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

[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.

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...

[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).