Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub
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Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub
1–10 of 195 posts
Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub
#2This 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
Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub
#3And I'm guessing they're even still not counting the Xamarin employees?
Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub
#4It'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?
Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub
#5When 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.
Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub
#6It'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?
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?
Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub
#7When 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.
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).
Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub
#8AFAIK 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.
Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub
#9Good for them. I use exactly 0 lines of code from them. Seriously, who cares?
Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub
#10It'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?
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?
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.