Comment by leoc
21 hours ago
I've seen enough: as the recognised authority and designated responsible person ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525256 I'm officially recognising this as the final end of 2010s Cool Microsoft.
> 74 points by leoc on April 3, 2014 | parent | context | favorite | on: Microsoft Open Sources C# Compiler
> Well, here we are then. This now officially the standard play for formerly-dominating computer-platform firms who have fallen on hard times: having before been proudly hard-nosed and proprietary, publicly see the light and present a new image as a new, kinder, gentler company which totally gets it about openness. Former famous examples: IBM under Lou Gerstner (we love Linux and open platforms!), Apple after the NeXT acquisition but before the iPhone (look how expandable our new PowerMacs are; on the software side, we're now an open-systems-loving Unix vendor, and we'll even open-source our kernel!), poor old SGI (we love Linux now! Or, wait ... actually WinNT, whatever.). Sun of course used to go back and forth between being chill dudes who totally get it and more nakedly hard-nosed. As always in these cases, the questions are how far the bright new era of glasnost actually goes in substance (IBM legal's patent monster quietly thrived through all the kinder-gentler period) and how long it lasts (these eras tend to end with the company either dwindling into irrelevance, or finding renewed success and going back to its bad old ways).
Historical debate may now begin.
I kind of agree, I was there when Apple was showing up at CERN IT trying to sell OS X a great UNIX workstation, and also though .NET was going to be fully open source, and to this day we have to thank the community efforts from Avalonia and Uno, for the actual GUI frameworks that support all major consumer OSes.
Also Microsoft lost a big opportunity with Unity (not helping them updating .NET) and killing off XNA, two major ways how kids get into .NET.
That coupled with Unity's mismanagement, means indies are more likely to keep using C++ based engines like Godot or Defold, and losing yet another adoption vector. Yes Godot does support C#, but GDscript is winning the heart of indie devs.