It’s always easy to be an open source proponent when you are the underdog.

And Microsoft, as crazy as it sounds to me, kinda is when it comes to cool dev stuff.

We'll have to see if they have really changed or just waiting to regain ground and going back to the extinguish part.

But what I can confidently say is that, of all the BigCorps, Microsoft is the only one actively trying to make developer's life easier.

Apple is consumer first, so MacOS is getting harder and harder to hack on, for better and worse.

Chromebook was never a serious competitor. And Linux is Linux, hackable to a fault.

But Windows… which I have always despised, is, for the first time in my life, tantalizing… to some extent.

The Microsoft you remember is at a time when dev tools were "the future". They are now the past. Microsoft's ruthlessness is no doubt focused elsewhere now. For example, do they go out of their way to make your code portable b/w Azure and Google? Probably not.

Off the top of my head here are three different offerings from Microsoft that enable cross cloud applications: - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/azure-arc/ - https://dapr.io/ - https://keda.sh/

The runtime for their serverless functions is also open source and (I guess) fairly portable: https://github.com/Azure/azure-functions-host

That's pretty cool not an expert so can't know how truly portable it is, or is it like "Visual Java" ;-)

From firsthand experience... Microsoft has quite a bit of NIH syndrome. Still does. They've just gotten better about it in recent years.

One good example is Microsoft adding dtrace to Windows. The Linux community has floundered for years with several competing tracing tools, all of which have major deficiencies in one way or another.

Also from firsthand experience: for many (not most) of MS's projects, that's the right decision. A lot of their software is at a unique intersection between consumer and enterprise support which at their scale often has unique requirements.

But then MS's bureaucracy can grind down even the most well thought out projects (Also getting better, though).

TIL Rust is also sponsored by Amazon. (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/aws-sponsorship-of-t...)

Right now they seem to have an enormous theme of winning over developers, of all kinds, for all platforms. I would say it's to sell them tools, but most of the recently-headlining MS tools have been free. Maybe it's just to garner general goodwill. Maybe it's to draw people to Azure. I can't quite see the strategy, but it's a very clear theme behind many of their recent (publicly-facing) efforts.

MS has a huge legacy market, they don't want to end up as the next oracle where every dev relentlessly argues to move to a different platform.

Making tools/functionality free such that existing devs don't want to jump, and new devs consider azure is a reasonable business strategy.

Except two of the biggest platforms they've been focusing on are the web and Android, and they've publicly stated that they don't necessarily see the future as a Windows-world. Azure is the only platform that I see these efforts helping, and maybe that's enough, but I still have to wonder if there's something I'm missing.

It's in their blood - its the 'Embrace' in EEE.

You know that’s from 3 decades and 2 CEOs ago, right? They’re a large company so there’s sure to be plenty to dislike but I don’t think it’s contributing much without some analysis of their actions in this century.

my view is that embrace/extend has really always been a general platform business thing and not specifically a Microsoft thing. it became infamously associated with Microsoft in '90s-00s because of the monopoly position they had.

since Microsoft is still a platform business, it's reasonable to be wary of the negative potential of embrace/extend in connection with them, for the same reason it is in connection with Google and others.

I don't see Microsoft doing much EEE on their modern non-cost-centre platform (Azure), though. Amazon is a much clearer example these days, with AWS having "embraced and extended" Postgres into Aurora, Redis into ElastiCache, and many other examples. (I don't know if AWS has ever gone all the way and "extinguished" any of the cores they've built upon, though?)

at its most benign embrace/extend can just mean that your product supports the standards people expect and need, and there's also some differentiating aspect in which it's better than the other options (otherwise why does it exist?)

It can be a bit fuzzy defining precisely where that benign sense stops and the negative sense where the "differentiation" brings harmful lockin begins. Then if you have a monopoly position the "extinguish" bit can come in. But actually AFAICT Microsoft rarely (never?) actually succeeded in extinguishing any of the open standards they were infamous for attacking - their successes happened earlier against proprietary competitors like Lotus 1/2/3 and Novell Netware

> But actually AFAICT Microsoft rarely (never?) actually succeeded in extinguishing any of the open standards they were infamous for attacking

SMB pretty well extinguished the use of NFS; and Active Directory pretty well extinguished the use of LDAP.

Neither of these were really Microsoft-driven, though. It was almost the reverse: the ecosystem cloned Microsoft's approach into FOSS, and then liked it better, and replaced their own stuff with it without Microsoft's participation. Sort of like how BitKeeper's approach was cloned as git, which then extinguished most other SCMs.

MemoryStore is GCP, AWS' redis is named Elasticache.

EEE did not end 3 decades ago and Balmer was only 1 CEO ago, so... no?

Whether or not you like/dislike EEE, the fact remains that MS openness to Embrace helps them today to quickly implement different technologies into Microsoft's own stack.

They may have stopped the "Extend & Extinguish" part, but they haven't forgotten how to Embrace.

I wrote this below, but I'll mention it here

this stuff also happens in a benign fashion. Emergent behavior. People/groups and their interests bubble up the self-serving outcomes without being a conspiracy.

We have 4 features to support in this release. feature 1 is p0 it is basic functionality. feature 2 is p0 because 3 customers are asking for it. feature 3 is p0 because our team needs it to work with our other product. feature 4 is compatibility and we'll get to that as p1.

That's why products get telemetry and linkedin integration, but not compatibility with other software.

Let me introduce you to Steve Ballmer, the CEO before the current one, Satya Nadella:

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

He was CEO of Microsoft until 2014, that is, 6 years ago.

Microsoft changed strategies because they tried everything they possible could to counter open source and Linux and lost. Now they are forced to play nice.

Being forced to be nice is not the same as being nice out of altruism.

If at any moment becoming jerks gives them more shareholder value they will become jerks again.

They _lost_?

They have a 1.36 trillion USD Market cap (today). That's more than Apple's 1.29 trillion USD Market cap. It's hilarious how people on hacker news live in this bubble where Microsoft has faded away into irrelevance.

And they're also very good. I'm running Windows 10 right now on a dual-monitor, dual NVidia GPU, dual Xeon system and everything "just works."

Saying they "lost" in this context means they got to a point where it was clear capitulation to open source was the obvious play.

As if you could not do that on another OS.

You can use Nvidia GPUs in SLI mode in Linux and BSD too. I am using an Nvidia GPU right now and I am not using Windows, and "everything just works" too, no terminals involved. Are you implying that it's not possible to do this outside Windows?

How much of that market capitalization comes from running a de-facto monopoly of office suites for decades? As a consumer, it's hard to see how corporations like Microsoft push governments around the world to buy licenses in bulk because there are no alternatives.

> dual-monitor, dual NVidia GPU

Not exactly thanks to Microsoft.

You can't do it on a Mac (unless you want to run two non-supported graphics cards sharing 4 lanes on a Thunderbold/USB-C connector instead of each having their own x16 PCIe connection)

To their credit, stability of such a setup might be facilitated by Windows' fine display driver model (WDDM).

Sure let's do that. This century they have bought up LinkedIn, GitHub, npm, and a stake in Facebook. They have replaced Atom with a fauxpen source editor. They've pointed them all at their locked down me-too cloud platform. And don't forget to develop your code on their locked down me-too tablet.

What has changed is that MSDN is no longer delivered on CDs.

That's because "Open Source" is a much cheaper deliver mechanism if you control the platforms that make its freedoms meaningless.

Plus ça change...

> This century they have bought up LinkedIn, GitHub, npm, and a stake in Facebook. They have replaced Atom with a fauxpen source editor.

You left out the part where you explained why any of those acquisitions are a problem: LinkedIn is no worse than it was before, GitHub and npm are both popular services people choose to use without coercion, and whether or not you like it a lot of developers are switching to VSCode because it's a better tool which makes them more productive.

I don't what you believe to be true about their Azure integration but I know many people who use GitHub, npm, VSC, etc. and none of them use Azure so clearly there's some key step missing in that process.

Concentration of power is (or at least I thought it was) obviously bad. This is why there's laws protecting against that but either they're not enforced or they weren't updated to the internet age.

It is a concern but being popular is not the same as having high power: GitHub has lock-in to the extent that it's a great service but it's not exactly like they're changing Git to prevent you from using your own self-hosted service, Gitlab, BitBucket, etc. Similarly, VSCode is open-source with tons of competitors: where's the angle where they have much ability to dictate anything to users?

>They have replaced Atom with a fauxpen source editor.

I'm gonna counter this with the fact that VSCode was way better maintained and optimized than Atom.

The GitHub before Microsoft seemed to me as an company that would half-ass everything they could, and Atom was one of those things.

When VSCode came, at least to me, it absolutely destroyed Atom with versatility and stability.

I don't think they really have the power to extinguish anymore. Sure, Windows is still dominant in the desktop market, but that's not where the novel software is being written.

Amazon is the king of EEE these days. Microsoft is desperately trying to remain relevant.

> It may be the only large software company that doesn't seem susceptible to not-invented-here syndrome.

.NET?

Many developers don't know that C# began in essence as a response to a lawsuit from Sun, sound familiar?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B#Sun's_litigatio...

.NET, ActiveX, JScript, etc.

> that doesn't seem susceptible to not-invented-here syndrome

Really?

Compelte opposite from my experience, Microsoft is re-inventing their own version of literally everything, even the smallest thing which doesn't have any strategic benefits. That shows me that they suffer extremely from not-invented-here syndrome.

For example, why does Microsoft need to invent their own Redis cache alternative (=AppFabric)? Why does Microsoft need to invent "Windows containers" which are incompatible with Docker Linux containers (aka normal Docker)? Why do they need to keep re-inventing Internet Explorer? Why does Microsoft need to re-invent their own search engine which nobody uses (Bing in case you have never seen/heard of it)? Why does Microsoft need to invent their own inferior Slack after already nuking Skype, Skype for Business, Yammer, etc.? Why does Microsoft need to invent their own Azure DevPops inferior alternative to GitHub, especially when they already bought the better tool, why compete with it with a shit product which makes every developers blood boil?

those are product offerings, it is like saying why are there new fast-food chains if McDonald's already exists.

specifically the alternative you list are commercial offerings from other companies, that is just wanting a piece of the cake.

and for example, "internet explorer" is now going to be based on chromium, a terrible news for the web, but definitely a invented-elsewhere case.

regarding Rust a not invented here situation would be trying to develop their own rustc/cargo or a new similar language, sort of like apple with swift (not saying this is what motivated apple)

As much as I appreciate what Microsoft is doing here, your NIH praise is not entirely well targeted - look at this research project from Microsoft, which aims to build a slightly different Rust. https://github.com/microsoft/verona

How is a research proof of NIH? I guess C++ or Java should never have existed because how dare another programming language use that "OOP" concept Smalltalk popularized

That's not at all a point I'm making. OP praised Microsoft for embracing Rust and making it work well on Windows and thanked them for not doing their own thing and instead supporting an existing project. So I'm just pointing out to a very recent endeavour that goes against all of that. I just enjoyed the irony of it all, that's it.

Not saying anything about anything else.

I think you're confusing Microsoft Research with Microsoft more broadly. A language research division (MSR does more than this, but they do this) is going to produce languages, that's their job. They often aren't trying to make a language that folks will use, but are instead exploring possibilities that end up improving other languages. Verona (and it is far too early to tell, IMHO) may end up in fact improving Rust. At the same time, Microsoft can and does support Rust, both as an organization on their own and indirectly via GitHub. These two things aren't in conflict, especially when you're talking about an organization as big as Microsoft is.

> Added their own packages version of every package.

> Added their own package repository (MRAN), replacing CRAN.

How is any of this different than the many incompatible Linux packaging solutions?

How would you address insecurity and trust relations if you weren't a first-class contributor of CRAN? (consider the recent Python package exploit; although amateur, it's still an indication of such issues; I'm sure I remember this was an issue with the Perl packages as well; wasn't there an exploit pushed to the Linux kernel tree at some point years ago?)

The narrative changes from "MS is EEE'ing CRAN" to "MS allowed a package with exploits to be deployed from CRAN".

I am not familiar with any of the issues within the R ecospace, but I am very familiar with corporate culture, security, and liability awareness.

> I am very familiar with corporate culture, security, and liability awareness

I thought the same thing many years ago. I was speaking with a friend (many years ago) who used to work for microsoft.

I said, "so they broke something and didn't support this, they're just developers and how do they know all the issues?" Basically, I was saying the coders were human, and sometimes getting something out is hard.

My friend said, "No, don't be naive. they had meetings. They sat around and said, "how can we own this?""

It might be interesting to revisit the (ancient) halloween documents:

https://catb.org/esr/halloween/halloween1.html

This also works in a benign fashion. Emergent behavior. People/roups and their interests bubble up the self-serving outcomes without being a conspiracy.

We have 4 features to support in this release. feature 1 is p0 it is basic functionality. feature 2 is p0 because 3 customers are asking for it. feature 3 is p0 because our team needs it to work with our other product. feature 4 is compatibility and we'll get to that as p1.

And now Google do the same in the browser. They're regularly being called out by Mozilian but most people dismiss it as "the coders are human".

Microsoft R is kinda annoying, OTOH it only happened because Microsoft bought Revolution Analytics, who developed this tool.

AFAIUI, it's mostly just R with better parallelisation of matrix libraries (which is cool).

It's not quite compatible, but I've used both through Conda a bunch, and haven't hit any edge cases that caused a problem.

So yeah, you're right that it's embrace/extend, but the extend was done by a startup which they bought.

Yeah this seems like a good take. Otherwise it's like saying anyone building alternative or similar runtimes for existing languages is evil. This is common. People don't always contribute to existing languages or runtimes because it's fraught a lot of politics and it can just be easier to fork and do what you need, rather than trying to get what you need into a project that might not want it.

F# is Microsoft's invented here version of Java

You mean C#? F# is an ML family language on the CLR.

> James Gosling, who created the Java programming language in 1994, and Bill Joy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, the originator of Java, called C# an "imitation" of Java; Gosling further said that "[C# is] sort of Java with reliability, productivity and security deleted."

(Wikipedia)

I thought C# was Microsoft's NIH version of Java?

To be fair Microsoft wanted to adopt Java, and with J++ they added Windows specific base libraries and make it work with COM. One could still compile ordinary Java back then also with J++.

Although they weren't allowed to do that if I remember right, so they basically had to create C# - and C# turned out to be fantastic in my opinion.