Slashdot Mirror
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."
It isn't the first time. Microsoft used to provide tools for accessing Visual SourceSafe repositories from UNIX. Needless to say, these tools were utterly terrible yet allowed them to claim that VSS "supported UNIX". I don't expect Microsoft to go out of their way to "support UNIX" this time around any more than they did previously.
"If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won." - Linus Torvalds
This is software for accessing repositories stored in Microsoft's "Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server " from Linux and Eclipse. I have never seen a usable Microsoft POSIX or Linux product; even if they don't deliberately sabotage it, they apparently don't have the expertise to produce such a thing. Teamprise may have some capable Linux developers now, but how long do you think those are going to stay?
You're much better off throwing out Microsoft's crappy server software and replacing it with a nice, high quality open source solution. Not only do you get better version control and team software, you're also assured that the Linux and Eclipse clients will keep working.
Microsoft doesn't need to control open source. Microsoft just needs to put it in a pretty box that someone is willing to pay for.
When they have shown by their actions, over seven years, that they have changed, than and only than will I consider purchasing Microsoft products again.
For each violation, I reset my 7 year clock from that day. Just reset it this week.
Basing my purchase decisions on their actions ONLY and not their marketing FUD, is the only way I can be sure not to ever be vendor locked-in ever again. So much time and money has been wasted by me, my friends, my family and other IT professionals over the last 20+ years...wasteful and unnecessary.
I will believe it when I see it. To date it has always been FUD!
Is your Internet Throttled? Install DD-Wrt, OpenWRT or Tomato to learn the truth! Google: 1Gbps/1Gbps: 5 Communities
Much like Apple did. This isn't a poor attempt at a troll -- if Microsoft want a hold on open-source software they could do worse than follow the kind of approach Apple took. Leave many of the guts the same, but pay professionals to fully sculpt the UI that the open-source programmer is less likely to be interested in designing. This wouldn't necessarily have to be an operating system (why would Microsoft want an open-source OS to compete with Windows? As a replacement, perhaps, but given the money they make from Windows I'd doubt they'll concede defeat in selling operating systems easily) but any software at all. I'm sure most people here are well aware that presentation and useability are two of open-source software's failings. Too many people say "But I don't care how it looks. If it works, what more do I want?" and forget that this isn't how the vast bulk of people think...
Microsoft has a policy to not use open source, because they can't guarantee it's pedigree. If a malicious person puts stolen code into an OSS project (or more realistically, if a programmer uses company resources to develop the code, without permission from the company; or somebody pastes GPL code into a BSD project) then people who rely on the code might be vulnerable to lawsuits. http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2007/05/02/why-microsoft-can-t-ship-open-source-code.aspx
At least, that's their excuse.
If open source was such a dangerous thing to touch, then I think Google, IBM and Apple would have been hit already.
Surely any code could have code copied in breach of copyright in it?