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Microsoft Has More Open Source Contributors On GitHub Than Facebook and Google (thenextweb.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via The Next Web: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has really embraced open source over the past couple of years. GitHub, a site that is home to a number of the web's biggest collaborative code projects, has counted more than 5.8 million active users on its platform over the past 12 months, and says that Microsoft has the most open source contributors. Microsoft has 16,419 contributors, beating out Facebook's 15,682 contributors, Docker's 14,059 contributors, and Google's 12,140 contributors. The Next Web reports: "Of course, this didn't happen overnight. In October 2014, it open sourced its .NET framework, which is the company's programming infrastructure for building and running apps and services -- a major move towards introducing more developers to its server-side stack. Since then, it's open sourced its Chakra JavaScript engine, Visual Studio's MSBuild compiling engine, the Computational Networks Toolkit for deep learning applications, its Xamarin tool for building cross-platform apps and most recently, PowerShell. It's also worth noting that the company's Visual Studio Code text editor made GitHub's list of repositories with the most contributors. You can check out these lists, as well as other data from GitHub's platform on this page." GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath said in an interview with Fortune, "The big .Net project has more people outside of Microsoft contributing to it than people who work at Microsoft."
They still are the company with the most open source contributions/contributors. They just have most of their projects like android on their own hosting to not overload github.
If they didn't require you to sign a contract just to contribute to an open source project. It's like they don't actually want help. They won't even accept an important bug fix without a contract.
Sign me up!
-Nutella
They have a lot more free time as they clearly aren't coding Windows 10
Windows is still a stinky proprietary black box.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Microsoft is a software company. Facebook and Google are advertising companies. Who would you expect to have more Open Source software contributors?
Microsoft went overnight from just another big corporation to being an active participant in a community. They didn't half-ass it like their previous MS-PL things and they aren't just hosting a copy of their repo in public. They dove in head-first and use all the same 3rd party stuff everyone else does. Non-Microsoft devs are on equal footing with those from Microsoft -- if your code is good and your points valid, they are taken.
All of the new features in C# 7 were discussed by the public, with multiple revisions coming out driven by those talks. There's a huge corpus of features in flight, some with 3rd-party implementations, ready to be picked from for C# 8.
When .NET Core was announced I saw it as an opportunity to add the features I always wished it had, fix random bugs that I'd reported but had closed as "Wont Fix" because they were without enough benefit to their business customers, etc. -- my first pull request came in so fast they told me "err sorry we haven't figured out the process for adding APIs yet, hold on."
If you want an accurate measure of the number of open source contributors, don't limit yourself to github. Google opened sourced their own source code management system, Monorail. Many of there projects are hosted there such as Chromium and Android. There also huge contributors to LLVM/Clang, which uses SVN and of course the Linux kernel which is also not hosted on github.
So basically BS click bait article.
This.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Docker only has a couple hundred employees at most -- so these numbers are complete shit.
Since then, it's open sourced its Chakra JavaScript engine...
Someone let Al Gore know that they've released their Chakra - as open source software.
Do you have ESP?
why Windows 10 is so shitty. Open source is garbage.
This little turd blossom has shown up in every single new stream I have. So Microsoft is playing the "open source" game again? Does no one remember what happened the last time? What about embrace, extend, extinguish? Let me know when Microsoft does anything that isn't directly in their short term best interest. This PR stunt crap is just that. They've lost on the servers, they are losing browsers, they've lost on mobile, they lost on fitness trackers. No one really needs Windows anymore. The only product that Microsoft does really well is the Office Suite, and I suppose the Xbox. This new PR campaign of "open source" will end as soon as they pivot again, this is desperation for a dying company.
Yup. Forget all the entirely open source OSes that have way more contributors. It's only those people that post to Github that matter.
If you want an accurate measure of the number of open source contributors, don't limit yourself to github.
But that isnt what they are doing nor what they are claiming to do, it couldn't be much clearer and is written right there in the article title.
So basically BS click bait article.
You just failed to read the title: Microsoft Has More Open Source Contributors On GitHub Than Facebook and Google. Which is the same title as the article which references Github metrics here.
"Sorry Github you can't post your metrics because somebody might report on it and despite them posting an accurate headline there are incompetent people out there like 'slacka' that lack basic reading comprehension and might inadvertantly read your article and infer something else then complain about that inferrence"
Do yourself a favor and read the title, then if it doesn't interest you stop reading and do something else.
Microsoft abandons framework. Non-Microsoft developers continue it. Microsoft has biggest FOSS project. Nice slap in the face to those FOSS devs. Hopefully Oracle follows suit.
Number of contributors is NOT equal to number of good contributors.
Heck, if they contribute the type of stuff Windows uses, they can keep it private, as far as I'm concerned!
Covered in open sores.
Windows 10 is a festering mass of weeping plague blisters.
Still waiting for Caligari TrueSpace... They bought it out in 2008 and released it free in 2009. But the sourcecode is still locked away buried and noone is updating or modifying it. #sadface
Are the contributions due to poor base code? Do Google get less contributions because they put out a higher quality of code?
Say you're a millenial and actually use this github hoping to meet geekchix or fellow Big BangTheory fans or whatever.
In which group are you,
1) the embrace group
2) the extend group, or
3) the extinguish group?
Or did you sign up to be the Bad Example github user guy, always presented in front of the day's training session, to hang his head in shame and remorse, writing I will stop being a bad example 1000 times on the chalkboard somewhere in Redmond?
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
What have they ever embraced, extended and extinguished? Java was the only thing they ever applied it to and look at it now. Then some people said they were trying to do it with web standards and in fact they are dropping support for their extensions now because HTML is capable of doing pretty much everything they were designed for.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is like Year of the Linux Desktop, it's just something out-of-touch people to say to spread FUD. By now the phrases have been so wrong for so long they have lost all meaning. Everytime Microsoft does anything with open source the panicky masses like you run around like headless chickens shouting that the sky is falling...and it never does. How many more times do you have to be wrong?
And no, before you get all redfaced and furious Im not saying microsoft has never done anything bad, I'm saying the continued failed conspiracy theories are getting pretty ridiculous and tiresome.
With Win10 being OSS now it should be trivial to remove all the telemetry junk, it might even make the OS run faster! Right? RIGHT?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Dude, if you love and trust them so much then by all means hitch your cart to them and enjoy the ride.
Crapping in it and discarding their trash. Waiting for something tasty to show up when they will overwhelm it with numbers and devour.
So, Google and Facebook require less external people to fix their code.
Even assuming there are third party chunks that would need to be removed, it would be awesome to get this released. Doubly so if they could release either a repo, or individual codebases for older versions as well (There were versions all the way back to DOS, right?)
I used truespace a few times when I was a kid, but it was always too expensive for my wallet. I do remember it being the easiest and most intuitive modelling tool I ever used with my mouse.
FB's employee count was 14495 on June 30, 2016 (on their website). This seems to say that FB has 15682 contributors. So either FB hired like 5k+ employees in the past 2 months (hey, they have sales, which I doubt contributes to software), or there is significant double/triple/quadruple counting (or maybe past employees, but I doubt their turnover is that huge). I doubt any of this is FB's fault (since I don't think FB cares about these numbers), but the original article is pretty bad at reporting (at best), or has a hidden agenda (at worst).
nt
You criticize millenials yet fail to deliver a cogent argument. This is the internet equivalent of a crazy old man ranting.
In a hypothetical situation where Microsoft were to release a version of their APIs that replaced the need for wine and competed directly with crossover, you would have a solution to many requests of desktop Linux users.
Now wine and crossover would be in trouble, but the interoperability benefits would be huge.
From the crossover camp they might argue that there are anti-trust issues, but obviously Microsoft has the moral right to counter that they own the APIs.
Microsoft would have a legitimate revenue stream via Linux that would also let their other traditional desktop software products compete in the Linux application space.
Quite a few other open source products would be in trouble from the closed source products they would now compete with properly (the Linux niche would no longer be the same)
If this were to happen you could argue that embracing and extending GNU/Linux had occured. The extinguish part would not be so simple.
Now for a small fee, quite a few of us Linux users might just purchase an official Microsoft wine that actually works. That API is kind of the treasure chest, it's like the app store on the mobile platforms and it actually surprises me that Microsoft has not yet made this move. If I was a Microsoft investor I would see this as an excellent hedge and a move that created room for growth.
Doing so would compete with Apple and might turn some Mac users who don't want to use Windows and currently don't want to use Linux over to Linux. Who knows. The nerds are more tribal than the normal users.
Either way, if you don't trust Microsoft and don't want to use their products you would still have the choice to not use them. A few more users might switch to BSD (I don't know what it's called now because they've changed their name and I don't care)
The systemd debate would probably not matter anymore, unless if Microsoft was really smart and made their wine clone and win32 api part of systemd, it might end up leading to a completely non-gnu system that could even run off the bsd kernel, or God forbid, the windows kernel. Cos who would need Linux at all after that?
Are you serious? They were convicted in court.
Indeed, the conspiracy theories of this level of ridiculous gets old. Embrace, extend and extinguish was used internally in Microsoft documents discovered in anti-trust lawsuits. Literally in the public record in 2001.
I would applaud any serious attempt by any company to contribute to the Open Source community, both in terms of active contributors and also the open-sourcing of projects (particularly widely-used ones, such as the .Net Framework).
However, purely focussing on the number of contributors is potentially misleading for a number of reasons.
For example, a contributor who posts a single one-line update fixing a spelling mistake is still a contributor, and in the total that contributor carries as much weight as a contributor who has pushed out thousands of high quality updates across several/many projects.
Also, the quality of the contributions is important - on one level all contributions are welcome as they are an effort to help. But contributions which require subsequent additional contributions to resolve issues they have introduced are less desireable than the actual fix. I would assume that programmers working for MS and the other big contributing companies are more competent and therefore less likely to introduce problems than a part-time coder working from home, but that is a potentially dangerous assumption. Either way the quality of the contribution would be important, while also being hard to measure and quantify on a site-wide basis.
However, my biggest feeling for the misleading factor of the total contributors number is the range of projects on which those contributions are seen - if MS's 16k+ contributors all contribute solely to the open-sourced MS products, then (purely in my opinion) that somewhat devalues those contributions - they are still useful, welcome and gratefully accepted because the projects they are contributing to are themselves useful, but I feel they do less to improve the overall ecosystem of the Open Source community than the contributors putting time into projects from a range of different sources.
Its only Open Source if it's a respected Open Source license... we have been over this time and again with Microsoft and their cronies. They want the 'brand' without making the 'commitment'
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
This is not the first time Microsoft declared itself as open source. If they were dedicated to open source back then, they wouldn't be in a position to announce they open source; everyone would already know it. Put your money where your mouth is, Microsoft. Until they open-source Windows, Office, and Visual Studio, they are lying. And lairs are not to be trusted.
Don't stop where the ink does.
Results of study don't fit with my narrative. Therefore, study is flawed!
See Also: Climate Change, Anti-Vax, Evolution.
Trust Microsoft at your own peril - the road is littered with corpses of organizations that trusted Microsoft at some point.
Of bundling IE with Windows (I guess Apple should be guilty now too? how about Google with Chrome OS where it IS the OS??).
Your bias is showing.
If it is all under a decent open source license, embracing and extending is a GOOD thing. That's what open source is all about,
I think you mean yours since you seem to be biased against Microsoft and giving others a free pass for the same behavior.
Seriously?
"Embrace, extend, extinguish" isn't something that the Linux crowd just made up to slander Gates and Co. It's Microsoft's own internal policy, made public when documents were released during their trial and conviction. They are on record as considering open source to be equivalent to a cancer to be eradicated. They were found to be funneling money into SCO during their attack against Linux and IBM. And let's not forget the halloween documents. None of this is made-up conspiracy theorist nonsense on the part of the OSS community. It's part of the public record which anyone can reach in five minutes of googling:
https://www.justice.gov/sites/...
http://techrights.org/2009/06/...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
http://archive.is/201207112333...
http://www.catb.org/esr/hallow...
Microsoft is not a good-faith actor, and never has been. I see no reason to trust them, no matter their Github numbers.
Imagine all the people...
But... But... But... Twenty years ago, Microsoft was almost broken up over building a browser into the OS! A clearly evil practice no one would do today.
And with a strong copyleft license, the Extinguish step is impossible.
Great! So, what are they doing about extending it, then?
And when can we expect them to try to extinguish it?
MS has earned their track record on that, so it's up to a defender to prove it wrong.
Most large companies have their very own copy of github in-house. Most commonly these days it's on AWS or some other cloud offering that the company controls for their IT Projects.
I can confirm.
Though we aren't *companies*, most of the universities and research institutes here around (Switzerland) have their own in-house git repository.
Though in our case, a self-hosted copy of * Gitlab * is what is the most popular here around.
And most of the time it's hosted on the universty's/research institute's own server because of complex IP/publishing/secrecy considerations
And if we do it, I can clearly imagin that huge corporation could be doing it too.
And for the record, Google has announced that they've shut down Google-Code for 3rd party project only. Android is *still* officially hosted on their servers.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Timing is everything. Now a days you don't destroy a company with anti-monopoly practices. Back then that is exactly what it did. It's not about the one technique they used, it's about Microsoft's systemic use of anti-monopoly tactics. Playing down the fact is a huge disservice to the people's whose lively hoods were destroyed by illegal practices.
No, just didn't know what group would fit the bill; just swap the term "Gen X"ers in its place, it was no swipe at millenials and no offense was intended. Close to old man ranting.