Microsoft Buys Teamprise, Will Ship Linux Tools

spongman writes "Microsoft's Senior Vice President, Developer Division, S. Somasegar has announced that Microsoft has acquired Teamprise from Sourcegear, LLC, and will be shipping it as part of the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 release. Teamprise is an Eclipse plugin (and related tools) for connecting to Team Foundation Server, Microsoft's source-control/project-management system. What's most interesting about this is not only that Microsoft has realized that heterogeneous development platforms are important to their developer customers, but the fact that Microsoft themselves will now be developing and shipping products based on those heterogeneous platforms, including 5 versions of Unix."

Comments

Re:Well ...

[h4rm0ny]

How does the language matter?

Mono isn't a language per se. Mono is an import of the .Net framework. The trouble is that this framework is controlled by Microsoft. Firstly, the Windows version will always be ahead of other platforms relegating other platforms to inferior, buggy or feature incomplete versions. This could result in security vulnerabilities and lagging behind in version availability. More dangerous however, is that Microsoft can withdraw approval for Mono at any time, if they wish. If Mono became a popular basis for running software on Linux, then Microsoft could bring it all crashing down whenever they felt Linux had grown to be enough of a threat. Or they can start charging licence fees. Once a software base is installed, it can be very hard to move away from it *cough*Office*cough*.

Basically, rather than true cross-platform compatability, what you get is Microsoft controlling a framework that Linux apps would become dependent on. A bad, vulnerable situation, imo. That's why I dislike proprietary systems such as Moonlight that are built on it. If we overhauled software patent law then it would be less of a threat, but it remains a technical advantage to Windows.