Microsoft: embraces open source

Open-source developers: "They're trying to control us! They're trying to control us!".

And yet, the hue and cry is "Unless you open source every byte of GitHub's code and infrastructure you're just evil monopolists trying to smother us!" Given all that Microsoft has done to embrace and support open source I think the onus is now on the Open Source community to justify their distrust of Microsoft because "Duh, it's Microsoft" simply doesn't fly as a legitimate argument anymore.

How does Microsoft make money? They make money by renting from a platform which is monopolistic and enforced. What do they do to maintain this? They deliberately force people onto their platform by abusing their market position, and try to crush any opposition by any possible tactic, including dubious legal cases designed just to bankrupt their opposition. What else do they do? EEE, and also just blatant unnecessary reinvention /ripping off and lock-in when they get the chance.

They didn't abandon some of the visible tactics and start paying open source because they had a moral revelation, it's a company with the same business model it's not possible. Those tactics were just inneffective and co-opting, more subtle EEE has to be the game plan.

Why does that make me angrier than equally evil Facebook/Apple? Well if I was a farmer driving around one of those trucks with source code preventing me from fixing it I'd be pretty personally furious. But I'm not, I'm a developer and those guys are the ones trying to make everyone drive the coding equivalent. But it's worse, because coding isn't just my livelihood, it's a lot of how I think and express my thoughts. They're not messing with my job they're trying to restrict the way I think, so their shareholders can make a buck.

"Microsoft is running Github for charity" have a word with yourself.

Feel free to show me which part of the criminal code "not making money" falls under. You want to rant about EEE (irrelevant for decades now) or some other silly plan to undermine open source development, feel free. But expect to be called out for your pointless drivel at the same time.

I'm fine with being cautious about Microsoft. I think at this point it's no longer necessary, but sure I can understand that. But the EEE plot-line is a 20 year old joke. It's not funny anymore.

"We are pro open source except our entire business model which is build around a closed source platform on which we sell closed source products"

Yeah they're worse than they could be but that's not really the central point.

The legal thing you asked for a source on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co. Some people dissent from this reading of the case but it's also not that important, in practice they act like this.

It's never time to stop being cautious about megacorps.

To think that Microsoft spent $7.5 billion for altruistic reasons, without a plan to actually turn a profit on the purchase, is dangerously naive.

You thinking tech companies don't have loss-leaders is naive.

I don't really know anything about US laws, but I think they do have to act in the interest of their shareholders, i.e. make them more money.

(My view of capitalism meshes with Churchill's view of democracy: It's the worst except for all the others)

This is true, but "long term interest" for Microsoft means 30, 50, or 100 years from now. People seem to forget that people actually liking your company is important for long term profits, and therefore doing good things is quite easy to align with the notion that companies only do things that make them a profit.

I find myself saying this a lot - companies are by definition amoral (lacking a moral sense or understanding), not immoral. Just because they are driven by profits doesn't mean they don't do things that are moral or good, as many good things are in the interest of a company's profits. Especially their long term profits.

This hasn't been the case with Microsoft. They had their most successful era, and created (at the time) the richest man in the world, all while we hated them.

They aren't the biggest player right now, so their main focus is getting people to switch from a different provider (AWS) to Azure. A great way to do that is for the developers to like using Azure more than AWS.

After all, most of Microsoft's "evil years" were when they were on top, not in a distant second place.

I also think that developers have a lot more power in companies, especially smaller and newer companies, than they used.

Who's "we"? The open-source advocate reviled Microsoft in their own clique but the vast majority of the software industry just quietly went on with their lives.

That assumes that this situation is a zero-sum game. It's not. Microsoft clearly benefits from this, but so does everyone else.

As I asked a few days ago: "Do proponents of Free Software, on the whole, assert that the concept of intellectual property should not exist?"

If so then I can see why a closed-source supporter of open source is an abhorrent concept.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17232778

I have viewed GitHub as a net negative for Free Software for a number of years, this Microsoft deal amplifies that...

"Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches"

Times have changed, however it's reasonable to question if the Microsoft DNA radically changed or "not really".

[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_...

Free Software is a ethical movement and position around software and information

Open Source is a business model for collaborative development where most often the end product is not open but the tools used to create the end product are. Thus you can not use Copy-left Licenses if you intend to close source your final product.

Free Software is about Developer and User freedom

Open Source is about developer freedom exclusively

Ballmer's Microsoft disliked both Open Source and Free Software. Today's Microsoft sees the profitability that can some from Free labor of open source, but continues to be Hostile to Free Software

> Today's Microsoft sees the profitability that can some from Free labor of open source, but continues to be Hostile to Free Software

Microsoft donates more dev time to open source then they will EVER get out of their own use of it. But sure, let's pretend the multi-billion dollar company is spending billions upon billions on open source in order to save money. That makes SO much sense!

One primary example of them "donating" dev time is their Advancment of the Linux Kernal of which they have "become a top contributor" like the article says.

Why did they do this? To make Linux a First Class citizen on Azure so they can take on AWS... they did not "donate" this work out of some ethical kindness or wanting to "give back to the community" they did it to make money on Azure.

Every single one of the Open Source projects and initiatives can be traced to the same monetary reason, and largely traced to get Linux to work with some MS Commercial product of some kind, be is Azure or some other product.

Are you as virulent towards people that donate their time for recognition or their resume? Nobody doesn't anything altruistically. Microsoft doesn't have to either.

> Every single one of the Open Source projects and initiatives can be traced to the same monetary reason

VS Code and open sourcing their closed source .NET modules? Those are about building trust in the dev community. They have no direct correlation with profit. And even if they did that's ok.

> Azure or some other product.

So?

I nave claimed they did. That is the claim that was made, MS is "donating more time then they will ever get out" that was the claim

That is factually incorrect. They are getting more value from the Dev time they are putting into open source projects thus it is incorrect to say they are "donating" it, nor are they "giving more than they are getting" which was the comment I was replying to,

You can attempt to strawman and move the goal posts if you desire but it does not change reality

This can't be true, or they wouldn't be doing it. They put dollar signs on positive attention. Obviously.

Oh please.

Microsoft has not embraced open source.

Is their web browser open source? No.

Is Word, Excel, or Powerpoint open source? No.

Do they even push for open standards of those products? No.

Is Windows open source? No.

Is the C# compiler open source? No.

Microsoft may have taken some positive steps to support Linux on Azure & other things -- things possibility necessitated by market demands -- as well some contributions to open source.

But to say they have embraced open source is patently false.

Their Edge browser engine is proprietary but is built to work with open standards - no more pushing their own proprietary standards like ActiveX.

> Is Word, Excel, or Powerpoint open source? No > Do they even push for open standards of those products? No.

The default file format for recent Office versions is based on Office Open XML which is a published standard that anyone can interoperate with. Also, Office apps can save to the OpenDocument format too. Yes, there is a lot of proprietary stuff inside of Office, but they also have 20+ years of backwards compatibility to deal with.

> Is Windows open source? No.

Are there any examples of a company taking something as large as Windows OS and converting the whole thing from closed to open source? It's not like they can just flip a switch and let the whole world see the source code?

> Is the C# compiler open source? No.

Look at what they are doing in the .Net Core space for an indication of where this is going...

> But to say they have embraced open source is patently false.

I disagree with this and most who have followed Microsoft's actions over the last few years would also disagree with you. They have embraced open source way more than could be expected of any other company with a huge portfolio of closed source software.

Maybe when Sun Open Sourced Solaris?

It took them quite some time to get it done, but with significant effort they got it over the line.

That being said, we have no way of knowing what the true motive of the move is - being sceptical/critical is indeed the correct reaction.

Is that your belief, or do you know that to be true?

Microsoft buys GitHub and says we're going to let them operate independently as they see fit.

Where do you see the profit motive?

They were missing CI/CD tools, and source control. They had VSTS and Team Foundation Server but there's no way theyd beat the ubiquity of git.

I'm betting they're going to now start offering CI via GitHub like Gitlab (or offering a unified marketplace to allow other companies to fill this role and they take a cut) and then folding GitHub Enterprise into their suite of developer tools. Just like Visual Studio is vscode++, GitHub Enterprise will be invested in to where it does a whole lot more fancy things, and free GitHub is the onramp. And then Microsoft will have a portfolio that spans the entire code development pipeline.

Did you realize that your Java/Android Studio project in GitHub could be connected to App Center such that for every source check-in the project is built, unit tested (code-level), UI-tested on physical hardware (Xamarin Test Cloud), and if all tests pass the build is pushed to beta testers via HockeyApp which also captures reams of telemetry and debugging information? App Center can even be set up to automatically push the app all the way to Google Play automatically when you merge down to your release branch.

Ditto iOS apps written with Swift in Xcode.

If you think Microsoft doesn't have massive amounts of CI/CD tooling that is agnostic to language and platform you should check it out.

https://www.visualstudio.com/app-center/

But I think that sort of makes my point. If a company makes world class tools that people don't know about or don't want to use, are the tools that valuable/good? Microsoft just spent $7.5 billion to say "we don't think Team Foundation Server can cut it for the developer population at large". By doing that, they threw themselves into the center of millions of developer workflows around the world. I think it was a great buy for them, and is definitely a strategic move.

I never wrote anything abut profit motives. You just made the same leap of logic again.

Do you know factually that , "Microsoft is committed to losing money from now until they cease to exist to continue GitHub as a going concern."

There could be a direct (selling subscriptions / additional addon products) or indirect (marketing dollars, community goodwill, 'mindshare) profit motivations.

I think Microsoft sees this as a way to get into businesses that would have never entertained a relationship with them. When those github enterprise contracts come up for renewal, I expect large discounts for trying Azure and other Microsoft products to come with them.

You can opt in to using .NET.

This purchase makes you decide whether to opt out of your existing Github use. Or at least worry whether its usability (on whatever dimensions matter to you) will decline.

Github is the extend part or EEE, Git is the Standard, Github is the extension...

--

Edit since I being prevented from responding I will edit this to address the idea that "Github is not an extension of git"

Yes, it is. While you can still use git with out Github, you could also use "the web" with out IE6, GitHub however had workflow and process improvements over standard git, just like Active X added workflow and process improvements over HTML Standard.

GitHub adds things like Issues, Pull Requests, "Social Coding, unified Login, Access Controls, Project Discovery and about 100+ other things on top of git that using git alone does not get you. This is text book example of EXTEND

it is insane to me how people do not see it.

Further to address "I have to be insane to believe GitHub was started by MS" well I never said that, Simply because Github was not created by MS, does not change the fact that their buying Github is part of the EEE model

And the logical leap required to think that somehow GitHub was built, years ago, as part of a strategy for Microsoft is bordering on insanity.

I'd be interested in seeing the source for microsoft's Telemetry, if you have a link? :)

You confuse embrace with replace.

Btw, you can make your point without bringing in Red Hat. It sounds absolutely silly to me :)

I'm trying to think of some, and drawing a blank so far...

It would be really weird to see anything but a positive reaction from a consortium which receives a substantial amount of money from Microsoft.

The Linux Foundation is literally a lobbying agency for major coporations, why does it matter what's their opinion?

I mean The Linux Foundation president doesn't even use linux on his machine lol [1]. This should say everything you need to know about the foundation really.

[1] - https://linux.slashdot.org/story/17/09/17/2017204/linux-foun...

Such as vmware and allwinner who refuse to release kernel sourcecode for their products.

It's not just a CEO who can change that. It needs all kinds of changes on all kinds of levels. For instance if department leader's KPIs and bonus structure hasn't changed, they will continue to actively fight open source. Even if there is now a new, fancy department with even big names from open source communities, that doesn't mean all the other departments changed.

Also what happens to the devs who are there for 20+ years now, probably quite a few of them in senior dev and architect roles. Will they drop all that they've grown up with? Can Microsoft afford to let them go for big money and hire new, unknown people instead?

If they manage to get this github integration right, I may start to think about them in a positive fashion but until now there's too much doubt and too many things that might go wrong. Compared to the size of a huge corp we've only seen fluff up till now.

This is insightful, and in addition to this, culture change can and does happen at companies.

Just because they're evil today, doesn't mean they'll be evil tomorrow.

Similarly, just because they're good today, doesn't mean they'll be good tomorrow.

We should always look with suspicion at megacorps acting with what appears to be outrageous altruism. Companies don't throw around $7.5 billion without expecting to profit from it.

They did change, and quite radically when Kevin Turner (then COO) was ousted (or voluntary left, it's unclear).

> Also what happens to the devs who are there for 20+ years now

Today, the biggest focus for Microsoft is Azure. And incidentally Azure grew enormously under Satya, so they had to hire a lot of new people there. A lot of them wouldn't even have considered joining MS under Ballmer, and a lot of them were hired specifically for there knowledge of non-MS technologies. Things might be different in older divisions, such as Windows, but at least in the division that now matter the most, the culture is dead-set on open source and the values that Satya promotes.

This doesn't really make sense. How did they get to be that successful? They must have changed something from an earlier point, when their most successful point was less successful.

Your claim is like saying "A companies stock is always worth less than its historical maximum". It's only true until there's a new maximum.

I feel that they were like this during the Windows 8 era.

But I like to believe they had their wake-up call (the failure of Windows RT, of Windows Phone, the rise of macOS and iOS) to a point where they were ready to try something radical, and what we're seeing now is the result of those efforts.

Looks like disclosure to me

They get a write off and your support as well as the marketing bits.

Though I'm in the middle on this, I'll see what microsoft does with github. The company has shown a different approach to the 'old microsoft' but it's still a company with the aim of making a profit. Github was losing money IIRC and MSFT has a lot of data on people as it is. Github might be a good way to target devs for advertisements :)

Ironically... having Microsoft behind GitHub and being willing to lose money on the company forever could actually be the reasons it has a hope to turn a profit some day.

I call BS -- it was very grown-up of Microsoft to abuse repeatedly their clients and partners, and it is just and right to call them out on it.. that one statement is obsequious whiteash, plain and simple.

The author implies that if you have a healthy skepticism when megacorps throw around billions of dollars, you're not "grown up."

Thanks for the recognition for GitLab! We hope that for many people that switched https://twitter.com/develosysadmine/status/10050613234058731... was the case: "For me, I already knew GitLab was better than GitHub in a variety of ways. Microsoft just gave me the slightest nudge to actually make the switch."

Acquired might be replaced with other euphemisms like "joined" or "became a member of".

Those saying there is no reason to worry are just hoping for big amount of luck. Yeah I hope so too, but let's face it, it's very unlikely they're not gonna do anything undesirable and only improve the platform.

This can be tricky in a legally messed up environment. In US, courts sided with Oracle about copyrightability of APIs. And guess who supported Oracle in that dispute? Microsoft. So how should open source projects feel about it, especially when they let's say implement MS own APIs?

Feels like a parent chiding a kid

I guess Github was in worse shape than they looked like on the outside. Happens; the fact that the 3 founders made a fortune off of this is unfortunate.

One of those founders stepped down and yet he still won.

It's just a game; wether you play blackjack or poker or big stakes with companies.

However the opposite might very well happen: Use your GitHub account to sign into MS other services.

No he didn't. He said "We love GitHub login. Your GitHub account is your developer identity, and many users are accustomed to signing into developer tools and services (e.g. Travis, Circle) with their GitHub accounts."

That leaves open the door for migrating all github accounts into Live accounts within a github namespace. The could have already done it but aren't letting it leak into the github UI yet.

>Use your GitHub account to sign into MS other services.

This isn't an argument they won't do it. It suggests that they will even more.

Implementing GitHub login for Microsoft's other products can be split into three categories of possibility:

1) Other MS services add support for GitHub's authentication systems.

2) GitHub accounts will be mirrored into Microsoft's existing account system.

3) GitHub's backend migrates to Microsoft's exiting account system.

The question isn't "if" but "when and with what UI" #3 will happen.

You don't have to go through 3 redirections to login, handling of 3rd party apps authorization is well thought out, and GitHub is already used an auth provider for many dev servcies, Microsoft accounts are not.

I'm no MS lover; I've been off their products both at home and work for over 15+ years, at home since basically forever except for some apps that only ran on Windows.

The MS of now is a far difference MS a decade ago, even five years ago. Things change--sometimes people don't.

Personally I'm not vehemently against this takeover, like others are. That said, I'm not super enthusiastic about it either. I've seen MS acquisitions go both good and bad before, so I'll simply wait and see how it turns out before passing judgement.

Consider me neutral[1] at this point.

> Ah, a voice of reason

I'm not going to argue "reason" or not, but the Linux foundation is not impartial in these matters: Microsoft is a platinum Linux Foundation partner.

They're obviously going to be biased.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk1dd1D2Kts

You're assuming bias. There may or may not be bias in this statement.

What is this guy talking about? Maybe he's changed but Microsoft hasn't: they're still a company doing evil things on a large scale that simply sees more value (for them) increased FOSS support. I'll especially highlight the patent suits with them pulling billions of dollars from Android vendors despite them not contributing anything to Android. They were working on displacing it with Windows Phone. Yet, they use legal threats to pull hundreds of millions a year for their "inventions" on paper from those actually building things we want to buy.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2015/11/01/microsoft...

Both stevelord and I had a few more examples at the link below where we last discussed it:

https://lobste.rs/s/zknzmj/microsoft_acquire_github_for_7_5_...

EDIT: In case anyone wonders, I was hoping a company like Red Hat acquired them. One that is a bit less evil with more incentive to keep high investments in FOSS. Given the numbers involved, one can't hope for much more.

I find this article distasteful and lacking integrity.

The Linux Foundation... the Business Organization that rejected the individuals of the community and focus solely on its corporate sponsors one of the largest being Microsoft

It is not shocking that the Linux Foundation supports their Corporate Master Microsoft in their acquisition of Github.. To do otherwise would cost them many many thousands of dollars

If you want to develop software for Microsoft’s Linux distro/kernel (Azure Sphere for IoT), it appears you must use Windows 10 + Visual Studio, https://seeedstudio.com/productDetail/3052 & https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/developing-an-azure-s...

> To use MT3620 Dev Board for Azure Sphere, you’ll need a Windows 10 PC with the latest Windows Updates, along with the Visual Studio Tools for Azure Sphere (which will be available for download from Microsoft). These tools will include application templates, development tools and the Azure Sphere software development kit (SDK).

Can someone clarify if Windows 10 will be a hard requirement to use the Microsoft Azure Sphere Linux SDK for IoT/embedded boards?

*About Microsoft buying Github.

Yes, most definitely.

If you’re Microsoft courting the open-source community to the the tune of $7.5B purchase of Github, and you are releasing the first Microsoft Linux kernel, why would you unnecessarily mandate the tying of Linux to a Windows toolchain, when you’re already going to win/earn a voluntary tie by competing on usability? What you want is developers voluntarily porting their Github embedded Linux open-source projects to Visual Studio.

New Microsoft should have a chat with vestiges of Old Microsoft.