Comment by rbosinger
8 years ago
Yeah, the open source dev community may very well see Microsoft quite differently in upcoming years if they keep playing their cards this way.
8 years ago
Yeah, the open source dev community may very well see Microsoft quite differently in upcoming years if they keep playing their cards this way.
Can't speak for everyone but that won't happen personally until they start respecting privacy.
The Silicon Valley hipster development ecosystem does not have a problem with how Google respects privacy.
What a spectacular example of faulty generalization and false dilemma.
> The Silicon Valley hipster development ecosystem does not have a problem with how Google respects privacy.
I don’t think that’s the case anymore.
But then again “the SV hipster development ecosystem”. Who is that exactly?
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The ggp claim was re: the open source community.
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Please, don't talk as you are spokesperson for anyone but yourself.
Stop bashing Google without any proofs. They do respect privacy and don't share data you elect not to. In fact, their take out tool was released in 2009 or something, way before GRPR made others do it too.
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I think it is a long term goal.
"Old" schoolers have and will likely have for ever that evil 90s vision of MS. However it is changing a bit in that people too. They still may be evil, but at least the look more modern (opensource, new technology, using/contributing to Linux etc).
However the important thing (for MS) here is new people. If you come into the scene now or in a few years you only get to know the "new" masked MS image. Yes, they are still doing dubious stuff but is all under the hoods, buried by layers of hype, cloud, linux and fireworks.
Rebranding some big stablished company with that kind of history is something that takes a long long time.
Microsoft isn't acquiring Github out of the goodness of it's heart, they want something of value from it. What is that, and is it compatible with what made Github useful?
I won't stick around to find out, my time is too valuable and the competition is strong. For me, Github doesn't really have any distinctive features except that is was the biggest, and so most convenient. I suspect most people and organizations will be in the same situation.
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As one of those "old schoolers" I don't view MS as any less evil than they used to be.
But they aren't the only 800 pound gorilla in the room - open source, google, apple, amazon have all taken a big chunk out of what MS was.
What prevents MS (or any one who acquires GitHub) from pulling a sourceforge? Well nothing prevents them, and I can't name someone who wouldn't want to monetize it -- that latter fact is going to be what kills the product/project.
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Or even more old school that remembers the original MS that put BASIC on my Commodore.
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> you only get to know
You know wikipedia exists. Or people like me who will harp on on how privacy standards that are somehow acceptable now would be something inconceivable in 90's.
Some old schoolers did not have any issue using Windows and related Microsoft tech.
This was absolutely my first thought too. I've developed for work over the last year on Windows. It's dark patterns to suck up data and ads now. There are ads on the login screen!
This is in regards to one Microsoft product: Windows. Reality is, they're not focused on Windows anymore, but I do agree it would be nice if they took away all that telemetry nonsense and allowed people to have better control over updates. To be completely fair under Linux I get updates weekly more or less, but they're just not forced upon me to install them.
To be completely fair under Linux I get updates weekly more or less, but they're just not forced upon me to install them.
Also, in many years my amount of downtime due to Debian's unattended-upgrades is exactly 0. The same cannot be said of Windows updates.
I'm still hoping Microsoft see the light on all the telemetry and forced update nonsense before the Windows 7 cut-off in a couple of years. The trouble is, I can't see it happening as long as Nadella is at the top, and I can't see that changing as long as the big enterprise customers who aren't subject to that kind of nonsense are propping up the share price.
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Windows was completed with Windows 7. Everything after that is just churn. Consider for a minute that Windows doesn't need to be redone every 3 years anymore.
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If you're on latest Ubuntu (or derivatives) since 16.04 at least you've been getting security track upgrades (through the default config of unattenfed-upgrades) forced on you.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's what you get default out of the box with Windows as well?
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And my update settings.
I understand the need for security, but updates shouldn't break my computer either.
MS heavily respects privacy and mandates that every employee go through privacy and GDPR training every year. And remember, MS’s business is not rooted in exploiting user data to sell them ads. Replacing “they” in your sentence with Google or Facebook would be much more appropriate.
Uninformed post of the year, with a side order of whataboutism, congrats. Who said i trust G or FB?
Indeed. I'm always a little surprised at how readily developers recommend VS Code, given the lack of privacy guarantees and Microsoft's recent track record on both telemetry and quietly overriding past user settings with updates.
I think that this is real "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS" and they know it will bring them good times.
I doubt it, I think they are doing it because they’ve seen more and more of their enterprise migrate from TFS to git.
This is my opinion, but I think Microsoft tech is fairly terrible for open source and smaller projects, because .Net is a lot of complicated tooling you’ll never use outside of enterprise. At the same time they are rapidly becoming the “only” enterprise option rather quickly, and with that comes the question of why you’d chose AWS over Azure.
Sure visual studio has a free version, Windows now does Linux and .net Core is open but I see those moves as a way to make c# replace JAVA in schools not as a way to make open source love Microsoft.
Game development has used C# for quite a while, and with official support for Mono, and adoption of .NET in Unity [0], it's a viable choice. The language is constantly improving [1], and is doing so in the open, on GitHub no less [2]!
From what I saw as an intern at Microsoft a while back, there's way more of an engineering-led culture at Microsoft than people give it credit for, and to the extent there's a push to promote their own language and tooling, it's largely driven by a wholehearted belief (and challenge) that Microsoft tools are the right ones for the job, with initiatives being chosen to fulfill and expand that promise. And, more recently, what I hear is that Nadella's initiatives are genuinely promoting that ethos across the entire leadership structure. In that context, they make a lot of sense as a partner for Github.
[0] https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/03/28/updated-scripting-runti...
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/csh...
[2] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vbteam/2015/01/10/were-movi...
No, they're totally reactive to everything. Why re-invent the wheel with NuGet if there's already software package repositories in the libre-free world for decades, but then not make it the main software distribution mechanism while allowing independent package signing and repository providers (to prevent Microsoft from gatekeeping the distribution channel), effectively eliminating viruses and the attached antivirus industry from the Windows OS? Why give out Internet Explorer gratis, but not the OS if it's that important for human communication? Why does Notepad only in 2018 get support for GNU/Linux line break \n and not in the many, many years before? Why can't Word export a valid XHTML file from a document in 2018, but VS never fails to generate valid XML? There are just thousands of examples like this that speak against the company having to do with engineering, it's more a law firm in my opinion. Let's not forget that it was their idea to claim that software is copyrightable in the same way like a novel is, with laws that are from the print era, and it made them an unbelievable amount of money and prevented the software field to enter a truly digital future. Humanity just lost several decades of progress because of this, and now GitHub, one of the few major innovations in the field, will go down the drain, too.
The web dev part, anyway. Microsoft still has a long hill to climb to be in the graces of nearly any kind of native dev.
While partially true, there are a ton of small and medium size companies out there that are just starting to rewrite their legacy stacks, with many choosing .Net with MSSQL. Worst part is, these shops keep turning up at my local LinuxFest yearly, looking for new dev talent.
What mirror universe do you live in where Windows doesn't have a huge amount of 3rd party native applications?
I don't think Microsoft even uses the same deck of cards as FOSS people.
Microsoft had their chance, and they worked hard to show us what they're made of. We learned the lesson, and they don't get another chance.