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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.

14 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 armanox · · Score: 2

      Do we really care one way or another? I mean, honestly. Attitudes like that won't encourage them to open up more code in the future - they need to see some level of success in the small set of stuff they put out to be convinced to do more (how success is measured is a different question...).

      --
      I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
    2. 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.
    3. Re:Accepting a story from Florian Meuller? by FearTheDonut · · Score: 5, Informative

      It's not just .NET. It's the .NET compiler. ASP.NET. ASP.NET MVC. The Entity Framework. .NET Core Runtime libraries. This stuff is the heart of Microsoft development. And it's all open-source. And, they are providing support for cross-platform development on Mac and Linux. The Visual Studio Community edition is free (free as in beer).

      People can be skeptical to be skeptical, but, as you eluded to, this is not the Microsoft of old. As some of my friends have said, "Haters gonna hate..." And some things won't change.

    4. 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.

    5. Re:Accepting a story from Florian Meuller? by phantomfive · · Score: 2

      People can be skeptical to be skeptical, but, as you eluded to, this is not the Microsoft of old.

      I remember the Microsoft of old singing, "developers, developers, developers......" Sounds like the same old song to me.

      Microsoft has been giving stuff away free for a long time to get an edge on competition. There was a huge lawsuit about that with IE.

      TBH I'm not sure exactly what you think has changed.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  2. Funny way of saying "SQLServer Pricing Doubles" by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 2

    >> Microsoft has evolved so much under Satya Nadella

    That's a funny way of saying "your SQL Server and other Server pricing went through the roof"

    The whole Microsoft "open source" strategy seems to be based on getting as many software applications and developers ("it's free!") to depend on the Microsoft crown jewels of AD, SQL Server and Windows Server (2012) as they can, and then squeeze cash (e.g., core pricing vs. CPU pricing) from IT departments as they try to build out a stable backend to support all these apps. That's Balmer's "developers developers developers" plan anyway...and I don't see Satya doing anything different yet.

  3. I will miss them by WillAffleckUW · · Score: 2

    Well, actually, not really.

    Nobody ever believed them.

    --
    -- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
  4. the obligatory, by Victor+Tramp · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ..and nothing of value was lost.

    --
    US$0.02++
  5. Re:Open Tech is closing? by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 4, Funny

    " shut down " in the "start" menu

    They fixed that, didn't you hear? In Windows 8, the option to shut down the computer is now logically found under Settings.

    --
    Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
  6. Re:Open Tech is closing? by zamboni1138 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If I want to start the process of shutting down my computer, why wouldn't I go to a menu of things to start?

  7. 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.

  8. Re:convicted monopolist shuts down open source dep by terjeber · · Score: 2

    Giving tools to developers for lock-in technologies

    Yeah, you are right. They have only open-sourced .NET and it is now available on all major (and quite a few minor) platforms. They have open sourced the C# compiler. They have open sourced just about anything web related they are doing. So, what else should they open source? Windows? According to Microsoft that is apparently also an option they keep open.

    What, specifically, are you missing?

  9. 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?