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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.
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