Microsoft Releases First Public Preview of RTVS Under MIT and GPLv2 Licenses (microsoft.com)

shutdown -p now writes: Microsoft has released the first public preview of RTVS (R Tools for Visual Studio), an extension for Visual Studio that adds support for the R (GNU S) programming language. The product is open source, and while most of the code is under the MIT license, some components are GPLv2, in accordance with the R license. That's not the first time this week (or this year) that Microsoft's open source efforts have been front-page news; with its new role in the Eclipse Foundation, too, the company's angling toward being one of the largest open source companies around, even if that's a small part of its business model. Update: 03/09 19:03 GMT by T : Speaking of which: reader Salgak1 writes with his first submission, linking the Register's report that Microsoft has released a Debian-based Linux distro, called SONIC. "It is optimized for network switching, and apparently is a localized version of the "Azure Cloud Switch" released into the Azure cloud hosting system. Question is, is it just another Microsoft "Embrace, Extend. Extinguish" strategy in action?"

Comments

Re:Embrace, Extend, Extinguish Meme

[93 Escort Wagon]

I wish this meme would die.

With time and good behavior on Microsoft's part, it will - eventually. But the "meme" exists because of very real misbehavior by Microsoft over the course of many years.

It's analogous to a career criminal declaring he's gone straight - it's going to take time and repeated evidence before most people believe him.

Re: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish Meme

[Billly Gates]

So you think Apple, Google, or IBM who are the good guys would be any different?

Oh yeah IBM wasn't this awesome open source Linux friendly company we know today.

It is called a free market. Everyone will be evil given opportunity and everyone will be good saints as soon as competition comes in. Saying a leopard doesn't change it's spot is silly.

Companies are not your friends.

  They are actors just like you in a free market. Let me ask you all something? If you had a skillset no one else had would you be a nice guy and only charge 65k a year? Or would you charge the world and force employers to contract millions with 401k, stocks, and golden parachutes if you could?

Of course the later. Competition forces us to be nice