My Windows license doesn't feel "Open by Default", nor SQL Server license audits ... I like the guy, he created Mono, Xamarin, Gtk and co. But only a tiny subset of MS products like the .NET ecosystem are open.
Obviously they are talking about projects going forward. The article makes that pretty clear.
"Microsoft is now open by default and you actually have to make a case on a team/peer review level if you feel something needs to be closed,” said de Icaza."
Should they stay guilty forever for the things done in the previous regime?
Will the next versions of Microsofts closed/licensed software be open? Will someone have to make a case that they need to remain closed? Will they release new products that are closed/licensed?
Yes, because their OS is now evergreen, there will never be another "Windows X" and it will be forever closed. If/when they make the OS open (and ideally their other products as well) only then can his statement be taken seriously.
First, you have to give very strong evidences that they are not "like the previous regime", or that there is a "previous" at all. All I see right now is PR and strategic moves (let's do what google did, even a bit late).
Secondly, given the track record, it is fair that it will take a long time before their past is forgiven. At least the same number of years of doubt that they spent misbehaving. And again that supposes they are not doing it right now. Like patent trolling, or moving software you could buy to a rent-only model, or put spywares in their new OS.
I strongly believe MS is not getting better, just getting better at communicating. They are not in a monopoly anymore and they can't get away with a "linux is cancer" like they used to do.
The only thing that bother me is that the Gates are getting away with it. They detached them self from MS, and now make heavy communication on their charity, so everybody seems to think they are saints. People have very short memory.
With decades of bad behavior I don't understand why they would ever be trusted. Its not like Gates is dead and buried and there certainly is continuity between the old regime and new.
I don't think that's a fair assessment; I'm going to judge them on their present actions rather than their past behavior, when the market, leadership etc. were all different. They seem to be trying to adapt to the new market reality where open source and dev friendly tools/software creates goodwill and promotes adoption.
I imagine we'll see Visual Studio open sourced sooner rather than later, going off the hint-dropping from MSFT engineers. I assume they have some code cleanup, and intellectual property issues to deal with first.
No idea why you're getting downvotes. You're completely right.
I was there when GNOME started. Was working heavily with GTK+ and GIMP at the time. Most of GNOME was tossed together haphazardly in a mad dash to catch up with KDE. There were astroturfing campaigns against KDE/Qt, organized on the GIMP IRC servers. The hate on Slashdot towards KDE was crazy, and much of it coming directly from GNOME camp. GNOME 1.x was a total shitshow. The code was horrid, and nothing was stable at all. Luckily their poor standards of code quality never hurt GTK+ much, as the GIMP guys still knew what the hell they were doing.
Remember that KDE/Qt were not licensed under anything GPL-compatible at the time, hence the reason GNOME was started in the first place.
KDE was indeed much better. GNOME 1.x was awful. I and others like me still used GNOME 1.x, because I wanted a free desktop environment.
You weren't the only one on #gimp; don't pretend GIMP had a much better class of developers. Remember GEGL used to refer to hairy parts of the codebase (Genetically-Engineered Goat, Large) that people were afraid of touching.
Miguel left GNOME before 2.0 shipped, and started working on Mono full-time. If you've ever used GNOME 1.0, it was barely more than a set of ORB-based applications you stacked on top of Enlightenment DR 0.15 (or Sawmill/Sawfish if you weren't cool/used RedHat after Raster left). The panel was awful, the fonts were awful. Themeing (once they moved to gdkpixbuf rather than imlib) was awful. It didn't even have Human Interface Guidelines until Eugenia Loli-Queru basically forced her opinion on the devs.
Sun Microsystems had to dedicate months of programming and useability testing to get the UI to a point that everyone didn't hate it anymore.
Once Miguel gave up the reins, others took GNOME where it is today. This is similar to Lennart Poettering, wherein NetworkManager and PulseAudio became much better/more stable/useable when he left.
oh god, old network manager was my breaking point.
looking back, it was the first time I _really_ understood that sitting down and learning to manage the relevant config files manually was going to be easier than dealing with a GUI app. hell, I learned for both redhat _and_ debian based distros.
I don't know if I would have gone down the path I have if it wasn't for that. that's insane...
"Microsoft is now open by default and you actually have to make a case on a team/peer review level if you feel something needs to be closed,” said de Icaza."
The Microsoft bias is to always bash them but give a pass to Apple. I think Microsoft has been the good guy for a bit but they still get hate mainly due to Steve Balmer.
“There was no story at Microsoft for other platforms back in the day. But the world is full of heterogeneous connections now and I think Scott Guthrie [now Microsoft’s lead on Azure cloud platform] helped drive a lot of the openness. Microsoft is now open by default and you actually have to make a case on a team/peer review level if you feel something needs to be closed,” said de Icaza."
So it seems "new" projects not older ones are "open by default" with a caveat. That's still a lot better than they used to be.
Microsoft embraces open source because they found out that there are other methods to monetize and lock in customers. As a bonus people seem to like you when you give them stuff for free, even with the catch of privacy invasion.
In other words, they stopped copying Apple and switched their sights on Google.
The stuff that matters stays closed source. Infrastructure, tooling are published because they bring massive amounts of goodwill and developer mindshare while hindering potential competitors that now have to battle with a free offering.
Frankly I preferred the old Microsoft which wanted your money, not the new one that (also!) wants your data.
Are there any good examples of this strategy? I can't think of anyone successfully moving a leading open source product back to closed source...I think normally it's the fork of the open source version that lives on...
historically it's what MS has done: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. No reason to think that they are doing something different this time. Trust, once broken, takes quite a while to build back.
The open source nature of it seemed to disappear overnight after Oracle bought Sun, but looks like Oracle's not doing too badly with it. I know there's the Open Source illumos (IIRC) but haven't heard of anyone using it in production.
In case of Microsoft, you don't even have to be very imaginative: how much of the stack currently in use by .Net developers on Windows is completely open? How important and hard to replace are the parts that aren't?
And how much of a difference would it make in the end to have had Core open source in the past, when the new and closed version is the only one that works with those billions of Windows10 tablets and those popular Azure services that everyone needs for their startup?
They're not copying Google. They're taking the worst of both worlds.
Windows isn't free. It just happens to come with the cost of your PC, but the PC manufacturer pays for it (and passes the cost to you).
They just noticed that no one upgrades Windows (and why should they? When was the last time you were excited about a windows release? XP? 95? 3.1? Maybe 7 if you're coming from Vista?)
I personally was VERY excited for Windows 7 and it proved to be a very solid edition. VERY VERY excited for Ubuntu bash in Windows 10 in the preview edition.
> They're not copying Google. They're taking the worst of both worlds.
Google's model is advertising
Apple's is Hardware
Microsoft is selling services more.
I find it really awesome that Microsoft has really turned into a company I have a positive view of and glad that Steve Balmer is gone.
Apple costs, is closed-source but (somewhat) cares about privacy.
Google is free, (somewhat) open-source but actively doesn't care about privacy.
Windows costs, closed source and actively doesn't care about privacy.
In other words, with Google you're not the customer, you're the product.
With Microsoft you're the product and you have to pay for the privilege to be a product.
I have a strong negative bias vs Apple and everything they make.
One thing is Apple is not a closed source company. Though it is a mixed bag they have made some good contributions to the Open Sources world. Though their Walled Garden is YUGE
Microsoft doesn't care about privacy? They stood with Apple against FBI so you know. They are more reliably data protective than Amazon or Google in their agreements. They don't know what your data is on the cloud for example. Amazon stole Target's data and used it against them.
> I personally was VERY excited for Windows 7 and it proved to be a very solid edition. VERY VERY excited for Ubuntu bash in Windows 10 in the preview edition.
You can't compare the need for Windows 7 vs XP and the need for 95 after 3.1 . There was a huge amount of software which simply required 95.
You seem hopeful of a thing few people are hopeful of.
> you still can tun[sic] Linux binaries
That does not make a platform open.
Also note that you can't run all Linux binaries. In this respect, my original comparison with VirtualBox gets even better, since with VirtualBox I can run whatever edition of Linux I want, with graphics and total, absolute control, and a faster filesystem.
Who wants to use Windows? So now they are just repackaging open free software like npm and angular 2... Oh great... Again who wants to use Windows? Azure you can't even have it use anything that touches other servers without costing you. I think their focus on their base is what is hurting them. Sure they gained a little with azure but as tech people know, thatll be out if date if not already. Cause why learn how is all connected right?
I want to use Windows. No other OS has put the time and effort into ensuring stable, cutting edge support for the 3D graphics systems I need for my work.
Windows is still 90% of the PC market. If only 10% of those users are developers, that means there are more Windows developers than all macOS users combined. There are a lot of us out here, and I think we're starting to get fed up with being treated like we don't exist, just because of the shame that gets lumped on us from a small cohort of other developers.
This is a fair point actually. I switched to the Mac a decade ago, but Mac hardware free-rides off the PC hardware market all the time. If we're honest, so does Linux. If Microsoft hadn't supported and grown the PC hardware industry for decades the whole desktop ecosystem would be a lot poorer.
Personally I'm very happy with the hardware options available to me on the Mac, but there's a whole world of hardware options over there in PC land I'll never take advantage of. Conversely Linux graphics card driver support is still woeful, but that's really not Microsoft's problem and if Linux didn't have the PC platform to run on it's hardware costs would be much higher. What would be the alternative, Sun-style workstations? It's not that Microsoft did this on purpose, but it's still a fact.
With no MicroSoft the PC industry would be as fragmented as it was in the 80s, with many operating systems and single vendor hardware/sw platforms running on different chipsets. We are down to Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android and iOS now, on either ARM or x86. Everything else is very minor.
However network effects would have given to another company the position that MicroSoft enjoyed for some 30 years. It could have been a slower growth or a faster downfall, but somebody would have been there. Not Apple because they are interested only in selling their own hardware. Probably some company out of nowhere, not necessarily on a x86 chip. Then everybody would have started building drivers for the OS of that company and Linux and MacOS would be running on the preferred chip of that OS.
Maybe in an alternate reality Visicalc built their own OS to run their spreasheet on a large screen (by the time standards) 8086 computer and replace MSDOS and Microsoft as the OS and sw company of choice. We'd be talking about VisiOffice and Vindows now :-)
> with many operating systems and single vendor hardware/sw platforms running on different chipsets.
We could have gone the slightly-less-compatible route with CP/M-86. Network effects would make the industry gravitate towards a standard platform, but not necessarily a company.
I remember tons of GUI software running on proprietary Unixes on vastly different architectures, all written aiming POSIX compatibility and an X graphics environment.
I remember them, but they cost a little fortune (both hw and sw). They were still popular in the 90s but the first cheap and good enough alternative started to make a real dent into their professional market. It was Windows 3.1 and 80486 in 1992. But don't forget Autocad in the 80s.
Yes, CP/M-86 could have played to role of MSDOS but people really needed to buy a box with a floppy disk to install from or a preinstalled OS on their new PC. MS did that right.
A 386 was a reasonable Unix host at the time. I first experienced Unix on a 68020 box attached to dozens of terminals. There were a couple Unix like OSs that were relatively inexpensive but I don't remember any that had a GUI.
All that is not very relevant. Had Microsoft never existed, it'd have been an ecosystem too different to make any valid prediction. We'll have to eventually restore the universe and run a different path to see.
> Maybe in an alternate reality Visicalc built their own OS to run their spreasheet on a large screen
Well, we did have Richard M. Stallman, Emacs author, not only create an OS (GNU), but also extend Emacs to the point that it might as well be an OS. More pointedly, Miguel De Icaza created Gnumeric (a fantastic Excel clone) before he started the GNU Network Object Model Environment (GNOME).
Corel attempted something similar to what you were saying, as well; Their Wordperfect/Office/Draw empire was leveraged against Microsoft's Embrace/Extend/Extinguish in order to promote their (debian-based) linux distribution.
Unless you're using Wayland on NVidia chipsets, graphics driver support is pretty damn good nowadays. I was able to install NVidia and ATI proprietary drivers during my graphical linux install of Calculate (Gentoo) linux. I'd be shocked if Ubuntu or Fedora were somehow more obtuse than this.
As for free drivers, the only one lagging behind is Nouveau for Nvidia users. AMD's free/open driver has made some serious performance improvements in the past few months, and Intel's driver (or just plain modesetting) has performance parity with their windows driver.
I remember 2008, and fighting with AMD/ATI drivers, and occasional reboots on my NVidia systems that led to X not working anymore. I've had exactly one instance of that in the past 4 years (under Arch). Can we stop spreading 2008-era misinformation in 2016?
No, I'm not. My point is to only draw an illustration of just how small the overall marketshare for "non-Windows PC users" actually is. I go out to meetups all the time and everyone wants to act like I'm some sort of weird outlier because I'm the only person with a Windows machine in the room.
They are not. That would mean that more than 10% of the people sitting on chairs in companies are doing software development. That would fail to take into account jobs that don't have a chair, every PC outside an office and even non technical jobs in sw development companies.
It's less than 1%, still much more than I would bet on. However I think that this figure is lower globally and Windows is sold globally. Hence, much less than 1% of PC users are software developers (Windows, Mac, Linux, anything) and having Windows the larger share its stats are close to the global figure.
If 1% of the desktop users are developers, that's the same as 50% of the Linux users, and a really big share of the Linux users are developers (really, I expected it to be more than 50% what, clearly isn't true). That's also circa 12% of the Mac users, and I bet a biggest share of them are developers than the Windows ones.
> That's also circa 12% of the Mac users, and I bet a biggest share of them are developers than the Windows ones.
That seems unlikely.
The fact that there are a number of programs without real non-Windows equivalents (games, emulators, various commercial packages) probably does suggest a lot of people doing Windows development.
It means that WayneBro conclusion up there is nonsense. You can't claim there are so few users of other OSes that it's impossible that most developers are on them.
It does certainly not mean that there are no Windows developer. That would just be repeating the same flawed argument, but twisted on the direction where it's the most flawed.
Meh. That stack overflow survey is definitely flawed. My conclusion is based on the fact that most businesses run Windows and as a consultant, I visit many many many enterprise shops. None of them are running Macs or Linux.
I'm probably in another country on another continent (Italy) but web development, both back end and front end, is a Mac business here. There are some Linux laptops (me too), many Linux VMs on Macs, very few Windows. But we're developing for Linux servers so why should we be using Windows? Every time I get to work junior devs out of university with Windows laptops I advise them to install a Linux VM or be prepared to suffer and google alone how to fix things there.
People are using Macs because it gives them a preconfigured and stable Linux like environment, almost 100% compatible with the server. Windows tend to have different toolings and different quirks. It doubles the effort. In my experience it's OK if you're using Java, which mostly hides the OS and it's obviously a must if you go with .NET. Basically only large companies use those two technologies, and not all of them. Everybody else is on scripting languages, JS, PHP, Python, Ruby. Btw, Java is almost always deployed to Linux too.
My personal experience with OpenGL is that all Valve games run faster on it than on DirectX (both on Windows, but I heard Linux + OpenGL also has better perf than Windows + DirectX), but that's about the extent of it.
Well, nothing like having to “log in” to a product to make it feel “open”, or have it randomly prioritize verifying its own license for 60 seconds over letting you launch and begin your work.
Somewhat OT: With the ad interstitial, and now an auto-play video with audio ad on the main article, and the article split into three pages... I just can't bring myself to read Forbes content online anymore. Even if I'm interested in what de Icaza has to say.
MS is not open. Well, they're as open as a Burmese tiger pit.
I.T. Has been evolving leaps and bounds due to "open" initiatives (GNU, FSF etc..). All the "closed" companies are hitting a ceiling in terms of their profits & their tech. is stagnating. MS is trying hard and they can catch up, but it's too little too late.
Nothing from the MS software portfolio beats a plain vanilla Unix/GNU Linux command shell (bash,sh etc..).
I have started thinking that those who now work at Microsoft are blind to its flaws by default.
The classic example being Windows 10 - anyone who is actually not blind to the fiasco of the automatic upgrades/issues around further updates [1] notices that there is a certain brutality in the way the whole thing was carried out. After installing the unwanted Windows 10 OS on probably hundreds of millions of perfectly fine Windows 7 machines, they claimed that some 300+ million computers were now running on Windows 10. [2] My guess is, less than half of those were actually desired by the end users. And a few more iterations of these botched auto-updates, and "happy Windows 10 user" is going to become an oxymoron.
This episode went so much against the spirit of open source that these claims seem a little comical. It is probably true that MS had to make these choices to maximize shareholder profit, but lets just take it down a notch on the supposed openness.
To those who wish to still make this 'open by default' claim, I welcome MS to open source Windows 7 and Windows XP and see if they can sustain the same kind of growth after that point [3]
From what I've seen, Microsoft employees have a keen understanding of both the issues with Microsoft as well as it's past. If you are seeing complete radio silence on something, like we see with both telemetry and automatic updates, that's when you know there's a corporate policy that's been laid down that nobody's going to risk their job to speak out against. You can see this sort of thing with a lot of companies, not just Microsoft.
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