If you told me 5/10 years ago about these developments I would have never believed you.
I don't think it's fair to reason about a (40+ year old, 100k+ employees, public) company's behaviour as if it has a mind. It doesn't.
[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/top-five-linux-contributor-mic...
[1] https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING...
What we are seeing now is Microsoft reacting to being kicked out of several markets by going back to the embrace phase in an attempt to regain some of the ground lost from Balmers failed attempt to secure a foothold for MS in the mobile and web framework markets.
If they had really been about embracing open source and open standards we would have seen them do something useful for Linux like releasing a version of excel for Linux or opening up the protocols outlook and exchange use to talk to each other, but that kind of openness was never on the table.
What i would expect to see with github is that if/when ms decide they want to utilize their investment for profit is a heavy integration with the azure environment in the form of CI hooks designed around azure api's to the point where other CI platforms become 2nd degree citizens in the ecosystem and i would not be surprised if a github account becomes a add on to an office365 subscription rather then a stand alone product.
If you change the leadership and change employee incentives, it might as well be a different company.
Sure there's cultural inertia... but incentives trump culture every time.
Exactly. Which is why the idea of "trusting" a corporation, or treating them like you would a human being on any level, is ludicrous. They're a plane crash and a stock dip from becoming a totally different entity.
[1] I thought it was just a cliche until I saw it happen to someone. She went through some things and upended her whole life.
So yeah, they are "all in on Open source", right.
As soon as a company realizes it can make more $$$ with new strategy B than their original strategy A, then boom -- changed. (Sometimes you have to get rid of the old believers, but that already happened at Microsoft.)
If you look at MSFT's stock price, it's ~tripled since Satya became CEO, after being stagnant for years. He seems incredibly committed to open-source -- because in the long run it will ultimately be more profitable for Microsoft, no?
I agree. They don't actually care about open source it's purely because it's profitable to their business. They'll close it without caring if it's not making them enough money or good will.
But I still hope this works. As long as maintaining open source projects is profitable to Microsoft then it gives incentives for other FLOSS projects to show that if such an anti open source company as Microsoft is willing to embrace it then there's good reasons to join in.
I think it's just because in the short run Microsoft ran a very high risk of getting pushed in a corner.
They are embracing what's hip most of all to improve their image, especially so as to be more attractive for talented technical people.
The "Windows everywhere" vision is not pursuable at this time, so it makes sense to let some things go and focus on what can get you the most money right now (cloud, IA, individual profitable products and services).
And maybe, just maybe, surreptitiously spread your patents everywhere... =0
He's just younger and less out of touch than Gates (and particularly Balmer). Many people seem to mistake ascribe this aspect of him (more in touch with modern tech) with some higher moral standards etc than e.g. Gates/Ballmer. I don't see why he should be any less fierce/brutal.
I agree with your assessment. For me MS motives are pretty transparent and in my opinion will have a positive net result for GitHub.
(2) Support OpenDocumentFormat in their office apps. Still remember how they corrupted the ISO certification process by creating OOXML (which is just a wrapper over binary blobs produced by MS-Office)
(3) Stop suing Android OEM's for patent licenses
I know the old .doc format was basically a memory dump of the document; but how does OXML relate to that?
http://slated.org/ooxml_dissecting_the_binary_blob_problem http://ooxmlisdefectivebydesign.blogspot.com/2007/08/microso...
It feels just like yesterday that Microsoft was spying on windows boxes. In my mind, everyone has a "Days since last accident" counter in their head, and Microsoft's number is quite low.
Windows 10 exists. Microsoft is "spying" on Windows boxes right now
It looks okay if you only have one Windows in your boot options but once you have two you realize you have two bootloaders.
That's about the minimum, given their track record.
In the meanwhile we can give them increasing credit, if they do behave nicely, but it's absurd to believe that they've suddenly become a good company and that they'll stay like this for the next decades. I have a hard time believing that anyone not payed by them could think so.
And by the way, they have yet to reverse the decidedly un-nice things they have done with Windows 10 in the last years. Allow everyone to disable the telemetry and to better control the updates, and then we can start the 15 years count. Oh yeah, and maybe also stop astroturfing, that's another extremely un-nice thing that they clearly started doing only recently.
There would be nothing wrong in discussing with the people, if they paid people to do so while stating in every message that they're being paid by Microsoft it would be perfectly ok, but that's very different from what they're doing now.
These things make it clear that they're still motherfuckers, just less then they used to be.
* Drop MSVC for Clang or GCC
* Drop Edge for Firefox or Chromium
because they love open-source, right?
The argument IE6 was that the web grew too stagnant with a single dominant web renderer. If we all agree that the Web is a better place with multiple competing web renderers, why wish the death of the Edge renderer when it and Firefox are all that are standing in the way (and barely by latest metrics) of forks from the KHTML/WebKit/Blink family dominating?
Did you mean to say Direct3D? That's still leave you with input, sound, maths, and 2D missing.
That view is fairly one-sided, to say the least. The history is presented in this StackExchange thread: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/6054....
But to summarize: OpenGL was the standard before D3D was created. D3D has been a step behind OpenGL in features and performance up to about D3Dv7. Then the OpenGL ARB screwed up, with Microsoft among the members (some hypothesize that Microsoft were attempting to sabotage OpenGL).
* Direct3D being open-sourced would have removed the need for Vulkan.
* Many compilers are good for the ecosystem.
* Many browsers are good for the ecosystem.
It's only a choice if we have open standards so you can actually choose between different implementations.
* Drop OOXML and make ODF the default format
* Drop the patents
* Drop the telemetry
* Drop Xbox
* Drop DirectX
* Drop the cloud garbage
* Drop or open MSVC
* Drop or open Edge
* Actually open .NET
We don't need to open the .NET Framework... We have .NET Core. It's better, faster, and cross-platform...
So yeah.
Everything said after that is just some cheap PR trick for chumps.
Quickly after they get back into an advantage position again they will abuse it same as before and you will live in an age of digital slavery.
(Never going to happen, not just for philosophical reasons, but I'm sure legal reasons too)
I know for a fact that the ZIP component of the windows shell would be an issue as that is definitely licensed to Microsoft instead of being owned by.
It’s a fair point but I still cannot read this without thinking of someone saying “yeah I did some things in the past but I’ve totally changed I promise. Look, for the whole past week I’ve been really nice to people haven’t I?”