We probably don't expect these companies to open source their primary competitive advantages. We expect them to open source things once good_will_value > expected_sales_volume for a given title/piece of software.

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.

>We expect them to open source things once good_will_value > expected_sales_volume for a given title/piece of software. The thing is right now Microsoft is getting into the habit of open sourcing things that hit that criteria,

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.

From GitHub:

Electronic Arts: 27 repos

Azure: 1.8k repos

n.b., I work in Azure, make your own conclusions.

It's mostly templates, SDKs, etc.

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.

Service Fabric is open source. SF is basically what powers Azure and tons of other MS cloud based software like sql azure https://github.com/Azure/service-fabric

I would actually go so far as to say it is an unethical strategy. It's just a popular one. And a very successful one.

How about VSCode and .Net Core?

I work with asp.net web api and angular (typescript) but I think the point stands.

> 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.

So it's quantity v. quality. As others said, don't pretend to make people believe you have 1.800 repos worth of useful software. EA may have only 27, but at least it's something you may benefit from even if you're not a customer of theirs.

I don’t pretend that 1.8k are super useful, but I’m still measuring apples to apples. I looked at the EA repos before posting. There’s a few C++ libs, some forks of Kubernetes components that don’t seem active, and some other misc stuff. It’s meaningful, sure, but I think MS does provide plenty of high quality code to close the difference.

Honest question, approximately what percentage of those repositories are original works and what percentage are forks?

The difference is that Electronic arts publishes things that I might actually use, unlike Azure.

there are plenty of use cases for the azure stuff, even if you personally don't see a use for it.

Are we on Reddit?

Posting like this will get you banned here regardless of how right you are or feel you are. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.

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?

Did someone forget?

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.

> Microsoft is garbage and you know it, that’s why you use gmail.

Hot take. How about simply that they have had their email address a lot longer than they've worked at Microsoft?

Some even prefer to use a different email service other than the one run by their employer.

Not OP, but hotmail predates gmail.

Sure, but that doesn't mean anything in this case.

This kind of attack is uncalled for. Please avoid this.

One aspect EA might be considering are potential losses in other product lines, say if fans were to expand old games with new campaigns that are better than what EA is offering today.

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.

> One aspect EA might be considering are potential losses in other product lines, say if fans were to expand old games with new campaigns that are better than what EA is offering today.

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

Good point, it really depends on how companies decide to look at this topic and what they decide to optimize. The „old“ Microsoft probably wouldn’t have created a platform for Mac devs deploying on Linux as another comment in this thread described.

I don't think people understand how large of a funnel VS Code is. Half the keystrokes I type in a day end up in a Microsoft product, as I dev on a mac and deploy to Linux. Crazy times.

You’re moving the goal posts.

Is he? He's just saying both MS and EA are equivalent in what they open source right now.

MS is open sourcing their platforms which is more valuable than their products from a community benefit perspective.

EA has open sourced tons of their internal libraries which are "more valuable than their products from a community benefit perspective." Just take a look at their GitHub. What "platform" of theirs has MSFT open sourced? Which of those were an important platform of MSFT. EA is atleast releasing something which made them money as open source.

> What "platform" of theirs has MSFT open sourced? Which of those were an important platform of MSFT?

Uhh, .NET?

I thought mono was developed by a team outside Microsoft.

Microsoft open sourced all of dotnet. Runtime, class library, everything.

All of .net is open source? So you can now run any winforms or wpf app in the operating system of your choice? That's great.

Winforms is a thin wrapper around windows APIs, so no, you can’t.

Not the debugger it seems :(

What about SONiC?

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.

I believe a good portion of Mechcommander 2 source code was made open source (enough to compile and play it), although I don't know if the licence fit the definition of open-source

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MechCommander_2

* https://web.archive.org/web/20161220070747/https://www.neowi...

That´s good learning by Microsoft: In the 1990s they "competed" against Netscape with the "free" web browser... it was shocking that they gave it for free, but in reality they were buying eyeballs.

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 was shocking that they gave it for free

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.

That's very interesting! Do you happen to have any reference where I can read more about it? (a search on internet explorer profit licensed lawsuit didn't show anything relevant).

They may not have actually sued, just threatened Microsoft with an audit.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyglass,_Inc.#Browser_wars

Source code without assets is not game, it is just code

VSCode was a fork of the open-source project Atom, and it was never closed-source as far as I know.

VSCode was not a fork of Atom. They started afresh. This is possibly why it’s much more performant than Atom.

Interesting, I always thought VSCode was a fork of Atom.

After some research, it looks like electron was previously called Atom-shell, which is where the confusion comes from for a lot of people.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17221917

It's also interesting to note that the core editor component/library of VSCode (called Monaco) predates Atom. It was used in a variety of places in Azure even before Atom built Atom-shell/Electron, and got a lot of early stress testing in powering the Dev Tools source code views in IE as far back as at least IE 10, IIRC.