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

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

#171

Post by Illniyar »

alpb wrote: post #134
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…

2561 members are the ones who made Microsoft org show up on their GitHub profile. By default, GitHub does not list your orgs on your profile. And many people are simply not aware of this, because your profile page looks different to you and others. You don't realize this until you visit your profile from incognito window or something. The actual people count in https://github.com/orgs/Microsoft/people is twice as muc…

Oh, I didn't know that.

But it's still obvious that this is not the metric that was used.

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

#173

Post by syshum »

mugsie wrote: post #151
mikegerwitz wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I will give an example where the GPL hurts some projects: I work on a OpenStack project that does DNS. We have plugable drivers for the different software out there - PowerDNS, Bind9, nsd, etc. One of the people deploying our software wanted (or needed? - there was some weird legal / support issue) to plugin into Nominum. Now, to even look at the API ref, or use the Nominum python lib, you need to have a support cont…

Or maybe they would choose to work with OpenStack and discontinue their relationship with a draconian and backward company that locks their API behind a NDA

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

#174

Post by edpichler »

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?

They started this move almost a decade ago, gradually, and just recently the accumulated effort got so relevant, that is evident even for an outsider like me, that they changed their strategy, that is why it seems now it's "visible".

"How I can notice this change of strategy?" may you ask, It's because they always said things like this, per example, that Linux was not good because something open source could never be better than a closed and proprietary system with a company protecting their code.

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

#175

Post by edpichler »

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

I also believe that this is one of the reasons. Open source is "cool" and motivating to work for.

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

#176

Post by yothisisalex »

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…

omg, it's based on "the number of unique contributors (users who pushed code, opened or commented on an issue or PR)" (from https://octoverse.github.com/#open-source).

So if I open sourced a buggy project, and someone reported a bug by opening an issue, and then 100 other people commented on that issue, my project would have 101 contributors!

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

#177

Post by diamondlovesyou »

mikegerwitz wrote: post #143
diamondlovesyou wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

moron4hire is correct. If you are not distributing the software personally or outside your organization, the GPL does not apply to you. If what you are doing does not constitute a derivative work, then your software is also not affected by the GPL: if you're invoking GNU grep in your program, for example, your program does not need to be licensed under a GPL-compatible license. For clarification, see https://www.gnu.…

I am aware of these issues. I replied in-haste in-class, and didn't specify that I was only referring to library code. I instead used 'work', which was the wrong term; I apologize. Anyway, according to the GPL, using a GPL-ed library as a dependency in a larger codebase constitutes a derivative work (assuming distribution etc), thus requiring GPL-ing the whole larger codebase, which isn't cool (imo, of course).

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

#179

Post by cobalt »

pm90 wrote: post #115
testgiveme123 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'd imagine most of their code was in TFS. However I'm sure they used a tool to move things over. None of these have the full history of the project

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

#180

Post by bad_user »

tracker1 wrote: post #163
danblick wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

IIRC, the only areas that have been specifically mentioned have been surrounding filesystem access and structure, which MS has done a lot with, most of it outside patent protection now though. Not sure what else, as most articles can't/won't say as part of the non-disclosed parts of these contracts.

One of their most potent patent that they're using a lot is the FAT patent.

Basically there are filesystems out there that are superior to FAT and not encumbered by patents, but device makers are forced to use FAT because of interoperability reasons.

This goes to show that the innovation argument is bullshit.

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