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What Will Microsoft's "Embrace" of Open Source Actually Achieve?
Nerval's Lobster writes Back in the day, Microsoft viewed open source and Linux as a threat and did its best to retaliate with FUD and patent threats. And then a funny thing happened: Whether in the name of pragmatism or simply marketing, Microsoft began a very public transition from a company of open-source haters (at least in top management) to one that's embraced some aspects of open-source computing. Last month, the company blogged that .NET Core will become open-source, adding to its previously open-sourced ASP.NET MVC, Web API, and Web Pages (Razor). There's no doubt that, at least in some respects, Microsoft wants to make a big show of being more open and supportive of interoperability. The company's even gotten involved with the .NET Foundation, an independent organization designed to assist developers with the growing collection of open-source technologies for .NET. But there's only so far Microsoft will go into the realm of open source—whereas once upon a time, the company tried to wreck the movement, now it faces the very real danger of its whole revenue model being undermined by free software. But what's Microsoft's end-goal with open source? What can the company possibly hope to accomplish, given a widespread perception that such a move on its part is the product of either fear, cynicism, or both?
...so they consider "embracing" the movement from within, with the potential to further fragment it by only supporting some distributions and by making their stuff hard to use on the distros that they can't influence, then they eventually discontinue support for that distro while showcasing their commercial product that does something not entirely unlike what was done through that distro before.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
To extend and extinguish, of course.
They're just trying to make their platforms more appealing to people shopping for cloud computing services.
Doesn't look like they're going to do anything with the cash cow, MS Office.
Historically, being embraced by Microsoft has often been deadly...
Except for Windows and Office, I don't run Microsoft bloatware on my PC. Everything else is open source. I'm still running the same AMD quad-core system from seven years ago. No need to get on the hardware band wagon again.
Obviously it's not tulips and dandelions, unless their shareholders are extremely keen florists, my hunch is money!
I think it's getting more and more difficult for Microsoft to successfully implement the three-E strategy in this day and age, but it doesn't stop them from trying.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
-- Ghandi
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Can't be any worse then the way Red Hat and Canonical are fucking over Linux....
They are trying to leverage their IP to get more people to buy or subscribe to their products. There's nothing wrong with that; it actually helps developers.
The idea is that if you make it easy for developers to do good stuff on your platform, they are more likely to do good stuff on your platform. Then end-users who want the good stuff will buy the good stuff from the developer and the platform from you.
They are open-sourcing their development "stuff", and are doing so because it will help them keep the "critical mass" of developers writing stuff for their platforms. As long as software keeps being released for Windows (all flavors) or Azure, they are pretty much guaranteed a place in the market.
It's really smart positioning on their part, and really shows that someone in upper management is thinking 20+ years in advance...
Give them a taste for free, then when they're hooked, gouge them.... Visual Studio and .Net do tend to be well received by everyone. The consensus is that it's a good product and a pleasure to use. The only problem with it is that you have to run it on Windows. So, perhaps the plan is to support .Net on Linux for a while, then yank the support for Linux away and force everyone back to Windows and SQL Server or rewrite their application for another platform.
Until they stop playing games with hidden and required patents, their talk is just BS. They have shown they have no intent to change that model time and time again, this round is no different. You can open source something that requires a DX call but if you don't open source DX and threaten anyone who does with patent suits, is there a point? It is hollow BS for all the same reasons. Don't buy the PR meant to distract, the underlying mechanics are still the same. They are antagonistic to open source and that won't change at a level deeper than the public messaging.
-Charlie
What has changed is that open-source is no longer a threat to Microsoft. It was a threat when Windows competed against Linux for the desktop and for the server. But today, Microsoft doesn't care about Windows and has re-invented itself: Microsoft lays its hopes on Azure.
All this open-sourcing of .NET is to entice people to use .NET and thus use Windows Azure. By eliminating the stigma of being closed and proprietary, they eliminate the #1 objection to using .NET. This openness goes both ways: not only is .NET opening, but Azure is supporting other stacks: node and LAMP for example. They don't care what tools you use anymore, they just want your hosting business.
Microsoft's new competitors are OpenStack, Amazon, and other cloud service providers. They will compete with those providers by trying to have the cloud platform that supports the most tools and the easiest process to get stuff into the cloud.
I don't know; the market looks very different than it did back in the Halloween Email days. There are two things going on here: 1) Ballmer and Gates are out at MS, and 2) server OS market share is not as important as sales of cloud services. It isn't what you're running on your box that they're interested in, anymore, it's what you're connecting to for your business layer. If they can get *nix customers connecting to Azure on .NET, I think they'd call that a win.
"Trust, but verify"
They are losing in mobile. But mobile is not only the client, it is the server. With Android you buy into gmail, youtube, Docs, Play Games, etc.
Historically, being embraced by Microsoft has often been deadly...
True in the 80s and early 90s, but today Microsoft is pretty responsive to their partners and that role has more been taken on by Amazon. I hear Amazon basically data mines business partners who sell on their site to undercut prices on everything except for certain narrowly agreed products.
It's a good business model for Amazon's move to gather more market power, which will give them a near-monopoly in the end. They're definitely playing the long game. But it's not a good move for their partners.
They've open sourced a lot of stuff that they're having trouble getting anyone to use.
Back in the day, Microsoft viewed open source and Linux as a threat and did its best to retaliate with FUD and patent threats.
then in 2013 Microsoft suffered a loss of more than US$32 billion and in 2014 it fired, er "layed off" almost 20,000 employees. faced with life support options of XBox earnings and corporate licenses, it excreted another phone no one wanted and held its breath. then it lost another 300 million on its nook investment and 676 million on the surface tablet in 2014. Then it remembered how well litigation as a business model worked for SCO.
microsoft is embracing Open Source in much the same way you embrace that creepy uncle that touched you as a kid during thanksgiving. Its a truce, because a patent war against amorphous things like windowing, clicking, or startup noises would haul big guns like apple and google into court, not just samsung and tomtom, and they would face the very real possibility of losing unchallenged but indefensible patents so its best to keep that paper tiger in the desk drawer. Their best bet is to hope people think Microsoft non OSI "open source" licenses can make some headway, and that people stop talking about BSD and GPL. Gobbling up more video games would do it well, but the innovation ship has sailed at redmond and there arent many options left for real growth. Watch for it to become a clearing house of small game studios and dessicated open source projects long since forked by dedicated dev groups that have very sour memories of Redmond. Microsoft knows it can expect businesses to pony up protection money but once Google or Ubuntu unveil an office desktop killer, thats the end of the show.
Good people go to bed earlier.
And there's still nothing preventing them from changing their attitude and discontinuing support, especially when by getting their software in-use, it's easier to migrate to their platform with the existing type of software than it is to change types of software while remaining on the existing platform.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Let me know when they stop billing samsung and other manufacturers for distributing android/linux.
They didn't stop hating linux, they just stopped outwardly hating linux because it was drawing to much attention to linux.
Could we get a summary that isn't like: "In an unbiased and purely 3rd party perspective Microsoft has been historically bad ..."?
I interpret this tone as: "You are an idiot that needs to be spoon fed value judgments" OR "You are an idiot, and I think I can manipulate you by disguising my opinion in here as uncontroversial, monolithic, undeniable claims".
It isn't what you're running on your box that they're interested in, anymore, it's what you're connecting to for your business layer. If they can get *nix customers connecting to Azure on .NET, I think they'd call that a win.
God, I hope that's the case. Since I won't touch cloudy services with a ten foot pole, this would mean that Microsoft will finally stop being a pain in my butt.
I don't think Microsoft cares much about helping IT "get further" as such. It only cares about maximizing profit.
Let's see,uh; Big Movement (bm) and Microsoft kind of go together. Not likely anyone will help them make their code or programming better for free, but good to see them trying to get some free publicity. I know! Why not sell a $50 operating system called Win10? And not a whittled down version, something with audio editing etc. That might actually stop people from using pirated software. Right now it's a toss up towards Linux (because it is getting better every year)
A wonderful development, to be sure.
Redmond Linux, here we come!
It is now easier, cheaper, and more reliable to develop on .NET than Java and Microsoft will get IDE sales and partnerships for most new projects that build websites, API, and integrations. It is the glooming death of Java and Oracle/Gold Finger dictate to the industry. Shortly, Unity3d will come with an open source .NET port and large parts of the gaming industry will also move to .NET.
Open source is a success. It's taken over most of the server market. The fact it's open is why it's a success - do you think PHP would ever be popular if it were closed?
The question Microsoft is asking themselves is not "How do we kill this", but "How do we monetize this?" (followed by "How far should we jump right now, and to what extent should we hold back?")
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
It's not hard. They want .Net to gain more traction as a development platform. There's enough people that are contributing to things like ASP .Net MVC and Entity Framework to make it useful for them. Also, there were open source projects that have helped them a ton (NuGet) and they realize that it works for them in some cases. Also, I think they sense that there is an opportunity for .Net to become the "goto" enterprise development platform. Oracle's handling of Java is creating a space for a new player to come along. Oh, and all that .Net stuff will run great on Azure.
Azure is the big thing internally, and they know they have to run open source platforms on it. There is a shift in the Enterprise group to get away from a "captive" market to just trying to compete on features and to make a compelling platform, which Windows Server, .Net, etc. really is becoming.
Now, there's some things that just don't make sense to do. Open source Office makes little sense, as I doubt there'd be any real interest in contributing to that code base. Same with Windows. So, of course, it's a self-serving, pragmatic approach versus an ideological change on how software should be created and supported.
Back in the '90s corporations started to rally around "open standards", so Microsoft obliging shipped off COM/ActiveX to ECMA to be "standardized". Of course, there was always only one viable commercial supplier of the "standard", although I think Software AG tried. Part of the problem was that it was very difficult to tell where the proprietary, closed source Windows ended and the "standard" COM/ActiveX began.
Fast forward, now "open source" is the rallying point and Microsoft is there with portions of the .NET framework. Here we have the same thing; Windows is still closed source and we don't know where it ends, and .NET begins. Ask Miguel for more insight.
In Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International the US Supreme Court ruled:
merely requiring generic computer implementation fails to transform [an] abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention.
Recently, after its SCO fiasco, Microsoft's biggest gun in its ceaseless war on Linux and all things FOSS has been patent extortion. IIRC, Microsoft makes a sizable chuck of change from Android devices due to the licenses for a fuzzy bunch of patents that have never been tested for validity in a court of law.
At some point, someone with deep enough pockets to risk a spin on the roulette wheel that is the US court system in regard to patents will take on Microsoft and see if the Emperor is wearing clothes or not. Microsoft owns some very smart lawyers. The lawyers know such a challenge is inevitable. They also know there is a good chance Microsoft will lose and will have to shut down its patent extortion racket. At that point they will need a plan B. This is their baby steps towards a plan B which is way too little, way too late.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
The SDK and libraries have never been a revenue source. The development tools and software platform are the revenue sources.
Given a continued level of investment, it is unlikely that another party would overtake Microsoft as the definitive source for commercial .Net needs. On the filp side, Microsoft needs a bigger ecosystem. First party only takes them so far, and most third party efforts focus around more linux-oriented or platform-neutral stacks, with an emphasis on open source. Going more cross platform and open source is their way of trying to get the platform more relevant. If this plan succeeds, then some parties will be 'getting it for free', but those parties would have otherwise gone with a free solution.
In short, they are trying to open source just enough to provide equivalent support to free frameworks that are realistically good enough, while holding back components where there is a shred of belief that MS might possible continue to hold differentiated value.
Micosoft made its fortune off of the Desktop market.
Windows, and Office. + The slue of apps that support the two. Programming, Servers, IE...
Now not everyone wants or needs a desktop.
They didn't get much effort in getting Mobile. Zune, Windows Phone, the PC makers are kinda floundering on Windows Mobile tablets.
Their XBox gaming is a fickle market. They are in way too tight race with Sony, then you have the mobile market taking up a lot of the indie game market. Screwups like they did with the XBox One launch can cause major issues. Forcing people to choose an other gaming system before the release.
Having the vendor lock in, just isn't working... Too many Rich HTML web applications out there, meaning people are not even caring if they are on Microsoft Server of LAMP.
In order for Microsoft to last for the future they will need to be more Open. So those .NET apps work in Linux and Windows, So people who care about the App that it runs not the OS (Like most people, just not Slashdot) means they will not need to switch to an other platform. If they keep on windows only. The fact people will feel stuck may mean they will chose a more open app,
I like my house, I like to stay inside my house... However if I feel like I am stuck in my house I will want to leave it.
Making microsoft open and allowing a way out, means people are not coming up with reasons to leave.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
A growing IT industry that uses Microsoft products, whether open source or not, is likely to be beneficial to their profits. There's no conspiracy here folks, not matter what the little voices under your tinfoil hats say...
So...kinda like what Redhat already has underway with systemd? Good ol'e Microsoft innovation at work!
How do you know that MS is not abetting the systemd bandwagon? What a perfect leadup to the Extend and Extinguish steps.
That would be a work of genius, and frankly I don't think MS is that smart any more. Still, if it turns out Pottering has been on the MS payroll all along, I might actually die laughing.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Barnes and Noble were shaping up to test a few of em in court - then Microsoft sidled up and 'partnered' with them. That's another part of the MS modus operandi. Wait for a company who you've hurt to be on the ropes financially, and then offer to help if they'll kiss and make up. Happened with Apple and MS too.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
" real danger of its whole revenue model being undermined by free software"
really, when did FOSS threaten MS? MS still making lots of cash, it's still in the fortune 500, etc... Its competitors, IBM, Apple have embraced [not free as in beer] OSS and that's what's killing them. There's also really good proprietary products out there as well that have eaten away from Windows. QNX, to Matlab RTT, to VxWorks, and even embedded systems have evolved since gadgets exploded over the last 10yrs.
They need to compete, and that needs following Apple, IBM, etc... Heck they still outrank Google in profits, which totally relies on [free as in in beer] OSS,
Because Apple, Google and other "namebrand" companies aren't known for dropping support of tech. Nope... that's only a MS trait.
DAM YOU M$!!!!!!!! YOU SAID IF I LIKED MY PHONE I COULD KEEP IT! AND SAVE $2500 A YEAR ON PHONE SERVICE!
Finally, thank you. That's the first argument I've read that actually addresses why Microsoft would want to "embrace" open source. Because it makes sense from the perspective of Microsoft's core competency: legal.
All of this sudden "change of heart" has nothing to do with the technical aspect of their business.
Because it worked so well for Sun Microsystems.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Oh please the only ones pulling a EEE is Google but the FOSSies are too busy pretending its 1999 and the desktop is still the battleground to see the buttfucking they are about to get from their supposed "friend"
TFA is beyond simple, BALMER WAS A SHITTY CEO who thought the way you win is by sticking a WinFlag on knockoffs of other people's shit. Flash? Silverlight. Java? .NET, iPod? Zune. iPad? Surface. Balmer was the Pepsi guy of CEOs who couldn't think beyond whatever was getting buzz at the moment. Compare this to Nadella that...get ready for this, its a mind blower...actually tries to give the customers what they want! Gasp! what we are seeing with Nadella is a Steve Jobs style transformation of MSFT and like Jobs Nadella is focusing on his customers. the reason why he is opening .NET is VERY simple, the way you make money on a language is support, not by waving the WinFlag so surprise surprise THAT is what he is doing!
After a decade of the Balmernator squirting his Zune as an Apple wannabe I'd say Nadella is a breath of fresh air and if his common sense moves make the FOSSies miss the Googlefucking until its too late? Bonus.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Sure it's possible, but given their history how could you trust them?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Uh... that's like saying that once you've converted to Apache, the Apache Software Foundation can leave you high and dry with no possibility of support for the software you're using.
Repeat after me: It's OPEN SOURCE. The software you're using today from them is OPEN SOURCE, and they cannot retroactively relicense it. Which means they can go back to their proprietary model, if they want, but the software they licensed under the MIT license STAYS that way, which means anybody else can pick it up, customize it, offer support for it, etc. if they wish.
There is LITERALLY no way for Microsoft to put people in a bind with this maneuver. The *worst* that would happen is that you're forced to spend money to someone other than Microsoft for maintenance releases of the open source software that Microsoft has decided they don't wish to open source anymore. And for everybody who's about to shout, "But they can SUE even though they promised NOT TO!" Go look up "Promissory Estoppel," and stop your bitching.
Microsoft's embrace of Open Source is a GOOD thing.
abandonment
Why is parent modded troll? This is *exactly* the kind of thing Microsoft has done in the past. Not just once, but repeatedly. The most obvious one was Java, and it took a lawsuit from Sun to get Microsoft to stop trying to commandeer the platform. Microsoft then dropped Java in a big public hissy fit, and came out with .NET instead.
And there's still nothing preventing them from changing their attitude and discontinuing support
Discontinuing support for what? If it's open source then the open source philosophy of maintaining it yourself or paying somebody to do it applies. If you require corporate support for open source code then what is the point of open source at all?
This is *exactly* the kind of thing Microsoft has done in the past. Not just once, but repeatedly. The most obvious one was Java
That was adding their own proprietary extensions to existing proprietary technology, this is releasing their proprietary technology as open source. Not quite sure what you're suggesting is similar between the two much less "exactly" the same kind of thing.
MS is transitioning, ... trying to transition to a service company. Which they should've done 10 years ago, imho. Couldn't tell if they're to late. Even FOSSing .Net came to late, imho. If they succeed, they'll become something like another IBM and Oracle.
However, I expect them to feel even more pressure in the next few years. At least in the consumer and services market MS looks like a toddler joining an NBA Final between Apple and Google. And in the new-gen consoles department they're currently getting their ass kicked by Sony. Doesn't look to good, if you ask me. They've got nothing for the consumer they can offer, that any of the above mentioned can offer better and/or cheaper with less tie-ins. The latest Surface devices appear to be at least somewhat pleasing to the consumer crowd, but I couldn't say it's enough to gain critical mass in that market. Apple has to much mindshare and their margins are *huge*. For anybody for whom Apple is to expensive, there's the devices with Google's Android and Chrome OS. With things and computer time spent moving further and further into the web, it's not looking good for MS.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
By 'exactly', I was referring to their MO, not specifics like licensing. I thought I had been clear. Sorry about that.
systemd
But what they did in the past was proprietary, that was the problem but this is open source so what's the issue?
.NET is not Open Source, more like .NET Core is an “open core” PR stunt. The main purpose of which is to lure developers away from real Open Source projects. When will we see Microsoft open sourcing Microsoft Android?
Samsung might well be the one that implodes it all on them. I won't venture, fully, a guess as to whether it's too little, too late for "plan 'B'" or not- but it's not looking good for them if someone like Samsung or Huawei nails them on the racket.
So far they've only open sourced software that they already provided for free. IMO they are attempting to defray costs: by open sourcing things like .NET core they are hoping that some external resources will pick up the cost of maintaining and extending the product, thus freeing up their own developers to work on paid-for products like Windows and Office (which they will likely never ever open source).
I think you are rather confused with the meaning behind EEE.
The EEE strategy of MS was harmful, because MS used its monopoly to screw up widely used open standards, thus eliminating competition at birth. This was bad not only for startups, but for consumers as well. Remember IE6?
As the article that you linked to yourself describes, there are a lot of Android versions that are based on the open source version of the OS. Google is actually giving its competitors the Android code for free, thus enabling them to enter the market, rather than shutting them out of it. Lack of other Google services is actually a feature in many of these cases (like in Chinese implementations). If you weren't allowed to use Google as a search engine in such competitor Android implementations (as if, for example, by means of a malicious code license) then *that* would be EEE, because Google would be using its search monopoly as leverage to prevent a competitor from entering the mobile OS market (as in Embrace the mobile OS technology by open-sourcing Android, Extend it with the Google search feature, and Extinguish it by showing everyone how lame those other Android phones are that don't have the Google search feature). As far as I know, this is not the case. You can even get the closed-source Google apps to play on a Kindle Fire, for example. There is definitely some bad karma created at Google for abandoning the open-source projects, but this is not a case of EEE. And on the other hand, who said that Google was obliged to invest into the open-source projects indefinitely? I'm not familiar with the exact license of each piece of Android code, but, in general, once it has been open-sourced the community will decide when it's time for the software to die. If Google stops development of an open-source app and the app dies, then it is *our fault* for not picking up where Google left off.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Google fanboy or anything, but the EEE technique that MS pioneered is *very* harmful and evil. We have to make sure we don't cry "wolf" at every sign that might resemble it, even if open-source fans (like me) have to come to the defense of a multibillion corporation like Google. Otherwise we will get no reaction when shit does in fact hit the fan, like we had with the OOXML fiasco.
Wait for a company who you've hurt to be on the ropes financially
Microsoft hurt B&N? And here was me thinking it was a comination of Amazon and people not buying books anymore that was the problem. What was it specifically that Microsoft did? Cripple that horrible Nook thing?
Most of what you say is true except Bill Gates is definitely not out...
http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/...
Bill Gates was on the board, he's stepped down from the board to take a more hands on role within the company.
I don't think you give the man enough credit, he is the man who beat Steve Jobs and nearly drove Apple out of business...
http://www.wired.com/2009/08/d...
Microsoft with (not against) the guidence of Bill Gates are embracing open source as they have every other technological movement there has been.
Well either you work with technology that doesn't require ethernet or you're planning on retiring.
Cloud services are not a trend. It's not going to go away, completely ignoring them for someone in the business of building software is a ridiculous folly.
The Cylons hate us with every fiber of their being.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
When Windows is based on making the WINE extensions work better under a Windows implementation of Linux, then I will believe. Until then I will just hear Daleks shouting "Embrace", "Extend", "Exxxxxttteeerrrmmmiiinnnaaattteeee"
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
One of the largest cross platform gaming engines today is based on Mono the open source implementation of .NET
http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual...
From mono also comes...
http://xamarin.com/
A very good cross platform development tool for developing mobile apps.
The CLI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Language_Infrastructure) was always open. Microsoft has worked with Mono developers from the get go and has even funded them...
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...
The notion that this is a recent renaissance is a complete fallacy. Microsoft understands that like any other company that when people leverage your technologies there are many opportunities to make money.
Open Source is not inconsistent with their strategies, which are all about making money and dominating the market, like every other company on the planet.
It matters. Is Microsoft embracing open source because of a change in philosophy, having committed to the principles of open source? I would assert that only a fool would believe that. So we're left with them embracing open source because deep in Redmond's bowels, they turned the crank on some Excel ROI formula, and determined that "embracing" open source gives them the greatest potential for the greatest profit ... for now.
... because that crank, they keep on a'turnin' it ... and as soon as it spits out the opposite answer, out come the knives behind open source's back, and stab stab stab ...
Should this worry us? I think it should
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
Embrace, extend, destroy. Sun Tsu's book isn't off their shelves just yet.
That said, Microsoft needs revenue, and moneyspenders tired of the BS, the poor quality, the BS, the proprietary nature, the lock-in, and more. The veneer of openness still means that Microsoft is looking for revenue, and their seeming love for open source is designed to follow the market, not some sort of philosophical shift. They're still in it for the revenue.
The trends in software and administrative support still favor strong static infrastructure, and Microsoft's IT management has a generation of schooled people that know dot-net, SQL Server, and desktop products. They learned AD, and how to make stuff the Microsoft Way.
Licensing models can't be easily ignored, and embracing them doesn't stop their principal need: more and lots of revenue, and at least some harmony. Their QA still is hideous, but it's improving, which is damning with faint praise. If they want to competitively and actively support open source/FOSS, fine. They could change that battleship of theirs tomorrow. Licensing wouldn't matter as there are armies of closed source coders dying for revenue, too. It's just that community-sourced armies of passionate coders can be not only faster, but equally as effective-- or more. It's the revenue. Follow the revenue. It's all about the revenue.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
The open source community does not use .NET or Java, so, it's a bit pointless to open source .NET or Web API. Their implementation of MVC+Razor is, and has been, a joke. Silverlight was DOA. Azure is a five years behind AWS. MS SQL no longer offers anything particularly more attractive than MySQL or MariaDB.
Now, if they open sourced something that the community desperately needs, like Office or Kinect, then there's something worth talking about.
It's just that community-sourced armies of passionate coders can be not only faster, but equally as effective-- or more.
Oh can you stop with that garbage! In almost every category of application (except a few notable outliers) open source provides the feature-poor, slow-follower alternative to the proprietary world. We do have Linux, Blender and Apache webserver but where is the Photoshop, AutoCAD, SolidWorks, Moldex, Logic, FinalCut, Renderman, etc? The open source alternatives are not even close to being of professional grade even after years and years of development.
Open source was a slow follower in the PC, smartphone, tablet, smartwatch, home automation, etc categories, in fact open source hasnt innovated *any* new product category despite the cries of how innovative it supposedly is. Be more honest about open source because it does it a disservice to make wild claims about how great it is and then for people to actually use it and end up severely disappointed.
Then you have systemd which is just those same open source coders beating eachother with sticks and crying that they cant maintain a viable alternative without those systemd advocates.
Oracle has destroyed the SUN documentation and sold the source for products I use.
You can get old source, but not in a way that is safe to bring into work.
If OpenSSL didn't have enough eyes, I won't kid myself that having the code does a thing for me.
You sir are indeed a fanboy because you obviously do not even understand what EEE stands for, pay attention...EMBRACE...Get the FOSSies to back and support their Linux based mobile OS above more open choices by basing their Android on the Linux kernel and talking up how open the code is and how you can do anything with it...EXTEND tie all the useful APIs required to actually USE the hardware for anything meaningful behind the Google Playwall, current estimates are that as much as 70% of the top apps on android WILL NOT WORK without the proprietary Google Play APIs. Comprende not functional? EXTINGUISH as the article I linked to shows they are cutting off support for AOSP for their proprietary "Android One" which keeps all the choice bits proprietary, the current deals with hardware manufacturers makes the old MSFT PC deals of the 90s look tame, with clauses that will royally buttfuck the companies if they for instance use AOSP instead of Google Android and with the latest release of Android if you want to do anything more complicated than make a slot machine app? You have to have the Google owned Google Play APIs, all the good APIs are locked behind the Playwall.
So there ya go sparky, how to turn a FOSS OS into another TiVo in less than 3 releases. another couple of releases and AOSP will be as worthless as FreeDOS when it comes to actually running anything people actually want and with everything tied behind the Playwall Android is now no different than Apple or MSFT.
Personally I think its fucking hilarious, the FOSSie faction are so damned stuck in the past and trying to fight the desktop war they aren't even seeing the assraping they are getting from Google, who has banned GPL V3 from their OSes BTW, its 100% verbotten...why do you think that is? Because you are gonna get EEE'd right up the asspipe with android and mark my words Chromebooks as well, become nothing but glorified TiVos, and all because FOSSies can't quit acting like its 19 fucking 99 and Billy Gates still runs the show. Before Google came along? You had a really diverse mobile ecosystem, now? Its Android or nothing, the momentum for anything else just isn't there. Google pulled a EEE better than MSFT could have ever dreamed and now you have the community actually cheering and championing a proprietary OS...fuck that is funny, its ROFL funny how a stupid catchphrase and some lip service could BS the entire lot like that, damned funny!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
...until some killer app uses .Net. Then the patent lawyer vultures of Redmon will be circling over said project. See Oracle/Java/Android.
While .NET is quite nice. it is severely hindered by being (mostly) Windows. Java has currently a much wider acceptance, running on most mobiles, running in BlueRay Players, still on some desktops and on most servers up to the really big iron servers. .NET could take this place, when it can gather a productive and creative community behind it. Microsoft will profit from this by providing all the tools for developing .NET applications. While I personally don't like Visual Studio very much (the built in assistants usually don't produce what I want and without the assistants things get really hard), I still recognize it as one of the best IDEs out there. When reaching to big iron, all the modelling and planning tools in the more expensive versions of Visual Studio come to shine. So by the broader the usage of .NET is, the more money can Microsoft make by providing the tools.
They still belong to The Borg and they will be used as much as Britain used their 20 inch guns against ANY unruly being in their colonies. The guns being in Portsmouth at this time means NOTHING.
Windows+Office is still the mainstay of M$ business. That's where they rake in BILLIONS EVERY MONTH from. Think Daimler, Toyota, BP and similar imbecile corpos who only know this kind of stuff. On whom I suspect to be bribed one way or the other to stay away from Linux.
I am a big fan and user of FOSS (writing this from an RPI). I also work for a major corpo (you probably know it by brand name) and I can tell you they will stick with Office, Lync, Windows, SQL Server and the like until Hell Freezes Over.
In the large corpo, all is about POSING. So what matters is NICE powerpoint slides, NICEly formatted documents (full of bull content), NICEly looking Excel sheets with crappy VBA scripting.
Linux+Libreoffice simply is not NICE enough.
Comprendre ?
...thats what you are. Billg might not work every single day, but sure as hell he is in co-command. Nadella cant do anything serious without billg's permission.
I am not a fan of Google either and I write this on a Raspberry PI. Which is Good Enough for me. The entire JS Bloat is not required in my world. Neither the Google-NSA SIGINT. Or the WINTEL BLOAT.
Libreoffice runs fast enough on this platform. Which proves it USEFUL.
Bloatware and Bloatconcepts need not apply.
If Linus screws up; I will used xBSD. Or some Russian ELBRUS computer, as soon as I can get them. I hear they currently reinvigorate them.
Interesting that you mention Pepsi. Speaking of stuck in the 1990s, did you mean to allude to former Apple CEO John Sculley?
Yes, I've noticed that what Google is embracing with Android is the walled garden model. One little thing their search engine does, and a big reason why I'm trying to move away from them, is this redirection. Click on a link on their search results, and it doesn't send you straght to the linked material, no, it sends you to a Google URL that does a little something, then sends you on to the link. It's slow. I thought I could get away from that at DuckDuckGo, but they've been doing the same thing.
What about Google's language, Go? Anyone using that? I've been looking at webRTC, from Google, wondering if it could be used to move away from the client server model of web and Internet usage. For instance Skype (now owned by MS), requires that users connect to a central server, which does provide a little bit of service, tracking who is avaialble and who is away. But at what price?
As to being stuck in the past, I still don't trust Microsoft. Remember OOXML? That wasn't the 90s, that was 2008 when they ran their ugly campaign to cozen and bully ISO into making it a standard. Then there was the little technical problem from 2012 in which Windows 7 didn't offer users a chocie of browsers as they had promised, and for which Europe penalized MS. Now one of MS's latest stunts is this huge change in how they sell Office. You can't buy it any more, you can only lease it? If you think file format lock was bad, how about cloud dependency? Be a real shame if you let your Office 365 subscription expire, and lost access to all those documents you foolishly stored in MS's cloud. Of if you became dependent upon their services to sync and share your documents. Not to mention the little detail that sensitive info may be in their cloudy hands, ripe for data mining, seizing by law enforcement, or leaking in industrial espionage incidents.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Barnes and Noble were shaping up to test a few of em in court - then Microsoft sidled up and 'partnered' with them. That's another part of the MS modus operandi. Wait for a company who you've hurt to be on the ropes financially, and then offer to help if they'll kiss and make up. Happened with Apple and MS too.
They also did this with Corel and Novell.
Get this, many of the people at the company - the developers, the outreach, the designers - actually value the idea of open source and the company/culture as a whole has actually changed from that of 20 years ago that /. loves to hate. But no... it couldn't possibly be that the company as a whole has changed, could it? There _has_ to be some sort of evil intention.
The other way to interpret what happened is to notice that Microsoft went buddy-buddy with a company that was going to fight them in court. By doing that, Microsoft avoided having any actual ruling on their patents, and kept them in top shape for FUD.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Because Microsoft is not Oracle. Look at how they handled the thread of ODF to see how they think outside the box. I would be applauding the brilliance of their strategies if they weren't so utterly counter to the public good.
No that isn't an answer to the question, this is MIT-licensed free software so what is the problem?
In this case, they only hurt them by threatening to sue over bogus patents when they were already down. But similar idea, no?
The only reason B&N was even able to attempt to fight MS in court is that B&N didn't require any 'preferred OEM' arrangements with MS in order to stay in business. Rather than air the details of the patents in question (there were leaks that hinted they were pretty lame), MS sensed an opportunity and bought their silence. Yeah, they didn't cause B&N's business to falter, but they did want them to base their next-gen tablets on an MS OS, which B&N had no interest in. And in any case, the MS vulture strategy worked for MS as intended. And BN bought some time.
So my ultimate point is that very few have the financial wherewithal to wait out Microsoft when they want to force your hand. They either force you by threatening to damage your MS-dependent business, by threatening to sue unless you pay them for stuff they don't really have valid rights to, or by standing by and watching you shoot yourself in the foot. In all those cases, the public loses.
And, oh, by the way. Barnes and Noble basically only 'shot themselves in the foot' by being an actual bookstore. Amazon competed unfairly for years by not charging sales tax that their customers actually owed - something B&N could not get away with due to the horrible mistake of operating actual stores. And then there was the silliness of the 'one click' patent. Amazon too has managed to succeed by being a bad actor on the assumption that the law wouldn't catch up with them until their competition was badly degraded - perhaps irrevocably...
And too many anti-tax ideologues think that's a good thing, simply because it involves a way around the 'evil' of paying taxes. But if you're going to be a Libertarian, at least insist on a level playing field. Fight taxes if you want, but not by cheering some who can cheat while others carry the freight.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
either force you by threatening to damage your ... your MS-dependent business ... threatening to sue unless you pay them for stuff they don't really have valid rights to
And all of this relates to the patent-free open sourcing that MS is doing right now, being the topic of discussion here? You do know that all patents related to this stuff is also covered in this push towards FOSS, right?