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Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub

businessinsider.com

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Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub

#81

Post by throwawaykf05 »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #20

Let's discuss Microsoft's software patents. Any Github contributions they make are trivial in comparison.

Let's. Microsoft is the biggest spender on R&D amongst software companies and they sponsor a lot of research without clear immediate benefits. This is in stark contrast to all the other big companies who largely only sponsor projects driven by product requirements. They regularly publish research papers in the best conferences and journals. MSR is the last bastion of well-funded, blue sky industrial R&D and the closest (though still a far cry) approximation we have to the precedent set by Bell Labs and Xerox Parc.

I don't begrudge them a few patents in exchange for that.

Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub

#83

Post by edpichler »

This is very good, with this I learned that it's never too late to a company change. A very slow and large company like MS took decades to make this change, but they did well. And, they do that not because they are "good guys", but because this is the strategy to make them grow on their business. They are thinking on themselves.

Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub

#84

Post by Illniyar »

Maakuth wrote: post #69
Illniyar wrote: post #37

How 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…

One method that comes to mind would be checking commit authors' e-mail addresses. Someone with @microsoft.com e-mail would very likely be an employee of MSFT.

I doubt that explains FonttAwesome though.

Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub

#86

Post by ocdtrekkie »

bad_user wrote: post #39
rmc wrote: post #36

Earlier 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.

Are they presently making any legal moves against Linux? Or just Android?

Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub

#87

Post by danblick »

throwawaykf05 wrote: post #79
bad_user wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, now they're just engaging in racketeering against Linux and Android using their patents.

Or, asserting their legal right to protect their investment in R&D that latecomers like Linux and Android simply ripped off. Just a matter of perspective, really. Is just that given open source is the dominant religion around these parts, that perspective is in the minority.

Honest question, what do you think was ripped off from Microsoft? I wouldn't think Linux or Android took much from them, really. (When I think of innovation at MS I think of developer tools, research on programming languages and distributed systems, and stuff like Photosync.)

Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub

#88

Post by testgiveme123 »

edpichler wrote: post #83

This is very good, with this I learned that it's never too late to a company change. A very slow and large company like MS took decades to make this change, but they did well. And, they do that not because they are "good guys", but because this is the strategy to make them grow on their business. They are thinking on themselves.

> A very slow and large company like MS took decades to make this change, but they did well.

From the outside imo it feels like it took ages for them to start this change, but actually doing it once they first started open-sourcing things seems to have been an incredibly quick switch, over just a couple of years. Has there been loads of progress on this in the background that's just only become visible now?

Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub

#89

Post by TACIXAT »

I've been using dotnetcore to prototype a project. I'm actually really impressed with it. Every time I build and run it on Linux I'm resurprised that the project started in Visual Studio and builds / runs on Linux. Neat stuff, now they just need to add support LDAP.

This is all coming from someone who only uses Windows for Overwatch, Office, and courses that require it.

Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub

#90

Post by ulber »

executesorder66 wrote: post #12

It seems to me like they are only open sourcing the products they wish more people are using, and not their actually useful products like MSOffice and the Windows OS. Edit: to be clear, I know it is in their best interest not to open source those products, because that's where most of their money comes from. But it really looks to me like the want to flood the market with random open source stuff, so that they seem m…

Other people are already flooding you with counterexamples, but I'll add to the pileup:

Z3 (https://github.com/Z3Prover/z3) is the Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solver to use. It is such a quality piece of software and it's amazingly easy to find help on StackOverflow from the main developers. Z3 really is the default choice for an SMT solver these days (i.e. you only reach for other solvers when you really have to).

Roslyn (https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn) is the C# (and VB) compiler as a library. Useful for doing code analysis and code generation for a modern imperative language. Roslyn is a whole lot easier to get started with than integrating Clang/LLVM into a project, so it really lowers the barrier of entry for lightweight program analysis projects.

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