> prove that they've had a change of heart regarding open source.

Change of heart? Why? I think they are doing a pretty smart move to be friendly towards open source community, but it's not because I believe they changed their mind and want to contribute to the open source world, instead, I simply believes they embrace open source community is because it's good for business.

You see, open source software these years became pretty good and infrastructural. If Microsoft can't be a part of it, then they will soon be obsolete. And they don't want to be obsolete, so they just can't afford to not be a friend with open source.

The real thing that I curious about is what would happen when Microsoft managed to re-dominates the software market (in both user and enterprise end). Will they still be friendly with open source community after that?

All companies that embrace open source do it because it's good for business. It's a seemingly unlimited resource that accounts for billions (made up number, feels reasonable) of dollars of unpaid labor.

It was always stupid to be against OSS from a business perspective and so long as developers hand over their IP on a platter it always will be - Microsoft would be really stupid to turn away free money, and they seem to realize this now.

The idea that open source involves “handing over ip on a platter” is what’s stupid here. The vast majority of open source code is developed on the job. The fact that it’s open source means that the developer can take it with them when they leave and possibly even get some name recognition from it. If it was closed source, the developer would be handing it over on a platter to their employer, never to be seen again.

That's a very contemporary development. Open source was originally hobbyist, research or academic.

Often, it was "programmer solve thyself".

Businesses have only been employing significant numbers to work on open source projects for the last decade.

2 decades

So are you saying that we don't encourage unpaid labor with open source? Are you saying that companies choose OSS for non-business reasons?

That to me is what DotNet Core is, along with Asp.Net, Entity Framework many years ago, and everything developer related becoming open source.

GitHub is just a signal to people who have been out of the loop, bloomberg and many linux developers.

When I start dropping my apps on their systems, they might be surprised how well they run.

https://github.com/dotnet

https://github.com/aspnet

DotNet Core was a real surprise to me. As was Windows Subsystem for Linux.

With DotNet Core we have an extremely well crafted language available on all Windows and Linux. It's a great move on part of Microsoft.

I've heard it told that WSL was actually a repurposing of the Android emulation layer for winphone. If that's true it's a hell of an awesome pivot.

People may or may not remember, but most of this started with ALT.NET movement, with a number of influential people and developer supported or created a number of projects.

Before ASP.NET MVC, there was Castle Monorail. Before Entity framework or linq2sql, there was Nhibernate.

It was amazing times. It was clear Scott Guthrie started moving microsoft in that direction back in the day, after ALT.NET movement started proving success and showing an alternative to people.

I remember ALT.NET, and I would not retroactively declare a success. What it did was push into the open the fact that the Microsoft of the day could not effectively handle having rival technologies on their platform, open or closed source. Their strategy at the time was to try to provide a solution for every single product category, to the point of maintaining various no-cost but proprietary tools and libraries just to fill gaps (most of which are now abandoned).

> That to me is what DotNet Core

DotNet Core debugger is proprietary . You can only debug apps within Microsoft environment according to their license.

Same thing for most of the azure tools , you are only allowed to use them within Visual Studio.

I don't really called that "all in open source" .

It's gimmick to give C# devs the illusion of a choice.

Try to build , run & deploy a C# app on AWS with Atom. You're gonna have a bad time.

You've heard of Open Core, I imagine? That's what everyone does. Even the GitLab everyone's talking about in this context is Open Core.

And regarding your claim, you can do all of that, even with Vim if you want. You just have to build some scaffolding.

After all, they can't be expected to implementing everything for everyone. More than that, they were actually nice and created LSP (https://langserver.org/) and now they're thinking about a Debug Adapter Protocol (https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-debugadapter-node/issues...) that would do the same thing for debugging.

>You've heard of Open Core, I imagine?

It's not "Open Core" if the core is not open. In this case a debugger is core part of a language. It's a very clear movement in order to keep C# devs within their ecosystem and guarantee revenue with Azure. They loose money here , they must get it somewhere else.

This guarantee a total monopoly over the .NET ecosystem , Rider is probably one of the only tools that tried to offer an alternative they are stuck with the exact issue of not being able to bring the debugger because of that hostile license policy.

>Even the GitLab everyone's talking about in this context is Open Core.

I never talked about Gitlab and I don't care about them.

Don't be mistaken about MS , almost every move they do as a double intention behind it.

Just to name a few :

One MS engineer is core member to Webpack & Angular , why ? Windows Server dashboard is written in Angular , it's a critical product, they need some controller there.

One MS engineer is core contributor to Electron, why ? VS Code is powered by electron , it's a critical product, they need some control here as well.

One MS engineer is core contributor to Vue.js , why ? Azure is investing hundred of millions in China and Asia due to insane growth over the past 5 years, they need a good image in asia.

If you think MS has changed , you are delusional about the situation.

Influencing the things you care about in a way you like, seems like a sensible thing to do...

>DotNet Core debugger is proprietary . You can only debug apps within Microsoft environment according to their license.

People keep bringing this up as if it's some evil plan, not a legacy problem.

The debugger is based on Visual Studio's closed source debugger. Visual Studio is a major paid product. It's not simple to just extract an integral feature from a paid product.

> It's not simple to just extract an integral feature from a paid product.

Why? This isn't a technical challenge. As far as I know, the actual debugging engines are pretty isolated modules with some alternative interfaces already available (e.g. cdb). So where do you see the real challenge?

No, it's not a technical challenge. It's a business issue. You know, the whole Visual Studio makes us a lot of money can we really afford to just open license its main feature?

I've always wondered - Do serious apps/products deploy directly from an IDE into AWS/Azure?

I wouldn't say that, as siblings echo. I genuinely think that, for instance, Microsoft is genuinely doing a better job of doing open source than Google right now (With Facebook at the top, MSFT #2, Goog #3 from FAANG).

That might be because I'm deeper into web development though, and both TypeScript, and VS Code are great contributions.

Maybe I'd feel different if I worked in ML, and used Tensorflow daily.

I wouldn't say that Google is high on my list of trust, either. But TypeScript and VS Code do not jump you into a #2 ranking. Go and Chrome easily trump them for starters. Then you get things like node that ride off V8, and Atom that rides off Chrome. The Google ecosystem of community building blocks is still much, much more significant than MS. After all, Google actually dogfoods OSS.

FWIW, I don't and wouldn't use a source code repository of Google's or Facebook's, either. In fact, rather than open a GitLab account, I started self-hosting a year ago. GitLab made that easy. I also looked at Pagure.

wait, how does go and chrome trump open source c#, f#, vb.net, .net core, typescript, asp.net, visual studio code, monaco, powershell core, mono, and the many, many other things they have open sourced?

they’ve gone insane.

https://opensource.microsoft.com

https://github.com/Microsoft

and all of these are active and well managed with microsoft employees engaged in communication.

Angular, Polymer,

Dart, Go,

Android,

Chromium,

Protocol Buffers, Java Guice/Collections, C++ Abseil

Plus a bunch of minor things

https://opensource.google.com/projects/list/featured

and stuff Google contributes to but doesn't lead.

Kubernetes, CGroups (for containers) VP9, VP10 codecs

Microsoft open source is inherently less valuable because it is all built around being closed source until recently.

So there is much less of a network effect which makes it less valuable. One example: most open source modern OO languages, e.g. Kotlin, Scala, target the JVM, and so are interoperable. Whereas C# is in a closed Microsoft bubble of open source. If it had an LLVM or Java backend, it'd be much more useful.

none of that makes any sense. c#, f#, and vb.net all target .NET (and thus the CLR) and are interoperable. they are also cross-platform with .NET core.

and saying “most open source modern OO languages ... target the JVM” is not accurate. if you mean modern OO JVM languages, then yea, of course, but that is satisfied analogously by the .NET languages.

the c# and f# compilers, .NET core (libraries and framework), and core CLR (the runtime) are all open source and cross-platform. there isn’t anything closed about it. i don’t know what you mean by “closed microsoft bubble of open source”.

why do the .NET languages need LLVM or JVM implementations to be useful? again, that doesn’t make sense.

Nothing which a normal 'non microsoft' developer would profit from. Even their contributions to Linux were mostly about running Windows on Linux and the other way around. Nothing a non Microsoft dev would even care about.

Google however maintains a few products that can easily be considered standard, or at least will find their way in any other developer stack.

what is a non-microsoft developer? these are open platforms that happen to be made by microsoft.

if you use google’s open source projects are you now a google developer?

and visual studio code is probably used more for web development than it is .net work. it certainly is the major selling point of it on the website.

Agreed that is weird wording. When I look at my environment there are basically 2 kind of developers (from this point of view) those who do Net and use the MS stack, and those who don't do Net and at max worked with VS code.

I really don't know a lot of people who do anything with the MS stack. And those who do code on and for Microsoft (which already is a minority)

I personally don't know anyone who switched from Atom or Sublime to VS. Only VS users I know have been using real VS before.

Microsoft might be doing a better job wrt contributing to and creating open source software, but the trust of Microsoft is not there.

My SO migrated everything off Github back on Sunday when rumors broke, deleting the account & repos that had commits and contribs going back years.

Consistently, one of the first questions I ask friends and acquaintences who go to work across the lake to work for MS in Bellevue or Redmond is whether they are on an Embrace or Extend team. Most are on Embrace/Rewrite our own version but "better" teams.

Microsoft has changed, but they're no Red Hat or Suse.

Considering Google has over 2000 plus open source projects I find it hard to believe how Microsoft is doing a better job of doing open source than Google.

Additionally, I find it comical that you would even suggest that a company that has sued other companies for using open source software is even in the conversation with companies that have championed open source software since their inception.

There is no undo button. All you can do is be better than what you were. If Microsoft really wants to start doing a better job in the open source community they can start by agreeing to never sue another company for using Linux.

I assume you're not using Google's GitHub profile as a measure since Google's has fewer repositories than Microsoft's. Where does the 2000 number come from?

To get the developers to help write obnoxious garbage like win10 which forces users into all sorts of things they don't want?

They want an undo button? It's right under their nose: stop with the bullshit auto-update that re-enables itself, document all telemetry and make a big button to disable it.

But they don't do that, do they? Any idea why? Spoiler: it's all fake bs again, take one flashy but insignificant step forward and take 3 covert snake-like steps back.

Updates are lose-lose. Either you get complaints from people about how they're being forced on them, or you get complaints that Microsoft isn't doing more to protect people from exploits because they've all shut off updates.

I'm not a fan of the telemetry either, but they do have it all documented now, which is more than, for example, most phone manufacturers: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/basic-level....

And I'm not sure what Windows is supposed to force users into things they don't want. I haven't had an issue with turning off functionality and having it be switched back on during updates - I guess it must happen based on the complaints, but it's not something I've experienced.

There's a middle ground somewhere around 'not re-downloading updates every time they fail' and 'not disguising Minecraft as a security update'. A lot of the annoyance at the updates is with how frustrating the implementation is.

Microsoft aren't the only company that need constant security updates: I've never seen any complaints about Chrome's.

Chrome's disabled using backspace as "back" button.

But really that's my only complaint!

> Updates are lose-lose. Either you get complaints from people about how they're being forced on them, or you get complaints that Microsoft isn't doing more to protect people from exploits because they've all shut off updates.

When updates that only add telemetry (Windows 7), or that upgrade an installed Windows 7 / 8 to Windows 10 without even asking, among other garbage, are classified as "critical security updates" by Microsoft, it really should come as no surprise that people disable all automatic updates in response.

> Updates are lose-lose. Either you get complaints from people about how they're being forced on them, or you get complaints that Microsoft isn't doing more to protect people from exploits because they've all shut off updates.

They didn't exactly help themselves, firing their QA team, and using their users as the test platform.

Nothing was done about Telemetry (maintain state after updates, better options to disabling PARTS of it, documenting it) till AFTER people discovered it and there was a public outcry. And they still didn't document it till it was becoming clear that GDPR would go through and they'd be legally liable for not doing so. And there's currently still no way to completely disable Telemetry's data collection. It's a simple on/off toggle and potentially a registry entry that determines if the startup scripts of the OS should start the Telemetry application at all. I'm sorry but at best that's pretty myopic for a company who claims (paraphrased) "trust is our most important resource", or (literal) "judge us by the actions of our recent past, our current actions and our future actions". And it certainly doesn't help to shake the notion that they have larger and more maligned plans for what they intend to do with their greater OSS influence, certainly not when you consider their history. But even if we're to take those statements at face value they still don't completely align with their actions.

even chunks of Azure are open source.

https://github.com/Azure

Azure used to bill themselves as the "open cloud". That's kinda gone from their marketing, but they are WAY more open than AWS.

Only OpenStack is fully open source and fairly feature complete, with a few dozen providers using the OpenStack platform.

OVH, who owns the largest datacenter in North America uses OpenStack, they're actually one of the largest contributors. Red Hat & IBM both seem to be really pushing private deployments as of late for their larger clients that already own large DCs.

Knowing that OVH uses a piece of software makes me want to never use that piece of software.

They are the worst quality cloud provider, IMO.

Definitly not the worst, but very far from the actually good ones for sure.

Did they kill your puppy? I've got multiple servers and VMs with them, uptime and connectivity is great.

Realistically, if Microsoft wants to be profitable on that investment, they will have to make changes to earn more money. Which will alienate developers looking for free good repo.

Even if they plan to keep good will support for strategic relational reasons, that good will is easy to go away with strategy changes.