Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Microsoft Open Technologies Is Closing: Good Or Bad News For Open Source?

Posted by timothy on from the sea-change-or-see-no-change dept.

BrianFagioli writes When Microsoft Open Technologies was founded as a subsidiary of Microsoft — under Steve Ballmer's reign — many in the open source community hailed it as a major win, and it was. Today, however, the subsidiary is shutting down and being folded into Microsoft. While some will view this as a loss for open source, I disagree; Microsoft has evolved so much under Satya Nadella, that a separate subsidiary is simply no longer needed. Microsoft could easily be the world's biggest vendor of open source software, which is probably one reason some people don't like the term.

5 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Accepting a story from Florian Meuller? by MouseTheLuckyDog · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Cause that is about the only person who was praising Microsoft Open Tech when it started.

    Microsoft has a long way to convince me that they are committed to OSS. So far their acclaimed commitments seem to be mostly fluff with very little real substance in them..

    1. Re:Accepting a story from Florian Meuller? by afidel · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So far their acclaimed commitments seem to be mostly fluff with very little real substance in them..

      How about completely opening .Net, moving their build system to GitHub, and moving the compiler to LLVM? Those seem to have some real substance to me. Then there's them embracing Docker for Windows Server 10 and open sourcing that work. This is not your fathers Microsoft.

      --
      There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
    2. Re:Accepting a story from Florian Meuller? by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Speaking of MS OpenTech, people just don't understand what it is (or rather, was) about. Back when MS was still in the "dark ages" wrt open source, but slowly coming out of them, OpenTech was set up as an independent org that could work with open source without the fear of "contaminating" MS proper - remember, this was back when Ballmer with his "GPL is a virus" notions was still around, and lawyers were super-paranoid about people copy/pasting some code snippet and inadvertently exposing the code to some OSS license, or a patent claim or something like that. They were even more paranoid when people wanted to contribute something upstream; with a few exceptions, this was something that you had to go to OpenTech to do.

      Now that this is no longer the case, and regular devs inside MS are allowed (in fact, actively encouraged) to use and contribute to open source, the legal separation that was the whole point in the first place has lost its relevance. Notice how the announcement specifically notes that this is not about laying people off, just closing down the legal entity.

  2. Re:Open Tech is closing? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    That was added in the Windows 8.1 update, actually. It's not in the original Windows 8.

  3. Re:convicted monopolist shuts down open source dep by Darinbob · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Has Microsoft ever offered any apologies for its past evils? If not, then why should anyone trust them now? If someone goes and trusts a company that has been well proven to be untrustworthy in the past, and another person avoids them awaiting evidence of remorse and reform, then which one is the idiot?