Slashdot Mirror
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?"
I miss the Bill Gates borg icon, where did it go!
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.
#DeleteChrome
I wish this meme would die.
That's not a meme. It's a real strategy that Microsoft was doing as early as 1996.
I doubt Microsoft is going to extinguish open source. If that were possible they would have done it long ago. They are anything but altruistic.
If they're contributing to open source now, you can be certain they have a business reason. After all, they're a business.
I cautiously welcome this. Time will tell what's really behind it, of course. Meanwhile, no one is obliged to use their stuff if you don't wish to.
To change that, drastic changes in the corporate structure would be required, changes that i hardly believe they are willing to make.
Like changing chairmanship and corporate structure a couple times in the 20 years since?
This is Slashdot, so it wouldn't matter if Bill Gates and Microsoft gave all of their money to Linus, open sourced Windows and rewrote the entire kernel and set of API stacks on top of Linux, and then provided a mechanism to performantly convert every binary program and application (along with source code) ever written for Windows to run natively on Linux itself... and then renamed the company to Linuxsoft and had Paul Allen personally crash a rocket ship into the company's main campus after using its plume to draw the shape of a penguin whose cock is being sucked by Steve Ballmer...
... someone would STILL yell "Extend, Embrace, Extinguish!"
I wish this meme would die.
With time and good behavior on Microsoft's part, it will - eventually.
Seems like Microsoft should just embrace the meme. And then extend it. After that, they should have an easier time killing it.
(full disclosure: I am a developer on the RTVS team)
It is a bit too early to make feature-by-feature comparisons, since you'd be comparing green apples to ripe oranges. RStudio has been out for several years; RTVS is in its first public pre-release, it's not even feature complete yet.
So, for the most part, RStudio can currently do more. But there are exceptions already. Some of it stems from piggy-backing on top of VS, such as multi-language support - you can have a .cpp file in your R project, and you will get the usual VS editing experience for it, with syntax highlighting, completion etc.
Some of it is product-specific features, such as Variable Explorer (in RStudio, the same thing is called Environment). Have a look at this video, starting from 2:12 on. Notice how you can drill down into children of values without limitation - in RStudio, you're limited to a single level. Or, in the same video, note how the REPL has syntax highlighting for R code.
More of both - more product-specific features and improvements, and better integration with the rest of VS and other languages in it (esp. C++) - will be coming in the future.
Our issue tracker is public, and you can see the things that are in the pipeline. Please take a look, and if you see anything you like, comment on it to let us know that there's user demand for it. And if there's anything that you would be interested in that is not there at all, feel free to file it.