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
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.