Open Source-happy Microsoft Joins Eclipse Foundation (networkworld.com)

alphadogg writes to note that just a day after announcing it would be bringing SQL Server to Linux, "Microsoft has announced that it is joining the Eclipse Foundation, an open source community for developers launched more than 10 years ago." Microsoft, which notes that it has worked with the Eclipse Foundation for years "to improve the Java experience across our portfolio of application platform and development services," made the announcement to attendees at EclipseCon, going on in Reston, Va., this week.

Comments

There's an old Microsoft slogan about this

[idontgno]

"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish."

Re:There's an old Microsoft slogan about this

[kheldan]

This, so much this. Glad someone else said it. I'd have to say, given Microsofts' track record, especially lately, that they're more interested in 'infiltrating' the Open Source community as much as possible, so as to more easily destroy it and make All Things Microsoft a reality. Come on, FTC, when are you going to get around to levelling monopoly charges against Microsoft?

Re:There's an old Microsoft slogan about this

[MightyMartian]

This isn't some Englishmen still taking the piss out of the Germans for WWII. Microsoft's turning over a new leaf is a very new phenomenon, so I don't see why a healthy dose of skepticism isn't in order. Microsoft has a lot of road to repair before a lot of people will be willing to fully trust it, and that's as it should be.

Re:There's an old Microsoft slogan about this

[Austerity Empowers]

Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

Doing the same thing over and over expecting different results is a sign of insanity.

If showing our age means we remember when MS was bad, and why MS was bad, then guilty as charged.

There are really good reasons to really hate Microsoft, and thus far, absolutely none to love them. Their OS is crap, their developer tool chain is crap, they still have cute ideas about the command line that are funny in a bad way. They appear to be all about Indian software development, and it shows. Honestly other than an effort by marketing to soften their image, they are still the same shitty company. It was just this past month that their covertly funded attempt at ruining Linux (aka the SCO lawsuit) finally died the true death. I don't know why we would expect anything has changed.

I will buy their turnaround the same way I bought Apple's turn-around: after surviving the brink of bankruptcy and fundamentally changing the nature of their product in acknowledgement of its defects, and coming out the door with something I want to buy on its own merits: not because I have to, not because I'm stuck in some demented ecosystem.

Re:There's an old Microsoft slogan about this

[barc0001]

OSS works a little differently. See Oracle and MySQL. Oops, I mean MariaDB.

As crazy as it sounds, Microsoft is probably actually trying to join the table in earnest for a change. They realize that the world is marching onward and that platforms are not as important as they used to be so they want to try and stay relevant. Witness their move to bring SQL server to Linux. They know that cloud/infrastructure on demand is where a lot of the world is going and SQL server on Windows just isn't going to be a big part of that picture. And honing in on Oracle's share of that space is a good motivation too.

Re:There's an old Microsoft slogan about this

[HeckRuler]

Especially since the evil old leaf's narfarious plan included

"Embrace open source"

as their opening move. And now we're supposed to be so glad that Microsoft is embracing open source? Seriously?

Hey, sure, if they get stuck on this phase, that's fine. But the moment they start making suggestions about the direction of the project, or new features they want to add, or "powerful extensions that would really help the project"... You know... I not sure which is worse, the maniac telling everyone to drive into the brick wall or the fool listening to him and steering the car into the brick wall.

Re:There's an old Microsoft slogan about this

[HiThere]

Change some of the code, wait a couple of years, file patent infringement claims.

Well, I haven't read the Eclipse license, so that might not work, but it's of a piece with what they've done before. So perhaps a modification of that, where Eclipse usability becomes dependent on a Microsoft plug-in that isn't a part of their donated code.

My feeling about MS is, "If it's a sleazy trick, then MS is either working on it or kicking themselves for not thinking of it first.".

Re:There's an old Microsoft slogan about this

[HiThere]

They've said that too often before, and every time they've lied. To trust them this time would be foolish.

That said, sometimes they do offer a hook with decent bait that it's possible to take without getting caught. Which is where not trusting them comes in. Be sure the bait is worth the risk, and avoid getting hooked...or poisoned.

Re:There's an old Microsoft slogan about this

[kheldan]

If Microsoft is actually dying, then so much the better, I'll throw a goddamned party when then go under.

Re:There's an old Microsoft slogan about this

[MightyMartian]

Look what Microsoft did to Kerberos... There are different kinds of poison pills.

Re: There's an old Microsoft slogan about this

[Anonymous Coward]

They could hire Poettering and kill your product from within.

Re:There's an old Microsoft slogan about this

[ilsaloving]

That's a strawman argument. There is zero evidence that that is their intention.

However, the is more than ample evidence of Microsoft disrupting competition in various, and sometimes ingenious, ways to either give them a significant edge, or to destroy their competition entirely.

Classic examples include:
-Trying to add windows-only extensions to java. Sun called them on that, sued, and thankfully won.
-Refusing to give OEMs very generous discounts/bonuses/etc, if they sold machines with anything other than Windows.
-Bundling IE with Windows, to destroy Netscape. They were ultimately sued by the US and European gov'ts, and lost, but they still won cause they became the default browser for a good decade. They subsequently did their damndest to fill the internet with proprietary crap like ActiveX, that wouldn't work on any other browser or OS.
-They successfully got Office OpenXML declared an industry standard, in one of the most sleazy and contentious ballots in the history of the ISO. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML) In the process, their ballot member stuffing hamstrung the ISO and ruined ISO's reputation.

The list is just massive, but the point is this. Microsoft would never do something so comically simplistic as try to 'close open source'. Their MO is to corrupt whatever they touch so that they can squeeze a disproportionate benefit from it.

They may well not be planning any such thing at all. But based on their previous behaviour, only a fool would take their word at face value.

Re:Will they help make Eclipse fast enough to use?

[Hognoxious]

Q: Why didn't they say something during the probationary period?

A: The were still waiting for it to open!

Re: Will they help make Eclipse fast enough to use

[MightyMartian]

What in the hell kind of hardware are you running Eclipse on? Shared drives on 10mb network cards plugged into hubs? It can be a bit slow at times for me, but I've never seen anything like that.

In other news: Hell freezes over, Pigs fly ...

[Qbertino]

... and the sea is running red with blood.

This move *does* raise an eyebrow with me. .Net FOSS? Naturally. SQL Server for Linux? Whatever. ... But this *is* surprising. They've got a very good IDE with visual studio, it is very surprising that they team up with Eclipse.

Perhaps it is to get closer to the Java camp? After all, that's where all the big corporate money is - Java Appservers and such.

Re:In other news: Hell freezes over, Pigs fly ...

[yodleboy]

"It is not surprising if Microsoft wants to turdify Eclipse through "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish." Microsoft under Nadella has been every bit as evil and corrupting as in the past under Gates and Ballmer."

jesus, some folks just won't let go... As if MS has not changed in 20 years. As if tech favorites like google, yahoo, hp, ibm, apple etc haven't ground the little guy beneath their feet on occasion. There's not a chance that the people making decisions these days at MS are from a newer generation than Gates, Ballmer et al. There's, not a chance that these new people have a different perspective on doing business. Nope, MS has stayed the same since 1998 or so and the rest of the tech industry has evolved into a serene and cooperative utopia.

Remember folks, once someone has committed a crime, served their sentence and gone on to do better (in general), it's OK to keep hating them no matter what.

Oh Shit!

[Agent0013]

Ape #1: Dear me. What are these things coming out of her nose?
Ape #2: Spaceballs.
Ape #1: Oh, shit. There goes the planet.

The common "Embrace Extend Extinguish" ....

[HerculesMO]

Which I expected to see on Slashdot in a laughably fast manner did not disappoint.

Whilst the anti MSers here continue with that tirade, the rest of us are noticing a differentiation in how MS is conducting is business. It's not selling software any more -- it's selling services. Office 365 and Azure are pretty much the key to this differentiation. They want to build their partner ecosystem (this is what they've been pushing heavily for the last year+) and allow their partners to resell not only Azure, but the PaaS offerings Microsoft has built and is building.

If you've seen "Field of Dreams" this is the Microsoft version of "If you build it they will come." They are building the future of deploying applications to the cloud, and managing everything throughout. They are going to integrate with everybody, they will make their own software a commodity and use that benefit of wide integration to drive it home in terms of operational benefits. It means developers can *just develop*. They won't have to worry about infrastructure, networking, etc.

Compared to AWS, Azure is a far less configurable but far easier to manage platform. AWS builds all of the automation they offer into a base of virtual machines that still need to be managed on a storage, network, and VM level. Azure offers that with less configurations (ie, less machine types) but also offers you abstraction from all of it via their PaaS services. The only thing AWS has to offer in that space is Beanstalk and to be honest, unless you're running a lot of Java services it's not that useful.

This is the future of Microsoft, in my opinion. You can think it's "embrace extend extinguish" but since all of their offerings are open source and they are making a hell of a lot of OS contributions, I think the simplicity of the hate has to be expanded a bit to think what MS could be doing to make money given their moves recently.

Re:It's hedging bets...

[PCM2]

As a key example, I have never met a shop that did SQL Server because they explicitly wanted it, but that it was the path of least resistance for supported database given an existing contract with MS.

But once Microsoft gets its database running on these customers' platform of choice, it can always start competing on price. SQL Server is a totally competent database. If Microsoft really gets it running on Linux in a way that Linux admins will like working with it, it stands to gain market share.

Re:It's hedging bets...

[phantomfive]

Previously, they hitched that all on the premise that a target market adopts Windows as the leverage point to get in. Now they are (seemingly) accepting that many market segments won't go that way (server and mobile particularly) and trying to tap into those markets.

A lot has changed, Windows is a small part of Microsoft's revenue, and the cloud is now the biggest part. CEO Nadella sees the cloud as a huge cash cow, and wants a part of (seriously, read the article).

So they probably have complaints like, ".net sucks because you can only develop for it on Windows." I'm sure they've heard it, because I've heard it. So they are trying to remove all barriers any pesky developers might tell their managers, preventing them from using the technology (as you pointed out).

Desperation

[plopez]

I for one smell desperation. See the recent article on SQL Server for Linux. They are losing mindshare and to remain relevant they need to get a footprint in the OSS space. They can no longer concede it to the competition.

Re:It's hedging bets...

[Burz]

As for .Net adoption, I wouldn't trust a company that extorts royalties from Android devices on patents it refuses to disclose publicly.

Patent revenues from Android devices are a big deal to MS... http://www.thewindowsclub.com/...

This theme about MS being "Open Source Happy" is dubious at best (no surprise it comes via timothy).