Comment by keithwarren

I think one would be exceedingly foolish not to exercise the very greatest of caution. This is Microsoft we're talking about - they have a track record of profound fuckery.

But I do indeed think this is better than not having happened.

I think you have to define "they" here when you say "they understand the value of open source."

There are a lot of people at Microsoft who really do understand the value of open source. When I worked there ten years ago, there were plenty who did. When I wrote interop papers as an outside consultant in 2007, I worked with a unit that did.

But Microsoft also has a bunch of real problems that make it hard for them to realize this value, and so their options in going into it are somewhat limited. They can't pivot and become a services company because their whole Microsoft Partner network would be turned upside down. So they enter services in some key areas where their partners can't. It's a very delicate process, and it means for many on the administration side, the value of open source software for Microsoft is not as high as it would be for some other firms.

Nonetheless this is huge. Open sourcing the VB.net/C# compiler effectively means the possibility of an Linux port, which means that .net has the possibility to become write once, run anywhere even if the whole class libraries are not open sourced yet. This is a gamble for Microsoft because it reduces the barriers to moving from Windows to other platforms (Linux, OSX, BSD, etc).

Well, I'd like to see Visual Studio for Linux with support for Java, Scala, Clojure, Haskell and other non-Microsoft technologies. That's my wishlist in this bright new era of Microsoft openness.

I don't like Microsoft but Visual Studio is the only IDE I've ever tried that is substantially better than gedit/jedit. The auto-completion (intellisense) is just delightful to use.

Perhaps the lieutenants and the rank and file are less afraid of having a chair thrown at them nowadays followed by a firing. And given that the new CEO is from the Azure team it seems like he should know the value of this kind of step.

I mostly feel sympathetic to the engineers working there. It's no fun living under an embarassing dictator.

There's a reason why Visual Studio continues to impress you.

I once saw a presentation of the Visual Studio lead in Belgium, where he claimed that there were over 1200 people involved in the Visual Studio project.

If that's true, i don't think there is any IDE that can top that number and it explains why Visual Studio is the best tool for (almost any) job.

People should realize that Visual Studio is not solely C#, it's NodeJS, PHP, Mono, Python and so much more in one environment.

Any developer worth his/her salt understands the value of open source these days. Keep in mind that these engineers don't actually run the business.

I don't know, I see this as a good sign but for me it's still "too little too late". At least release it under a copyleft license, make it usable with previous versions of Visual Studio (it only works with 2013) and I'll feel more confident that you aren't setting a trap.

Non-copyleft licenses can easily align with the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy. The value of .NET for most developers is closely associated with Visual Studio. They can make the next version closed source and have Visual Studio only accept that one and we are back to the same old Microsoft. Sure, you'd still have the previous open source version, but who cares when most people will probably just move on to the next.

Well, I certainly can't speak for the startup community, as I'm more strongly affiliated with the screwup community myself. ;) But no, I'm certainly not dismissing MS's new direction: it seems to be fairly genuine, and (some lingering patent/EEE concerns aside) good news, just as IBM's support (in various ways) for Linux or Sun's eventual open-sourcing of Java were good news. I'm all in favour of a kinder and gentler MS (as far as it goes and as long as it lasts). And I'm certainly not singling them out either, as the list of comparisons shows.

Yes, although I could pick nits about the significance of each of these (Webkit being open source is somewhat less significant that it appears since web browsers nowadays are de facto somewhat unforkable; the open-sourcing of clang was partly or mainly an attack on the GPL). But while Apple's continued doing many of those things (and done some similar things like GCD), they've also started doing other things they weren't doing back in 1999 or 2003, like breaking new ground in walled-garden application platforms and aggressive use of patents. The iPhone has never been as open to non-native apps as desktop OS X, while even desktop OS X's support for them is declining. (That's especially significant if you take the post-PC-era viewpoint and see phone/tablet devices as displacing or succeeding the PC rather than just supplementing them.) So overall Apple fits the mould pretty well.

None of them should be lumped together. There's no evidence that open-sourcing is a "standard play" demonstrative of anything as specific as what leoc claimed or with predictive power. That list of companies seems to demonstrate the opposite, in fact.

Apple took advantage of things that were already open source. How many innovative, profitable programs has it developed itself and then made open source?

The fact that the core OS is still open source doesn't actually mean much when there's a huge layer of proprietary code on top, does it?

Given that all of those are already open sourced, do you know how bad it would look to close source them now? Especially Webkit/KHTML - that would be a PR disaster. I don't keep track of what Apple does - have they open sourced anything within the last few years? If not, I think they fit right in with the other companies.

Hate to burst your bubble, but the only thing apple has going for them is the iPhone, which is arguably a fad. The reason Rolex never goes out of style is because they never change their style, and apple is no Rolex like a lot of people seem to think. People easily forget about all the hype around the iMac g3. Sure, it changed the company, but they still have yet to over take windows. Now Android is out selling the iPhone because of the business model. No large companies would ever replace current desktops with iMacs except in specialized "labs" where they're needed (mostly for designers). Apple isn't dominating any market. They're not on servers, they're not embedded, they're not on super computers, they're not on mainframes. They're no where, but if you spend your whole life surrounded by graphic designers and programmers and hacker news, they're going to appear to be everywhere.

Important. Also, Oracle has bought/absorbed free software and slowly suffocated it (lookin at you, MySQL).

Correction: Webkit wasn't some software Apple made use of. Apple created Webkit as we know it. What they DID use was KHTML, a far more barebones web rendering engine used in KDE, that Apple adopted, and turned into Webkit. Webkit as Apple had it (before Google stepped in) was an order of magnitude more evolved than KHTML.

Apple has made Darwin open source. That, WebKit, and LLVM are pretty core technologies. A good portion of their technology is open. So, it's not just using free software and not giving back.

It's my understanding that the original plan for how FaceTime worked was derailed thanks to Apple losing a patent lawsuit.

Not to mention that in 2009, when RMS wrote that, the TomTom lawsuit recently happened.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._TomTom_Inc.

Speaking of which, have the patent concerns about ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows Forms gone away yet?

No, not really. It's clear to me we are moving to a devices and services model. More people writing C# means a broad reach on everything from netduinos to iphones to desktops to the cloud.

* I work for MSFT, on the Cloud.

Red Hat, for instance, makes a ton of money off the reverse model, where they let CentOS give away their core offering for free (heck, they're even paying people to work on CentOS now), and they make their money off clients who have money and are willing to exchange it for support and such for otherwise free offerings. There's really no reason Microsoft can't do something similar here (and they seem to be trending in that direction, although not quite to the extent Red Hat has) -- a mix of free-as-in-beer and open source tools for a "core" offering, so people can get into the Microsoft developer ecosystem, and a variety of paid offerings on top of that as their needs grow. And the extent of Microsoft's partnership with Xamarin shows just how much Microsoft is depending on Mono for their strategy, it'd be senseless at best to kill it.

Yeah, it always amazes me that MS fans would be using the term FUD to refer to people wary of MS vendor lock-in given that there is plenty of historical precedent for MS using exactly that approach.

This current move from MS suggests that they may not be being evil in this case, and that's great, but it doesn't make people with concerns about MS FUD-merchants at all. In fact, that's kinda insulting - most people accept that past behaviour is a good predictor of future behaviour so being cautious and sceptical about MS was not an unreasonable stance.

I work at Microsoft, in Azure.

What I hear privately from the people I meet who work on the .Net and Visual Studio side of things is consistent with what the company is now saying publicly.

Basically: "We luvvv Mono" :-)

The KILL MONO FUD was coming from the Open Source community not from MS.

I think you misunderstood the parent. They are talking about the open source community and RMS, not Microsoft trying to kill Mono.

> Mono clearly undermines that b/c it allows you to "easily" jump ship to a free platform.

You know, I tried that. I've tried to run about 3 .NET programs, written for Windows, under Mono on Linux. They all have had some library that was never part of the "open spec" that, therefore, ruined their chances of running on anything but Windows. The experience(s) put a nice, neat pin on the board as to what "open" meant when it came to Mono. It was a lot of double speak. And it's exactly this long-suffering characteristic about Microsoft that makes people like me take these current announcements with a large grain of salt.

Pedantic: From the job posting that a sibling comment linked, the display tech appears to be under OSG. That means it's actually under Terry Myerson, not Scott Guthrie.

I have a few WPF 4 bugs that were marked "fix in next version" 3-4 years ago, and then it was announced that there is no next version - i'm in the process of moving off WPF and this newfound love is not going to change anything.

WPF is alive and kicking. I'll just leave this here... https://careers.microsoft.com/jobdetails.aspx?jid=137020&pp=...

No WPF is still there. XAML is still the basis for windows store apps, and windows phone apps.

Just because they were working on it before doesn't mean that the plan at the time was to open-source those things...

Quite a lot of people actually. These moves have been on the cards for years. Just waiting now for the next big move in the coming months of when they acquire Xamarin.

They open-sourced a lot of things related to .NET in the recent years. That Roslyn was to join those things doesn't exactly come as a surprise. It's still welcome, though.

ASP.NET went open source 2 years and a few days ago. Since at least that long ago, things have pretty steadily been heading in this direction. Only reason we haven't seen things more along any more quickly is that companies this size just don't move that fast.

At that moment they already released part of .NET, asp.net and azure.

I think you wanted to say that the "change" was made only thanks to the exit of Ballmer, but I think that's an exaggeration.

yulaow, clearly the lead-time on a lot of this stuff is longer than Ballmer's been gone, so yeah, not fair to put all this on his departure. "Five months" was a pithy play off "five years," nothing more or less than that.