Is it how many contributors their open source projects have? nope, FontAwesome has maybe 100 contributors to all of it's 5 projects but it's listed as having 9000+ contributors.
From what I can gather it's mostly based on the number of people that forked one of their projects (with some padding, maybe by the number of contributors to forks of the project? I have no idea)
This doesn't seem like a metric that is more meaningful then just the number of stars a repository has.
I'm no huge fan of Microsoft but leading that list with Azure made me recall a nice experience I had with their devs.
One of their APIs was missing something I needed so I created an issue on Github. Not only did the devs respond, they thanked me profusely for the input and made the (rather significant) change in days. I don't know if it's true or not, but I felt like their only user whenever I interacted with them (their issue tracker was rather empty...)
Historically I believe F# was the first project Microsoft open sourced. I'm not sure the current incarnation of the project reflects the entire history, but the language has active community contributors, with Don Syme of MSR acting as benevolent dictator. https://github.com/Microsoft/visualfsharp/graphs/contributor...
omg, it's based on "the number of unique contributors (users who pushed code, opened or commented on an issue or PR)" (from https://octoverse.github.com/#open-source).
So if I open sourced a buggy project, and someone reported a bug by opening an issue, and then 100 other people commented on that issue, my project would have 101 contributors!
2561 members are the ones who made Microsoft org show up on their GitHub profile. By default, GitHub does not list your orgs on your profile. And many people are simply not aware of this, because your profile page looks different to you and others. You don't realize this until you visit your profile from incognito window or something.
One method that comes to mind would be checking commit authors' e-mail addresses. Someone with @microsoft.com e-mail would very likely be an employee of MSFT.
This is very good, with this I learned that it's never too late to a company change. A very slow and large company like MS took decades to make this change, but they did well.
And, they do that not because they are "good guys", but because this is the strategy to make them grow on their business. They are thinking on themselves.
> A very slow and large company like MS took decades to make this change, but they did well.
From the outside imo it feels like it took ages for them to start this change, but actually doing it once they first started open-sourcing things seems to have been an incredibly quick switch, over just a couple of years. Has there been loads of progress on this in the background that's just only become visible now?
I suspect that most of their code was probably version controlled in Git anyway, so it wouldn't take that much effort to simply upload it to Github. What really delays stuff is probably the approval process, which for some companies can be really slow.
They started this move almost a decade ago, gradually, and just recently the accumulated effort got so relevant, that is evident even for an outsider like me, that they changed their strategy, that is why it seems now it's "visible".
"How I can notice this change of strategy?" may you ask, It's because they always said things like this, per example, that Linux was not good because something open source could never be better than a closed and proprietary system with a company protecting their code.
But a quite decent improvement from the era when the company bribed government officials to purchase bulk licences for pupils and govn't, distorting the job market. This is a less harmful Microsoft than it was 5-10-20 years ago.
Well, to be fair, he was trying to refer to the fact that GPL is viral (turning other licenses into its own). That is a valid critique of GPL (it reduces developer freedom) and that is why it has been in steady decline compared to more liberal licenses (as a percent of FOSS licenses).
that's no different from any company with more than 10K employees, one group won't necessarily be aligned to all the others... The developer and azure areas of MS have definitely been leaning in the pro-floss side of things... Windows and Office, not so much, who knows wrt XBox, they seem to flip-flop on indee support.
>But a quite decent improvement from the era when the company bribed government officials to purchase bulk licences for pupils and govn't, distorting the job market
IIRC they're still doing that. In India I think?
>This is a less harmful Microsoft than it was 5-10-20 years ago.
The key to that is Microsoft being far less powerful than it was 5-10 years ago. Where MS can throw it's weight around, it still does.
The aftermath of the DOJ case is probably as much as responsible for that as the competition which ended up marginalizing them.
>>But a quite decent improvement from the era when the company bribed government officials to purchase bulk licences for pupils and govn't, distorting the job market
> IIRC they're still doing that. In India I think?
I wasn't aware of this. At least the IT textbooks in my home country write about “text processor” and “spreadsheet tool” and not explicitly MS Word or Excel. The programming classes don't require MS Visual Studio project files to be submitted either.
In 2008 Hungary paid $162M for the “Clean Software Programme” for 3 years. In 2011 it became $54M for an other 3 years, in 2014 it was reduced to $2.8M. I don't hear stories any more about their legal bullying team called BSA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSA_(The_Software_Alliance) which with members of the local police they appeared time to time at business offices asking the for proof of purchase. Even they had no search warrant, they used a psychological terror with the presence of the police to threaten the businesses.
This is one of their ads from the past http://img.index.hu/cikkepek/0101/tech/bsaplakat2.jpg It says: “Don't use illegal software! _Users_ of illegal software can sentenced to 2-5 years. _Have you been inspected today?_
This is quite an improvement from the olden days when a certain Microsoft executive described the GPL as a cancer, and open source in general as a thing to avoid
> This is quite an improvement from the olden days when a certain Microsoft executive described the GPL as a cancer, and open source in general as a thing to avoid
Absolutely.
And don't take this the wrong way... I much appreciate the improvements. But there's still a very strong trend that Microsoft code contributions tend to be in MIT or similarly permissively licensed projects. They still tend to avoid the GPL where possible.
(Disclaimer: Have contributed code and patches. I don't personally don't mind permissive licenses)
The problem of these licenses is that they don't come with patents grants. Which given that this is Microsoft we are talking about, it's a big deal.
Of course, their projects does come with a patents license, in addition to the copyright license, but it's unclear to me whether this license applies to derivative works for example. I'm not a lawyer of course and I have a very limited understanding, but interpreting their license as an English text, I really don't think it applies to derivate works. Would like an analysis of somebody knowledgeable, because a project that can't be safely forked isn't open source. Here's their license: https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/blob/master/PATENTS.TXT
Anyway, my point is that I would have preferred something like the Apache License, which is still permissive, but was written by lawyers that know what they are doing and has an explicit patents grant in it. You see, people think of BSD and MIT as being "permissive", but that's only true as far as the copyright law is concerned. Patents are a whole different thing.
Yes. If you're the original copyright holder, you only give others cancer with the GPL. As the the copyright holder, you are licensing your code to others and as such, you subject yourself to whatever terms you want. But those who accept the terms of your copyleft license are bound to all the cancerous viral terms you set.
As a user, I prefer licenses like MIT that just give the code away with some reasonable strings attached. As a pip-squeak creator, I have to admit the copyleft licenses are attractive - the more viral and toxic (like AGPL), the better! I like being able to show off my clean and valuable code and have some reasonable expectation that no big corporation will rip me off. But then, universities and hobbyists will have full run of my code and that suits me fine.
Am I greedy? Am I stingy to think of my code this way? Should I be happy that anyone would see fit to use my code and thus maximize that chance by licensing with MIT? Or is no value ever generated with all the codes being completely free and open? I wrestle with this.
if you are attempting to exploit other peoples code with out giving anything back to the people that created the code then GPL is a cancer
>MIT or the MS-PL is much more practical.
This depends on the project
I normally license my libraries, code I intend to be included in other software under BSD or MIT, but full developed software that is intended to be used as is gets GPL.
"If you are a software repository, proprietary license is toxic waste."
"If you write software, proprietary content is a time bomb waiting to kill everyone involved."
Does this kind of language really help anyone? Do you want to be called a toxic waste distributor? Do you like to plant bombs in peoples projects, killing them?
"Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible-just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.
Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license. If this seems surprising to you, please read on."
I'm not sure what changed about them. Do you think that dumping some code on GitHub is enough? I disagree.
"Linux kids" hated Microsoft because of their dirty tactics, exemplified for example in the "Halloween documents" [1], which shows among other things how they sponsored the SCO lawsuits against Linux. "Linux kids" also hated Microsoft for how they always tried to subvert open standards, like for example the Open Document Format (ODF). "Linux kids" also hated how Microsoft tried to push people towards DRM and Trusted Computing.
If they changed, that would mean they no longer engage in such tactics, right?
Yet Microsoft constantly engages in racketeering practices against Android phone makers and against Linux, with their huge patents portfolio, turning into genuine patent trolls. They make more money from Android than from their Windows Phone. They are also coercing computer makers to install Windows on computers, threatening with patents that allegedly cover Linux. If you can't innovate, litigate, right? And on open standards Microsoft is still engaged in subverting ODF, forcing governments that want open formats to accept OOXML as an alternative. And on Trusted Computing, well, they weren't the ones popularizing it, Apple takes the credit for that one, but they surely benefit from it now ;-)
Oh, and the often cited article by Scott Hanselman, titled "Microsoft killed my Pappy", doesn't mention these problems. Convenient, but it feels like a slap in the face.
Yet indeed, Microsoft did change. The Microsoft I know would have never tricked users in giving away their privacy by dark patterns [2]. And I can recognize they now have a wonderful PR department, otherwise this "change" nonsense wouldn't have flied without one.
Meh. Linux would never have replaced Windows on desktop computers back then or ever. Anyway, the great majority of people never cared about Microsoft's behavior towards computer makers, Linux or Open Office. That's just politics.
If I boycotted every company who played hard-ball politics, I would be living alone and naked in the woods. Your priorities are out of whack if you're railing against Microsoft but still living on the grid.
Scott Hanselman's article is a whole 20 paragraphs long, it wasn't ever supposed to be a comprehensive coverage of every action Microsoft has ever taken.
Like most people, all I ever cared about was high quality software and Microsoft has it in spades...which is why almost every business desktop system on the planet is running Windows.
Nothing changed about Microsoft. Back then, MS's leadership was doing things that they thought would make them the most money and now MS's leadership are doing things that they think will make them the most money. Being "for" or "against" OSS or Linux or whatever doesn't even enter into the equation.
To be frank, when you are no longer the dominant player in a market, open source looks very appealing as a method of gathering additional market share. If you are the dominant player, there is little reason to give your opponents a tactical advantage by open sourcing your software.
Very few open source companies make money and even fewer companies make significant revenue as a consequence of releasing free/open software as their core business (FB/Google, for example, only open source ancillary services or services which devalue their competitors tactical advantages).
Let's. Microsoft is the biggest spender on R&D amongst software companies and they sponsor a lot of research without clear immediate benefits. This is in stark contrast to all the other big companies who largely only sponsor projects driven by product requirements. They regularly publish research papers in the best conferences and journals. MSR is the last bastion of well-funded, blue sky industrial R&D and the closest (though still a far cry) approximation we have to the precedent set by Bell Labs and Xerox Parc.
I don't begrudge them a few patents in exchange for that.
I keep saying that for a lot of people there's nothing they could do to change their opinion because people are so invested in them being a bad guy. It's part of a world view.
It seems to me like they are only open sourcing the products they wish more people are using, and not their actually useful products like MSOffice and the Windows OS.
Edit: to be clear, I know it is in their best interest not to open source those products, because that's where most of their money comes from. But it really looks to me like the want to flood the market with random open source stuff, so that they seem more open source friendly. But in reality they are not actually contributing anything very useful to the community.
and click on the last tab (077be8bd -> 966c0823) and click on any of the files in the tab, you can see the diff editor in action. I don't know how much money was spent in developing the editor, but it's FREE for use by the community.
Other people are already flooding you with counterexamples, but I'll add to the pileup:
Z3 (https://github.com/Z3Prover/z3) is the Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solver to use. It is such a quality piece of software and it's amazingly easy to find help on StackOverflow from the main developers. Z3 really is the default choice for an SMT solver these days (i.e. you only reach for other solvers when you really have to).
Roslyn (https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn) is the C# (and VB) compiler as a library. Useful for doing code analysis and code generation for a modern imperative language. Roslyn is a whole lot easier to get started with than integrating Clang/LLVM into a project, so it really lowers the barrier of entry for lightweight program analysis projects.
they are not actually contributing anything very useful to the community
'very' useful is of course subject to debate, but did you even bother to check what they have on github? F#/msbuild/vscode to name some bigger ones, then there's smaller things like ffmpeginterop etc which I was looking into just last week.
> But in reality they are not actually contributing anything very useful to the community
Uhm... .NET? Anyone?
Google doesn't open source their search engine, most larger corporations don't open source some key products that they make money from. They are in the business of making money, afterall.
Agreed - I have access to Visual Studio at work, but for some projects I've lately been using VSCode. It's super fast and has most of the features I need. Visual Studio is of course more fully featured, but I don't always need everything it has, and god it is SLOW!
I've been using dotnetcore to prototype a project. I'm actually really impressed with it. Every time I build and run it on Linux I'm resurprised that the project started in Visual Studio and builds / runs on Linux. Neat stuff, now they just need to add support LDAP.
This is all coming from someone who only uses Windows for Overwatch, Office, and courses that require it.
Leaving aside the obvious methodology issues, whenever such a huge company starts using a third party extensively I start worrying that they will buy them and lay waste to the values of the original company. At least we'll have GitLab and the like.
> whenever such a huge company starts using a third party extensively I start worrying that they will buy them and lay waste to the values of the original company.
The issue is the financial health I would be worried about. I haven't seen GitHub as anything special and it is clearly not the most Open Sourced company and their price structure has been all over the place. I am not worried about MicroSoft doing anything with Github they already have VS using git and you can use it dozens of different ways. There is nothing to be made with owning one piece of a dozen.
At this stage the value of GitHub doesn't have much to do with git per se. It's about the projects' communities hosted there. That said, I don't see much of uniqueness in what GitHub provides, it just happened to be good enough and popped up at proper time.
Microsoft is definitely trying to change its perception among the people, from hardcore closed box to trying to be the typical silicon valley company which opensources time to time to entice engineers working for them and yeah, greater good of the community.
But, as you see if you add Angular and Google's contributions, Google leads the list by a margin. So this looks more like a PR exercise and since when did we start taking BI articles on tech seriously(no offence to any readers).
Regarding poorly research, this paragraph from the article struck me as odd:
> The data isn't perfect, since it only relies on GitHub information available publicly — lots of businesses and project teams use GitHub in a private mode to quietly share their code. But it's still a big step forward for Microsoft.
Que? The article is regarding open source, not the use of GitHub as a source control, right? So even though the statement is true, it's not really making any sense. Am I misreading this?
It's a bit different when a corporation open sources their product because it brings them more business value than a corporation actually contributes to not their open source projects. Does MS do that?
Yeah Microsoft contributes to a bunch of projects. I'm sure at least in part that's to help compatibility with their systems, but it still helps those projects that are not theirs.
A good example is Docker where, IIRC, Microsoft people were the top non-docker contributor for a while.
I think akerro is asking about the motivation for Microsoft's contributions to OSS, rather than whether they benefit from it (clearly they do).
My impression, having spoken to people from Microsoft involved in OSS, is that they are pretty much entirely driven by what will make them the most profit. Sometimes that means making software "open source" and accepting contributions from the public (free labour!), other times that means keeping their software proprietary. They don't seem to care about ethics, or software freedom. It's a shame, but Microsoft aren't the only ones with that mentality. Big businesses are, more often than not, primarily motivated by profit.
There is always some direct or indirect benefit, but it conts more when community is involved in development of OSS supported by corporation, like GSoC, where actual community is paid to work on selected projects, Clang, where Apple tried to reach consensus with GNU, BSD, Mozilla which creates a lot of fun stuff like Rust and Servo, their full MozLabs and WebOfThings, DuckDuckGo.
Companies are rarely of a single mind. I like to believe some departments within it are less prone to self-reflection and still need a bit of nudging. In Microsoft's case, I think they went user analytics crazy in recent times and see it as a path to invest resources on. And in true corporation fashion, they are being a bit too heavy-handed with it.
Only an egomaniacal coddled baby with an exaggerated sense of self-importance would think that their shiy abandonware project is going to get 101 PR comments.
Yikes. Personal attacks aren't allowed on Hacker News. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do this. Instead, please post civilly and substantively, or not at all:
GPL and Open Source are still a cancer purely from Business perspective especially on a short term perspective. This is exactly Steve Ballmer too, he is a business guy running a tech organization. He generated huge profits.
Satya Nadella is a technical guy, who had seen the benefits of OSS tools, languages and platforms to know how they impact both the developer mindshare & long-term company perspective
Thats a bit like saying, as long as Google keeps their search algorithm closed source, i see it as charade.
I'm happy that those companies open source more and more code. And Microsoft released some of their key technologies like .Net as open source. Personally i give them credit for that.
Nope, I don't think so. I don't demand Microsoft to open up the Windows sources or sources for MS-Office for that matter. They make money with these products and I understand the incentive to keep them closed. Alas NTFS is a filesystem, not the kernel of the OS. If Microsoft would recognize that there are other operating systems than Windows, and that it is valid that they operate with NTFS partitions, NTFS would be open.
Oh and yes, .NET is open source by now, btw. I think it's great too. And I am far less critical of Microsoft than 7-8 years ago. But opening .NET is also a strategic descision. In essence, it remains a Microsoft platform, and if more software for linux is written with .NET, good for Microsoft. If more software for windows is developed on linux machines with .NET, good for Microsoft. If more linux devs switch to windows, because of the better .NET integration, great for Microsoft. It's a win-win situation either way.
I'd love to see a development, that might be a net-loss[0] for Microsoft but a net-win for systems interoperability or the open source community.
If that is considered valid, then let's also apply that broad sentence to a ton of other companies out there (Google, Apple). There's huge value to them open sourcing the things they have without giving away their core software.
The problem I see with OSS folks is that they think if a company isn't all in, they are corrupt. This polarized view doesn't work in the real world.
At some point, some of us engineers like making money, we do need a place to live and eat after all.
How is that calculated?
I mean Microsoft only has 2561 members (https://github.com/orgs/Microsoft/people) , so it isn't how many microsoft members contribute to open source.
Is it how many contributors their open source projects have? nope, FontAwesome has maybe 100 contributors to all of it's 5 projects but it's listed as having 9000+ contributors.
From what I can gather it's mostly based on the number of people that forked one of their projects (with some padding, maybe by the number of contributors to forks of the project? I have no idea)
This doesn't seem like a metric that is more meaningful then just the number of stars a repository has.
Microsoft also has:
https://github.com/azure
https://github.com/OfficeDev
https://github.com/mspnp
https://github.com/dotnet
https://github.com/aspnet
https://github.com/powershell
https://github.com/nuget - not sure this counts
plus probable another 100 i'm not aware of.
I'm no huge fan of Microsoft but leading that list with Azure made me recall a nice experience I had with their devs.
One of their APIs was missing something I needed so I created an issue on Github. Not only did the devs respond, they thanked me profusely for the input and made the (rather significant) change in days. I don't know if it's true or not, but I felt like their only user whenever I interacted with them (their issue tracker was rather empty...)
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and many more but this is still not the entire list:
https://github.com/Xamarin
https://github.com/PowerBI
https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge
https://github.com/yammer
https://github.com/OneDrive
https://github.com/MicrosoftResearch
https://github.com/LIS
https://github.com/DynamicsCRM
https://github.com/MicrosoftDX
https://github.com/ms-iot
https://github.com/microsoft-mobile
https://github.com/thaliproject
https://github.com/OneGet
.
Please take a look here: https://microsoft.github.io
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Historically I believe F# was the first project Microsoft open sourced. I'm not sure the current incarnation of the project reflects the entire history, but the language has active community contributors, with Don Syme of MSR acting as benevolent dictator. https://github.com/Microsoft/visualfsharp/graphs/contributor...
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omg, it's based on "the number of unique contributors (users who pushed code, opened or commented on an issue or PR)" (from https://octoverse.github.com/#open-source).
So if I open sourced a buggy project, and someone reported a bug by opening an issue, and then 100 other people commented on that issue, my project would have 101 contributors!
I guess that other _companies_ have even less than 2561 employees on GitHub
2561 members are the ones who made Microsoft org show up on their GitHub profile. By default, GitHub does not list your orgs on your profile. And many people are simply not aware of this, because your profile page looks different to you and others. You don't realize this until you visit your profile from incognito window or something.
The actual people count in https://github.com/orgs/Microsoft/people is twice as much. (I can see the actual number because I'm in the org.)
Oh, I didn't know that.
But it's still obvious that this is not the metric that was used.
One method that comes to mind would be checking commit authors' e-mail addresses. Someone with @microsoft.com e-mail would very likely be an employee of MSFT.
I doubt that explains FonttAwesome though.
This is very good, with this I learned that it's never too late to a company change. A very slow and large company like MS took decades to make this change, but they did well. And, they do that not because they are "good guys", but because this is the strategy to make them grow on their business. They are thinking on themselves.
Um, Microsoft has also been a steady producer of academic research papers.
Just as an example: http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html
(Scroll to the bottom, and see that MS is #1, ahead of e.g. MIT, which is #3 on the list, and far ahead of Google which is #17 on the list)
Not to mention, they employ many stalwarts of CS, like Simon Peyton Jones and Leslie Lamport.
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> A very slow and large company like MS took decades to make this change, but they did well.
From the outside imo it feels like it took ages for them to start this change, but actually doing it once they first started open-sourcing things seems to have been an incredibly quick switch, over just a couple of years. Has there been loads of progress on this in the background that's just only become visible now?
I suspect that most of their code was probably version controlled in Git anyway, so it wouldn't take that much effort to simply upload it to Github. What really delays stuff is probably the approval process, which for some companies can be really slow.
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They started this move almost a decade ago, gradually, and just recently the accumulated effort got so relevant, that is evident even for an outsider like me, that they changed their strategy, that is why it seems now it's "visible".
"How I can notice this change of strategy?" may you ask, It's because they always said things like this, per example, that Linux was not good because something open source could never be better than a closed and proprietary system with a company protecting their code.
It's because they're bleeding engineers like crazy. Anyone with offers from Google, FB and MSFT would choose Google or FB 99/100 times
That's because Microsoft doesn't pay well and the benefits aren't as nice as goog or FB.
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I also believe that this is one of the reasons. Open source is "cool" and motivating to work for.
Pity they changed and became even worse in relation to privacy with Windows 10...
AFAIK Angular is part of Google.
But a quite decent improvement from the era when the company bribed government officials to purchase bulk licences for pupils and govn't, distorting the job market. This is a less harmful Microsoft than it was 5-10-20 years ago.
> a quite decent improvement from the era when
Or the era of "Linux is a cancer"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_c...
Yeah, now they're just engaging in racketeering against Linux and Android using their patents.
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Well, to be fair, he was trying to refer to the fact that GPL is viral (turning other licenses into its own). That is a valid critique of GPL (it reduces developer freedom) and that is why it has been in steady decline compared to more liberal licenses (as a percent of FOSS licenses).
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It still has split personality, unfortunately. You can't turn such a huge company 100% around in such a short time.
that's no different from any company with more than 10K employees, one group won't necessarily be aligned to all the others... The developer and azure areas of MS have definitely been leaning in the pro-floss side of things... Windows and Office, not so much, who knows wrt XBox, they seem to flip-flop on indee support.
>But a quite decent improvement from the era when the company bribed government officials to purchase bulk licences for pupils and govn't, distorting the job market
IIRC they're still doing that. In India I think?
>This is a less harmful Microsoft than it was 5-10-20 years ago.
The key to that is Microsoft being far less powerful than it was 5-10 years ago. Where MS can throw it's weight around, it still does.
The aftermath of the DOJ case is probably as much as responsible for that as the competition which ended up marginalizing them.
> IIRC they're still doing that. In India I think?
They still do this in France and they are being sued for this. Actually this is in today's French headlines.
>>But a quite decent improvement from the era when the company bribed government officials to purchase bulk licences for pupils and govn't, distorting the job market > IIRC they're still doing that. In India I think?
I wasn't aware of this. At least the IT textbooks in my home country write about “text processor” and “spreadsheet tool” and not explicitly MS Word or Excel. The programming classes don't require MS Visual Studio project files to be submitted either.
In 2008 Hungary paid $162M for the “Clean Software Programme” for 3 years. In 2011 it became $54M for an other 3 years, in 2014 it was reduced to $2.8M. I don't hear stories any more about their legal bullying team called BSA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSA_(The_Software_Alliance) which with members of the local police they appeared time to time at business offices asking the for proof of purchase. Even they had no search warrant, they used a psychological terror with the presence of the police to threaten the businesses.
This is one of their ads from the past http://img.index.hu/cikkepek/0101/tech/bsaplakat2.jpg It says: “Don't use illegal software! _Users_ of illegal software can sentenced to 2-5 years. _Have you been inspected today?_
This is quite an improvement from the olden days when a certain Microsoft executive described the GPL as a cancer, and open source in general as a thing to avoid
> This is quite an improvement from the olden days when a certain Microsoft executive described the GPL as a cancer, and open source in general as a thing to avoid
Absolutely.
And don't take this the wrong way... I much appreciate the improvements. But there's still a very strong trend that Microsoft code contributions tend to be in MIT or similarly permissively licensed projects. They still tend to avoid the GPL where possible.
(Disclaimer: Have contributed code and patches. I don't personally don't mind permissive licenses)
The problem of these licenses is that they don't come with patents grants. Which given that this is Microsoft we are talking about, it's a big deal.
Of course, their projects does come with a patents license, in addition to the copyright license, but it's unclear to me whether this license applies to derivative works for example. I'm not a lawyer of course and I have a very limited understanding, but interpreting their license as an English text, I really don't think it applies to derivate works. Would like an analysis of somebody knowledgeable, because a project that can't be safely forked isn't open source. Here's their license: https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/blob/master/PATENTS.TXT
Anyway, my point is that I would have preferred something like the Apache License, which is still permissive, but was written by lawyers that know what they are doing and has an explicit patents grant in it. You see, people think of BSD and MIT as being "permissive", but that's only true as far as the copyright law is concerned. Patents are a whole different thing.
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GPL is a cancer. That's why people vastly prefer something more like the MIT license these days.
Yes. If you're the original copyright holder, you only give others cancer with the GPL. As the the copyright holder, you are licensing your code to others and as such, you subject yourself to whatever terms you want. But those who accept the terms of your copyleft license are bound to all the cancerous viral terms you set.
As a user, I prefer licenses like MIT that just give the code away with some reasonable strings attached. As a pip-squeak creator, I have to admit the copyleft licenses are attractive - the more viral and toxic (like AGPL), the better! I like being able to show off my clean and valuable code and have some reasonable expectation that no big corporation will rip me off. But then, universities and hobbyists will have full run of my code and that suits me fine.
Am I greedy? Am I stingy to think of my code this way? Should I be happy that anyone would see fit to use my code and thus maximize that chance by licensing with MIT? Or is no value ever generated with all the codes being completely free and open? I wrestle with this.
Ooh who? Ballmer?
I'm just here to remind people that this same executive still ran Microsoft just two years ago.
If you're trying to write commercial software and make money off of it, the GPL is a cancer.
MIT or the MS-PL is much more practical.
To translate
if you are attempting to exploit other peoples code with out giving anything back to the people that created the code then GPL is a cancer
>MIT or the MS-PL is much more practical.
This depends on the project
I normally license my libraries, code I intend to be included in other software under BSD or MIT, but full developed software that is intended to be used as is gets GPL.
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"If you are a software repository, proprietary license is toxic waste."
"If you write software, proprietary content is a time bomb waiting to kill everyone involved."
Does this kind of language really help anyone? Do you want to be called a toxic waste distributor? Do you like to plant bombs in peoples projects, killing them?
"Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible-just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.
Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license. If this seems surprising to you, please read on."
from http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
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When I was a script kiddie back in the mid nineties Microsoft was this evil corporate empire that all the linux kids hated.
Now I'm in my mid 30s and I respect them a lot and would definitely work for them.
I guess we both have changed.
I'm not sure what changed about them. Do you think that dumping some code on GitHub is enough? I disagree.
"Linux kids" hated Microsoft because of their dirty tactics, exemplified for example in the "Halloween documents" [1], which shows among other things how they sponsored the SCO lawsuits against Linux. "Linux kids" also hated Microsoft for how they always tried to subvert open standards, like for example the Open Document Format (ODF). "Linux kids" also hated how Microsoft tried to push people towards DRM and Trusted Computing.
If they changed, that would mean they no longer engage in such tactics, right?
Yet Microsoft constantly engages in racketeering practices against Android phone makers and against Linux, with their huge patents portfolio, turning into genuine patent trolls. They make more money from Android than from their Windows Phone. They are also coercing computer makers to install Windows on computers, threatening with patents that allegedly cover Linux. If you can't innovate, litigate, right? And on open standards Microsoft is still engaged in subverting ODF, forcing governments that want open formats to accept OOXML as an alternative. And on Trusted Computing, well, they weren't the ones popularizing it, Apple takes the credit for that one, but they surely benefit from it now ;-)
Oh, and the often cited article by Scott Hanselman, titled "Microsoft killed my Pappy", doesn't mention these problems. Convenient, but it feels like a slap in the face.
Yet indeed, Microsoft did change. The Microsoft I know would have never tricked users in giving away their privacy by dark patterns [2]. And I can recognize they now have a wonderful PR department, otherwise this "change" nonsense wouldn't have flied without one.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents
[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/windows-10-microsoft-b...
You should be more worried about Google and Facebook tracking your spatial and temporal data than Microsoft racking fees from Android OEMs.
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Meh. Linux would never have replaced Windows on desktop computers back then or ever. Anyway, the great majority of people never cared about Microsoft's behavior towards computer makers, Linux or Open Office. That's just politics.
If I boycotted every company who played hard-ball politics, I would be living alone and naked in the woods. Your priorities are out of whack if you're railing against Microsoft but still living on the grid.
Scott Hanselman's article is a whole 20 paragraphs long, it wasn't ever supposed to be a comprehensive coverage of every action Microsoft has ever taken.
Like most people, all I ever cared about was high quality software and Microsoft has it in spades...which is why almost every business desktop system on the planet is running Windows.
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Nothing changed about Microsoft. Back then, MS's leadership was doing things that they thought would make them the most money and now MS's leadership are doing things that they think will make them the most money. Being "for" or "against" OSS or Linux or whatever doesn't even enter into the equation.
To be frank, when you are no longer the dominant player in a market, open source looks very appealing as a method of gathering additional market share. If you are the dominant player, there is little reason to give your opponents a tactical advantage by open sourcing your software.
Very few open source companies make money and even fewer companies make significant revenue as a consequence of releasing free/open software as their core business (FB/Google, for example, only open source ancillary services or services which devalue their competitors tactical advantages).
Let's discuss Microsoft's software patents.
Any Github contributions they make are trivial in comparison.
Let's. Microsoft is the biggest spender on R&D amongst software companies and they sponsor a lot of research without clear immediate benefits. This is in stark contrast to all the other big companies who largely only sponsor projects driven by product requirements. They regularly publish research papers in the best conferences and journals. MSR is the last bastion of well-funded, blue sky industrial R&D and the closest (though still a far cry) approximation we have to the precedent set by Bell Labs and Xerox Parc.
I don't begrudge them a few patents in exchange for that.
Can you give some stats to quantify your comments?
Never praise a good thing while a bad thing exists.
yep. this times a hundred.
I keep saying that for a lot of people there's nothing they could do to change their opinion because people are so invested in them being a bad guy. It's part of a world view.
It seems to me like they are only open sourcing the products they wish more people are using, and not their actually useful products like MSOffice and the Windows OS.
Edit: to be clear, I know it is in their best interest not to open source those products, because that's where most of their money comes from. But it really looks to me like the want to flood the market with random open source stuff, so that they seem more open source friendly. But in reality they are not actually contributing anything very useful to the community.
> But in reality they are not actually contributing anything very useful to the community
Have you looked at https://github.com/Microsoft/monaco-editor
They have examples of what it can do at
https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/
It literally took me a couple of days to integrate their diff viewer into my product. If you go to
http://bitbucket-server-demo.gitsense.com/plugins/servlet/gi...
and click on the last tab (077be8bd -> 966c0823) and click on any of the files in the tab, you can see the diff editor in action. I don't know how much money was spent in developing the editor, but it's FREE for use by the community.
Other people are already flooding you with counterexamples, but I'll add to the pileup:
Z3 (https://github.com/Z3Prover/z3) is the Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solver to use. It is such a quality piece of software and it's amazingly easy to find help on StackOverflow from the main developers. Z3 really is the default choice for an SMT solver these days (i.e. you only reach for other solvers when you really have to).
Roslyn (https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn) is the C# (and VB) compiler as a library. Useful for doing code analysis and code generation for a modern imperative language. Roslyn is a whole lot easier to get started with than integrating Clang/LLVM into a project, so it really lowers the barrier of entry for lightweight program analysis projects.
they are not actually contributing anything very useful to the community
'very' useful is of course subject to debate, but did you even bother to check what they have on github? F#/msbuild/vscode to name some bigger ones, then there's smaller things like ffmpeginterop etc which I was looking into just last week.
> But in reality they are not actually contributing anything very useful to the community
Uhm... .NET? Anyone?
Google doesn't open source their search engine, most larger corporations don't open source some key products that they make money from. They are in the business of making money, afterall.
.NET Core is a hugely useful OSS project, only suprassed by another of theirs called "VS Code". I use it on day to day basis.
VSCode is a great contribution and in some areas a valid alternative to Visual Studio.
Agreed - I have access to Visual Studio at work, but for some projects I've lately been using VSCode. It's super fast and has most of the features I need. Visual Studio is of course more fully featured, but I don't always need everything it has, and god it is SLOW!
And how is it different than other companies like Google?
I reached a similar conclusion regarding Microsoft, based upon my own analysis:
http://www.gh-impact.com/blog/the-most-influential-organizat...
Despite being a latecomer to GitHub, Microsoft has risen to become the 4th most influential organization on GitHub in a very short amount of time.
And I'm guessing they're even still not counting the Xamarin employees?
I've been using dotnetcore to prototype a project. I'm actually really impressed with it. Every time I build and run it on Linux I'm resurprised that the project started in Visual Studio and builds / runs on Linux. Neat stuff, now they just need to add support LDAP.
This is all coming from someone who only uses Windows for Overwatch, Office, and courses that require it.
Great - did they stop suing linux users yet?
Yes.
Unless you count android as linux.
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Any article how they stopped the lawsuits?
Leaving aside the obvious methodology issues, whenever such a huge company starts using a third party extensively I start worrying that they will buy them and lay waste to the values of the original company. At least we'll have GitLab and the like.
> whenever such a huge company starts using a third party extensively I start worrying that they will buy them and lay waste to the values of the original company.
The issue is the financial health I would be worried about. I haven't seen GitHub as anything special and it is clearly not the most Open Sourced company and their price structure has been all over the place. I am not worried about MicroSoft doing anything with Github they already have VS using git and you can use it dozens of different ways. There is nothing to be made with owning one piece of a dozen.
> At least we'll have GitLab and the like.
At least we have git.
At this stage the value of GitHub doesn't have much to do with git per se. It's about the projects' communities hosted there. That said, I don't see much of uniqueness in what GitHub provides, it just happened to be good enough and popped up at proper time.
Ballmer 2005: Let's kick open source's ass
(Many years of confusion, a realization that no company has the engineering chops to pull off such a feat, stagnant stock price, CEO change..)
Nadella 2015: Let's kiss open source's ass
Let the meaningless metrics wars begin.
Microsoft is definitely trying to change its perception among the people, from hardcore closed box to trying to be the typical silicon valley company which opensources time to time to entice engineers working for them and yeah, greater good of the community.
But, as you see if you add Angular and Google's contributions, Google leads the list by a margin. So this looks more like a PR exercise and since when did we start taking BI articles on tech seriously(no offence to any readers).
> when did we start taking BI articles on tech seriously(no offence to any readers)
None taken, BI articles are often poorly researched and written from a Wikipedia search knowledge level.
Regarding poorly research, this paragraph from the article struck me as odd:
> The data isn't perfect, since it only relies on GitHub information available publicly — lots of businesses and project teams use GitHub in a private mode to quietly share their code. But it's still a big step forward for Microsoft.
Que? The article is regarding open source, not the use of GitHub as a source control, right? So even though the statement is true, it's not really making any sense. Am I misreading this?
I have a feeling Microsoft will open source Windows soon.
Docker has 14,000+ employees?
CrunchBase [0] puts the number between 100 and 250.
[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/docker#/entity
If the article did the math to add Angular + Google, it would make them the top by a long shot.
I'm pretty sure there is quite a bit of overlap between angular and Google once you combine them.
Although they need to show how the numbers are calculated.
Is it the number of contributions and not contributors?
It's a bit different when a corporation open sources their product because it brings them more business value than a corporation actually contributes to not their open source projects. Does MS do that?
Yeah Microsoft contributes to a bunch of projects. I'm sure at least in part that's to help compatibility with their systems, but it still helps those projects that are not theirs.
A good example is Docker where, IIRC, Microsoft people were the top non-docker contributor for a while.
Are there any examples where a company contributes to Open Source software, without any (direct or indirect) benefit to themselves?
What difference does it make anyway?
I think akerro is asking about the motivation for Microsoft's contributions to OSS, rather than whether they benefit from it (clearly they do).
My impression, having spoken to people from Microsoft involved in OSS, is that they are pretty much entirely driven by what will make them the most profit. Sometimes that means making software "open source" and accepting contributions from the public (free labour!), other times that means keeping their software proprietary. They don't seem to care about ethics, or software freedom. It's a shame, but Microsoft aren't the only ones with that mentality. Big businesses are, more often than not, primarily motivated by profit.
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Yes it does make a difference.
There is always some direct or indirect benefit, but it conts more when community is involved in development of OSS supported by corporation, like GSoC, where actual community is paid to work on selected projects, Clang, where Apple tried to reach consensus with GNU, BSD, Mozilla which creates a lot of fun stuff like Rust and Servo, their full MozLabs and WebOfThings, DuckDuckGo.
Let's note that the analysis was done on Google BigQuery's GitHub public dataset
Yet they are still opposed to user freedom on computers. Microsoft hasn't changed.
Companies are rarely of a single mind. I like to believe some departments within it are less prone to self-reflection and still need a bit of nudging. In Microsoft's case, I think they went user analytics crazy in recent times and see it as a path to invest resources on. And in true corporation fashion, they are being a bit too heavy-handed with it.
Probably it's only a short term statistics.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statist...
Too little; Too late;
Wow, you are so out of touch with reality.
Only an egomaniacal coddled baby with an exaggerated sense of self-importance would think that their shiy abandonware project is going to get 101 PR comments.
Yikes. Personal attacks aren't allowed on Hacker News. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do this. Instead, please post civilly and substantively, or not at all:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12511770 and marked it off-topic.
Obligatory word of caution,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extingui...
GPL and Open Source are still a cancer purely from Business perspective especially on a short term perspective. This is exactly Steve Ballmer too, he is a business guy running a tech organization. He generated huge profits. Satya Nadella is a technical guy, who had seen the benefits of OSS tools, languages and platforms to know how they impact both the developer mindshare & long-term company perspective
As long as key components like the official Microsoft NTFS implementation remain closed source, I see in this open source policy as a charade.
Thats a bit like saying, as long as Google keeps their search algorithm closed source, i see it as charade.
I'm happy that those companies open source more and more code. And Microsoft released some of their key technologies like .Net as open source. Personally i give them credit for that.
Nope, I don't think so. I don't demand Microsoft to open up the Windows sources or sources for MS-Office for that matter. They make money with these products and I understand the incentive to keep them closed. Alas NTFS is a filesystem, not the kernel of the OS. If Microsoft would recognize that there are other operating systems than Windows, and that it is valid that they operate with NTFS partitions, NTFS would be open.
Oh and yes, .NET is open source by now, btw. I think it's great too. And I am far less critical of Microsoft than 7-8 years ago. But opening .NET is also a strategic descision. In essence, it remains a Microsoft platform, and if more software for linux is written with .NET, good for Microsoft. If more software for windows is developed on linux machines with .NET, good for Microsoft. If more linux devs switch to windows, because of the better .NET integration, great for Microsoft. It's a win-win situation either way.
I'd love to see a development, that might be a net-loss[0] for Microsoft but a net-win for systems interoperability or the open source community.
[0]: Opening NTFS might not even be a net-loss...
Your sentence is the epitome of good criticism: concise, valid, fundamental.
If that is considered valid, then let's also apply that broad sentence to a ton of other companies out there (Google, Apple). There's huge value to them open sourcing the things they have without giving away their core software.
The problem I see with OSS folks is that they think if a company isn't all in, they are corrupt. This polarized view doesn't work in the real world.
At some point, some of us engineers like making money, we do need a place to live and eat after all.
Good for them. I use exactly 0 lines of code from them. Seriously, who cares?
The majority of the working world.