EA also open sources stuff like that. They even have open sourced a java library to be able to write async await style code in java. They off course won't open source money making games, and neither does MSFT.
The thing is right now Microsoft is getting into the habit of open sourcing things that hit that criteria, and EA is just flatly evaluating that to False every the time. Even when they aren't actively selling a title they own the rights to. The expected value of a title you don't sell is $0 [0], so in effect they're valuing goodwill negatively!
When it's framed that way, it's actually pretty dumb for EA not to be making that calculation. If they do and open source more low sales titles, EA will make more money from better goodwill, and consumers will get more value from older games
[0] This isn't strictly true, because they retain the rights to sell the title in the future, and that option is worth something. But barring very strange circumstances, we expect that if an old title isn't worth the effort to sell today, it likely won't be in the future either. The option is not worth a ton vs. the goodwill of open sourcing it.
Which of their former good selling products has microsoft open sourced? Which of the microsoft open source projects were formerly for sale. I am very sure it would be very very few, and only in those areas where open source competitors are already strong.
EA does tons of stuff open source. Have a look at their GitHub. I am not even sure microsoft has made a similar amount of their internal libraries a available.
Electronic Arts: 27 repos
Azure: 1.8k repos
n.b., I work in Azure, make your own conclusions.
MS is open-sourcing the pieces of cheese that lead to their proprietary cloud-shaped trap. I don't think they've open-sourced anything related to Azure itself (i.e. if I wanted to run my own Azure-like cloud).
I'm not saying it's a bad or even unethical strategy. I'm just saying that MS is not, remotely, an open-source company.
> Which of their former good selling products has microsoft open sourced?
Neither Visual Studio Code nor .NET core fits this criteria. Visual Studio IDE is not free and open source and neither is the older version of .NET framework.
Launch a .NET core application inside visual studio code. Even that comes with a warning saying you can only use the debugger within certain limited situations.
We've had to ask you this before recently, too, which is not good. Would you please take the intended spirit of the site more to heart?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm really not sure where your vitriol for Azure is coming from. If you want to respond to the point, you should -- if you can avoid going off because you have an axe to grind with Microsoft.
And the point about emails is a real head-scratcher. Most of us have been online for a long, long time. I expect there are quite a few people working at Big X with a @hotmail, @gmail, @yahoo, hell, @sbcglobal personal email that they use for the rest of their online life.
Hot take. How about simply that they have had their email address a lot longer than they've worked at Microsoft?
For Microsoft this seems to have worked out fine - they’ve helped create an eco system around VS Code and now they are integrating it in all sorts of ways with their paid services.
Valve especially has made a ton of money buying and selling fanmade expansions to their games, way more than they would have by not allowing mods
Uhh, .NET?
https://azure.github.io/SONiC/
OSS NOS that runs in white box hardware from Broadcom, Mellanox, Centec, etc. ASIC driver includes closed source items depending on the ASIC vendor.
Now to be fair they are doing this to force the traditional switch vendors to support what they need to run their network at a lower cost. Both Arista and Juniper support SONiC on their HW and I believe (fact not in cache right now) that Cisco supports the SAI configuration layer.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MechCommander_2
* https://web.archive.org/web/20161220070747/https://www.neowi...
Nowadays, they have seen that if they provide software as "open source", and not only "free", not only do they get eyeballs, they also get "feel good" points from the community, and I assume they use that to attract customers to their revenue streams (Azure I guess).
It certainly shocked the developers of its engine. They licensed it to Microsoft for a share of the profit and ended up suing Microsoft over that stunt.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyglass,_Inc.#Browser_wars
After some research, it looks like electron was previously called Atom-shell, which is where the confusion comes from for a lot of people.
The open code to the software we use should not be a handout or a gift ex post facto.
The open code to the software should be an invitation: to collaborate on it, audit it, or frankly do anything you want with it (e.g. WTFPL); before, during, and after using it.
Open source should be a big tent - it should be an answer to questions people have many different motives for asking. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
You're not wrong, but given the world we live in the incentive would be better. And I would say that's the sort of "non-reformist reform" that's liable to push towards the ideal, not appease and reinforce the status quo.
> You're not wrong
"Not wrong" seems like a... generous... description of this viewpoint. Lots of places tried the system of "all housing is publicly held"; it was not a success.
https://opensource.google/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#wtfpl-no...
https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/29718/is-the-wtfpl-g...
> Third-party software made available under one of these licenses must not be part of Google products that are delivered to outside customers.
This policy covers all 3 versions of the GPL. And yet they made Android, based on the Linux kernel.
I mean, really. It just seems batshit insane to me that this is problematic.
As copyright pushed to things beyond books that also made it easy to forget that original "open source" idealism behind copyright. It's tougher to build a new movie out of the components of a published movie than to build books from the components of published books.
Patent law is where the idea was applied to something that needed "source control preserved": describe an invention in complete detail in a public registry so that others can recreate and get a powerful limited monopoly on it, but as soon as that limit hits everyone should be able to recreate it.
Software patents have long been a mockery of that original spirit of patent law, but "open source projects by companies get stronger piracy protection/what have you for the first X years of their registered life" is really what software patents should have been in the first place, based on the original goals of what patents were for.
Create that tax incentive, and 99% of publishers will slap the "open source" label on something 5 or 10 years old which is completely unmaintained, unusably buggy, and virtually unreadable. Nothing of value will be gained, and big companies will have yet another tax loophole.
I’m sure I’m not the only one (though the number is vanishingly small). It’s difficult to know how large the community is without nekochan.
Hope springs eternal. :)
I'm running a Irix 6.2 desktop on my PC right now.
Also fun fact: up to version 6 of the MIPS port of NetBSD, you could run Irix binaries. I'm pretty sure it can boot in qemu-mips which would be another avenue for some ability to run certain Irix software on PC.
Commonly Physics Engines, like Havok and others.
Can't wait for MS to learn from EA and open source Windows 95.
Given they've only made it to DOS 2.0 so far, it might take them a while to open source Windows 95, but it no longer seems like an impossibility either.
Unfortunately, while AoE2:DE is an awesome game, they have done neither…
Good thing that there are projects like OpenAge going on!
For example, not long ago, Quake II RTX was released by NVIDIA as a way to demonstrate the advanced raytracing capabilities of their new RTX cards. A decision made in 2001 (open sourcing Quake II) continues to benefit the world today.
Decades ago, Sun Microsystems open sourced OpenOffice, Java and Solaris. LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice and is one of the few office suites available free of cost.
Before Microsoft acquired Github, Github open sourced Atom, an editor similar in scope to VS Code. They also open sourced Electron, which is the framework used by VS Code.
Smaller companies have been doing much more. Microsoft has open sourced some interesting projects, but to say that companies are open sourcing projects because Microsoft is a pioneer in open source is just 4/20 talk.
Microsoft will never open source strategic projects like DirectX, Microsoft Office, SQL server or Windows. They will keep making money hand over fist.
EA has a few things open sourced.
Imagine if Bungie open-sourced Destiny and Destiny 2.
Sure, you don't have to buy the game anymore to get the software, but they also don't have to let you onto their immersive and highly moderated and orchestrated servers. They can offer their own signed builds that you need to access the official universe.
So you could still break the game apart and build new content for fun, but the main game could still stand on its own and still be easy to sell to people because you're not selling the world, you're selling the experience.
I wonder if active support for open source by game companies will eventually reap the benefits it ostensibly does for big tech companies. For example, by open sourcing React, FB not only can influence JS frameworks in general, it can cultivate a hiring pool of engineers already familiar or proficient with React internals. There's already limited precedent with game companies hiring creators of big-time mods (Valve hiring the creator of Dota). But I'd think more open source support and reducing the friction for fans to become creators would surface even more talent.
The original Red Alert came with a map editor way back when as well :-)
It's probably been 22 years (!!), but IIRC it was strictly for editing terrain only. You couldn't place buildings, place units, or script scenarios.
Which is only in the interesst of small companies, but against the interesst of big companies. Basically any single-game-company has a strong interesst in a long-selling game, take Minecraft, Stardew Valley or League of Legends. They are selling the same game for a decade and make good money with it. Though in case of League of Legends it's "game as a service"-approach, not just a single game without any extras.
Big companies like EA on the other side invest regulary in development of new games and need people to buy them all. Thouhg, they do have those "game as a service"-types too, for example Sims, which get's flooded with small extra-content, skins and little crap. Allowing modding there would totally kill this business-concept, because then people would not need anymore to buy the costly stuff from EA, but get it for free from somewhere.
Apparently, Microsoft is now the exemplary open source hero. Previous to them, there was none other to learn from.
I'm sure there are more examples of companies embracing open source after previously looking down on it, maybe you have some names handy?
Long term, the involvement of companies like Microsoft in OSS and OSS communities might be damaging, not beneficial.
I'm going to reconsider my point when everyone can compile their own fork of Windows and Office.
And then us gamers get more long-lived games as a benefit as well.