Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 195 posts

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

#111

Post by nojvek »

FT_intern wrote: post #107
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.

It's because they're bleeding engineers like crazy. Anyone with offers from Google, FB and MSFT would choose Google or FB 99/100 times

That's because Microsoft doesn't pay well and the benefits aren't as nice as goog or FB.

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

#112

Post by nojvek »

ruffrey wrote: post #97

If the article did the math to add Angular + Google, it would make them the top by a long shot.

I'm pretty sure there is quite a bit of overlap between angular and Google once you combine them.

Although they need to show how the numbers are calculated.

Is it the number of contributions and not contributors?

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

#113

Post by arcticfox »

nojvek wrote: post #111
FT_intern wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because they're bleeding engineers like crazy. Anyone with offers from Google, FB and MSFT would choose Google or FB 99/100 times

That's because Microsoft doesn't pay well and the benefits aren't as nice as goog or FB.

"doesn't pay well" - source? Remember to factor in insane California cost of living and taxes

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

#114

Post by arcticfox »

us0r wrote: post #80
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…

Microsoft also has: https://github.com/azure https://github.com/OfficeDev https://github.com/mspnp https://github.com/dotnet https://github.com/aspnet https://github.com/powershell https://github.com/nuget - not sure this counts plus probable another 100 i'm not aware of.

I'm no huge fan of Microsoft but leading that list with Azure made me recall a nice experience I had with their devs.

One of their APIs was missing something I needed so I created an issue on Github. Not only did the devs respond, they thanked me profusely for the input and made the (rather significant) change in days. I don't know if it's true or not, but I felt like their only user whenever I interacted with them (their issue tracker was rather empty...)

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

#115

Post by pm90 »

testgiveme123 wrote: post #88
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?

I suspect that most of their code was probably version controlled in Git anyway, so it wouldn't take that much effort to simply upload it to Github. What really delays stuff is probably the approval process, which for some companies can be really slow.

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

#116

Post by 794CD01 »

arcticfox wrote: post #113
nojvek wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because Microsoft doesn't pay well and the benefits aren't as nice as goog or FB.

"doesn't pay well" - source? Remember to factor in insane California cost of living and taxes

Seattle's cost of living is not exactly low either.

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

#118

Post by josteink »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #103
daveguy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, to be fair, he was trying to refer to the fact that GPL is viral (turning other licenses into its own). That is a valid critique of GPL (it reduces developer freedom) and that is why it has been in steady decline compared to more liberal licenses (as a percent of FOSS licenses).

The GPL reduces developer freedom Does it?

> The GPL reduces developer freedom. Does it?

The GPL increases the user's freedom by forcing developers to contribute back, ie limiting the developer's freedom (to close code down).

Likewise, BSD and MIT type licences increase developer freedom at the cost of end users.

You have got to keep these two roles clearly separated when thinking about licences, even though in lots of cases the actual users will be developers (but of other products).

If you do, there's nothing controversial about that statement.

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

#119

Post by diamondlovesyou »

mikegerwitz wrote: post #76
rubber_duck wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 That's bullshit - GPL requires you to open source your derived work as well - which plenty of people have a problem with commercially - it doesn't mean you don't want to contribute anything (quoting you) back. Even with the LGPL there are scenarios where sharing your code is not…

> In general GPL creates a lot of problems to which GPL supporters just plug their ears and mantra "if you were truly free you wouldn't have those problems". I'm not plugging my ears. I recognize it, and it's terribly unfortunate that one would ever be in such a situation, but the idea there is that the GPL would encourage the liberation of other code, and other platforms. Here's an example: http://clisp.cvs.sourcefo…

Except the GPL doesn't just encourage open sourcing works which use the GPL work as a dependency; it makes the open sourcing of any library/program/what-have-you a MANDATORY condition for use of the GPL work. This has nothing to due with modification of the GPL work; the condition is still in effect when no modifications, proprietary or otherwise, are required in the GPL work.

I'm actually in agreement with Ballmer on this one: GPL is cancer. And I love contributing to OSS in general.

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

#120

Post by arcticfox »

794CD01 wrote: post #116
arcticfox wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"doesn't pay well" - source? Remember to factor in insane California cost of living and taxes

Seattle's cost of living is not exactly low either.

Taxes are the much bigger factor, but Seattle is certainly significantly cheaper. Of course, other areas are much cheaper than Seattle as well.
Post reply on HN