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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?"
This is partially offtopic, but I'll repost this a few times because I think it needs to be heard. Over the past few months, I've posted plenty of trollish ultra-nationalist comments. I've alternated between claiming to be an American citizen and a citizen of an EU member nation. I've taken stock of the responses to the comments based on whether I claimed to be an American or a European. I've always posted the comments as an Anonymous Coward, so the reputation of the poster cannot be an issue.
Ultra-nationalist and xenophobic comments posted while claiming to be an American are predictably nearly always downmodded to -1 and met with derision. The responses are both predictable and reasonable. The sentiments expressed in the posts are destructive and deserve their negative moderation.
However, the response to comments with the same type of views posted while claiming to be a European are very different. I've blamed much of Europe's financial woes on Syrian refugees. I've claimed that any foreign relations of the US are attempts to force their laws on Europe, regardless of whether it's true or not. I've even suggested that Europe should go to war with the US over data privacy. I've frequently used offensive stereotypes such as "dumb, fat Americans." I've suggested that the EU should cut all of Russia off from the internet. While some of these comments have been modded down, the majority seem to be modded up, frequently to +4 and +5.
It seems that there's a very different reaction to ultra-nationalistic and xenophobic statements depending on whether the source claims to be European or American. There definitely seems to be a pro-European bias, looking the other way to offensive and destructive statements made when I claim to be European. It's truly alarming that such comments would be acceptable from any source, but that seems to be the case.