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Comment by Stratoscope

7 years ago

> I don't know about any other company that is large, successful, focuses on the enterprise and absolutely behind OSS.

Doesnt Microsoft tick all those boxes? Even if they aren't exclusively an open source company, they are "absolutely behind OSS" if you go by how much open source code they have contributed.

28 comments

Stratoscope

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emilsedgh  7 years ago

How on earth is Microsoft "absolutely" behind OSS? Which of their main products is Open Source? Windows? Office? SQL Server? Azure? Exchange? What exactly makes Microsoft a company "absolutely behind OSS?"

Their stupid boot loader still ignores any other operating system for god's sake.

Kudos to people at Microsoft's Marketing and "developer relations" department who won the hearts of developers by allowing TypeScript and VSCode to be FOSS. Suddenly MS is "Absolutely behind OSS".

  • eksemplar  7 years ago

    I work in the public sector in Denmark, and we’ve delt a lot with both IBM and Microsoft over the past 25 years.

    Microsoft has been one of our best partners, including for the open source software we run, especially since Azure became their mission.

    IBM has been one of the worst, so bad that I’d dread making any deals with them ever again.

    I wouldn’t say MS is fully behind OSS though, they contribute a lot these years, but their main goal is still to sell you Azure. I think they won the hearts and minds with .Net core though, I mean VSC is the best ide and typescript is typescript, but the future of a lot of web programming lies within .Net core.

    • Stranger43  7 years ago

      You are likely coloured by being in the one marked where .Net became significant and that’s mostly bacause the only accepted altilernative in Denmark’s monopoly friendly procurement systems were IBM mainframes or Oracle solutions.

      Everywhere else RedHat/Jboss won the game and is being replaced by new JWM languages rather then node or .Net though node hides in strange places like the latest SAP framework.

      Frontend/native .Net apps are fastly becoming extinct.

      MS pretend love for Linux is more an acknowledgement that no one wants dotNET on IIS or anything windows centric in the cloud than any genuine love for Linux so they kind of have to pretend to like Linux workloads and unix tools if they want azure to be more then an niche product.

      8 replies →

  • rz2k  7 years ago

    If you are including the boot loader, don't leave out the file systems.

solarkraft  7 years ago

Meh. They have a bad reputation due to calling open word source software cancer the new windows business model.

Also, while their engineers are certainly smart, their software seems very crusty (the down side of infinite backwards compatibility) and usually doesn't play well at all with existing open source software. Thus: Mostly useless.

  • rincebrain  7 years ago

    Amusingly, they're damned both ways at this point, since many of the Windows 10 complaints have, in fact, been breaks in backward compatibility.

  • thatcloudguy  7 years ago

    The early 2000s called and would like their objection back. Microsoft isn't that same company any more and haven't been for a long time. Sure, some of their technology is pretty awful but they definitely changed their tune around OSS.

    • jhasse  7 years ago

      So we can merge exFAT support into the Kernel now? Microsoft loves Linux, right?