Great - did they stop suing linux users yet?
Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub
41–50 of 195 posts
Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub
#42As long as key components like the official Microsoft NTFS implementation remain closed source, I see in this open source policy as a charade.
Thats a bit like saying, as long as Google keeps their search algorithm closed source, i see it as charade.
I'm happy that those companies open source more and more code. And Microsoft released some of their key technologies like .Net as open source. Personally i give them credit for that.
Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub
#43Leaving aside the obvious methodology issues, whenever such a huge company starts using a third party extensively I start worrying that they will buy them and lay waste to the values of the original company. At least we'll have GitLab and the like.
Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub
#44As long as key components like the official Microsoft NTFS implementation remain closed source, I see in this open source policy as a charade.
Your sentence is the epitome of good criticism: concise, valid, fundamental.
Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub
#45How is that calculated? I mean Microsoft only has 2561 members ( https://github.com/orgs/Microsoft/people ) , so it isn't how many microsoft members contribute to open source. Is it how many contributors their open source projects have? nope, FontAwesome has maybe 100 contributors to all of it's 5 projects but it's listed as having 9000+ contributors. From what I can gather it's mostly based on the number of people t…
I guess that other _companies_ have even less than 2561 employees on GitHub
Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're trying to write commercial software and make money off of it, the GPL is a cancer. MIT or the MS-PL is much more practical.
"Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible-just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding. Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree lic…
You can't practically charge for distribution though - your sell it to one person, and they'll upload it to an FTP archive server.
Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
To translate if you are attempting to exploit other peoples code with out giving anything back to the people that created the code then GPL is a cancer >MIT or the MS-PL is much more practical. This depends on the project I normally license my libraries, code I intend to be included in other software under BSD or MIT, but full developed software that is intended to be used as is gets GPL.
Thanks for putting words in my mouth. How many people would have used jQuery, if it was GPL? Full-on GPL taints your software, such that you have to be extremely careful not to use any libraries that are GPL'd if you want to release it under any other sort of license. Sure, you can get exemptions, but can you imagine the clusterfuck if, say, the NPM community defaulted to using GPL? Trying to trace back and make arra…
If you're a lone developer or small team and you're releasing your code under anything other than a strong copyleft license, you're leaving yourself open to the Joyents of the world to abscond with what you've made and build their business with nothing more than an attaboy to you. I would much rather nobody made money off of my code than somebody else while I still struggle. At least the Mozillas and Googles of the world have the decent politeness to just completely ignore your open source project, no matter how long its been out and how new they are to that particular field, to boulder through and make their own thing.
Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub
#48Leaving aside the obvious methodology issues, whenever such a huge company starts using a third party extensively I start worrying that they will buy them and lay waste to the values of the original company. At least we'll have GitLab and the like.
> whenever such a huge company starts using a third party extensively I start worrying that they will buy them and lay waste to the values of the original company.
The issue is the financial health I would be worried about. I haven't seen GitHub as anything special and it is clearly not the most Open Sourced company and their price structure has been all over the place. I am not worried about MicroSoft doing anything with Github they already have VS using git and you can use it dozens of different ways. There is nothing to be made with owning one piece of a dozen.
> At least we'll have GitLab and the like.
At least we have git.
Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a quite decent improvement from the era when Or the era of "Linux is a cancer" http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_c...
Yeah, now they're just engaging in racketeering against Linux and Android using their patents.
This isn't 2001.
Most Microsoft shops in my area are now at least 25% Linux these days on Azure.
Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I think akerro is asking about the motivation for Microsoft's contributions to OSS, rather than whether they benefit from it (clearly they do). My impression, having spoken to people from Microsoft involved in OSS, is that they are pretty much entirely driven by what will make them the most profit. Sometimes that means making software "open source" and accepting contributions from the public (free labour!), other tim…
So are most for profit open source based companies. Redhat development is probably solely based on profit to.