Yes there are some people in Microsoft who are concerned about competition from OSS, but unlike IE I don't see any dirty tactic here TBH. It's their job to sell their product and highlight bad things about open source competing products. It is the same for other side of the camp as well.
I think the point that @pjmlp was making was that "Microsoft couldn't care less." But, while that may or may not be true, I see it more like microsft using open source software against possible open source customers...or rather against customers who have the potential to leverage open source. And, if that's true, then i would gather that microsoft does indeed care...its merely using a different set of tactics and tools (open source software), as compared to its tactics and tools from decades ago.
It is interesting to me that I read people criticizing Microsoft for their open sourcing code as doing it for marketing reasons---which seems accurate---but not criticizing Google or Apple or whoever else when they open source code.
To set the record straight, I have not ever nor do I currently work for microsoft. If you have IP tracking skills you can probably figure out where I work from these posts. As a matter of a fact, I don't like a lot of things about msft, this just isn't one of them. I dislike that msft is getting a disproportionate amount of hate about this stuff and yet Google and Apple don't seem to get the same level of flack. People seem to get more upset at them related to privacy. I wanted to offer a different perspective that acknowledges that this is the state of things across the board, and this one thing is less harmful than it's being made out to be. Microsoft embraced open source when it was friendly to their business and shunned it when it was not. They may very well shun it again, but with the proliferation of cloud providers and the dominance of AWS in the space, they just don't have a real choice. Windows simply isn't enjoying the dominance it once had in the server space. What I am trying to say is that this incident isn't evidence of anything except that Microsoft is like every other company that will use any advantage it has to push its product. Google and Apple do it too. Let's put our energy in things that pressure companies to behave properly like lobbying governments to step up their anti-trust and privacy enforcement.
The intentions may be different, but it doesn’t mean one of them has to be bad. If MS makes money and users get to do more with the open source code, it’s a win-win.
I try not to complain when proper competition causes improved behavior.
I’m a fan of “the new MS”. Do I trust them? Not any more than a massive company.
But do I love all the open source software they’re producing now? Yes! Do I pretend that it’s because MS has seen the light and become penitent? No!
But at least this time when MS turns its back on their users, we can fork .net, edge, and vscode and go on with our lives. MS can’t unmerge their contributions to the Linux kernel or other open source projects they’re selfishly contributing to.
Microsoft has made various token attempts at being open source friendly in the past. Thing is, Microsoft has a lot to live down from the OSS perspective. I wont begin to consider Microsoft for anything serious until it "makes good" within an order of magnitude of the harm it has tried to do to the open source community.
I see that Microsoft is not a corporation that is evil by design and that they are doing exciting stuff as well -- I don't hate them.
However, I am keeping my skepticism when they embrace open-source and am curious which 'actual evidence' you are referring to?
So far, many open-source efforts look more like marketing to me. For instance, WSL makes sense to keep people in a Microsoft environment (and to me at seems that more and more frameworks favor Linux and Mac over Windows).
Yep. People come out of the woodwork to praise MS when they do something that involves Linux, but when they are caught (yet again) doing something anti-Linux it get very quiet.
It doesn't seem fair to say that Microsoft is attacking open-source software here. They're just asking not to be shut out. I think any of us would be asking the same if someone were trying to categorically exclude something we'd made.
I remember back when Microsoft used to be anti open source too. They would release super straw man type articles about how proprietary software was actually cheaper with lower ToS and other poppycock.
Weird to see a startup making such simplistic, wrong statements to promote their business rather than to protect an entrenched business.
This is silly, this makes it look like all open source or alternatives projects were made to attack Microsoft, or vice-versa. Development of new solutions/alternatives is not always against something existing. It could be to serve other purposes, other markets, other clients/users. This is not a zero-sum game.
So the quality of the tool chain has everything to do with their attitude to open source software and whether they can be assumed to be a friend or enemy of open source software?
We began couching the argument about the company and its businesses practices and we ended on the implementation detail of needing to change a registry setting in a windows deployment. If that isn't tangential muddying of the waters, what is? I want to discuss things to derive truth but my conversational partner just wants to force the Microsoft == bad equation. THAT is arguing in poor faith and not being interested in the conversation and the revelation of truth. That is forcing a pre-destined conclusion on the conversation and a requirement for re-checking of self.
My argument is merely that there _is_ a difference. Its been over twenty years, surely the passage of time generates _some_ difference. My position is far from radical nor am I excusing Microsoft from anything but merely stating they have a more positive stance on OSS today than they did during the Gates era.
Except in this case it is ok to single out something that is produced by a single company.
I am weary about non open source dev tools lately. I was burned pretty badly by MS when the killed managed directx and said - learn XNA. Or all those guys with silverlight experience or the ones that knew flash and become hostage of the Apple/Adobe war. The moment some other entity can kill the technology that you make your living with you are in a trouble.
The decision to adopt new MS tech is like a Russian roulette. So I don't see any of the comments as assholery.
Why? Because they're the new Microsoft that completely embraces open source, we have been told, and it was seen as paranoid and ridiculous to suggest that they were merely the old Microsoft with a new trick.
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