note: I have almost no ties to MS. I haven't used an MS os or desktop software since before covid (in any capacity, even moving the mouse on a computer running windows). I don't use any of their SaaS products personally or professionally. There are integrations between the products I help build and azure, however those are not a major source of revenue for my employer and I do very little work that even touches that stuff. Point being - I'm pretty non-MS in my life and don't have any sort of loyalty or incentive to defend them. I do abhor their EEE actions back in the 90s and 00s when they were doing them, and those still make me angry... but that's not a reason to assume that different people at a company are going to act the same as the old-school ones.
While it may technically be open source due to it's license and you can literally go look at the source - Microsoft is operating these codebases as-if they are proprietary. Every decision is made out of public - and I would not be surprised to learn they have their own internal tracker for the "real" backlog items. You frequently see command/comments by Microsoft employees which clearly are triggering workflows in their real backlog tracker, and near-zero discussion happens in Github by Microsoft employees, and when it does - it's clearly through a PR filter.
Like I said, beggars can't be choosers and it's better to have this than nothing - but I don't really think Microsoft has grasped the true concept of FOSS as-of yet.
> Is SQLite not open-source?
Not really in my opinion either. There's no way to contribute at all... best you can do it raise hell on the forums about a particular issue you want to see fixed. So while it's Open Source in the strict sense, it's not Open Source in the general sense.
The sibling comments contain some sharper critique of Microsoft if you haven't read them yet.
> best you can do it raise hell on the forums about a particular issue you want to see fixed
Also, do you have any open source projects that you wrote, maintain, and accept contributions?