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Microsoft Becomes Sponsor of Open Source Initiative

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Re: Microsoft Becomes Sponsor of Open Source Initiative

#151

Post by phjesusthatguy3 »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #71

What signs of change are you expecting? Microsoft is a huge organization and change comes slowly to different products. Here's the thing - if we see Microsoft making tangible changes to their behavior, and we reward that with more derision and distrust, then we aren't exactly incentivizing them - or anyone wathcing - to do more. I personally applaud Microsoft on their dramatically increased involvement in open source…

Microsoft burned that bridge a long time ago. My organization's LOB app is going web-based next version, so we can finally update almost every computer to anything but Windows. For the very few users that still require some other Windows-only app, we'll probably still give them a Windows-based computer. We already have a GSuite setup in place so it's really just about giving our users something that isn't too much of a culture shock. I'm looking forward to it!

Re: Microsoft Becomes Sponsor of Open Source Initiative

#152

Post by bitmapbrother »

Fnoord wrote: post #149
tyfon wrote: post #2

This is all fine and good. I hope their efforts are sincere. All money and support to free software is most likely good. However, I've been part of the open source community for 25 years, and I remember the brutal marketing against the "cancer" of open source. It will take a lot to convince me that there is not some underlying goal here that is not beneficial to free software. How much has Microsoft really changed? I…

> However, I've been part of the open source community for 25 years, and I remember the brutal marketing against the "cancer" of open source. 25 years, so that's since 1992. Do you also remember IBM? Did you hold it against IBM when they started to become actively part of the open source community? Microsoft is changing from a proprietary software company pur-sang to a more service-oriented (and, like Google & Facebo…

I can't help but think of the irony of mentioning IBM in your comparison to Microsoft considering Microsoft indirectly bankrolled, via BayStar, the SCO lawsuit against IBM for the alleged violations of IBM's Unix licenses in the development of Linux code at IBM.

Re: Microsoft Becomes Sponsor of Open Source Initiative

#153

Post by carussell »

morganvachon wrote: post #116
hannob wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The BSD/GPL question is independent of the free software / open source term. Both the OSI and the FSF accept GPL and BSD-style licenses. So both GPL and BSD code is free software and open source software.

Are you sure about that? gnu.org has a huge beef with BSD, they are actively campaigning for any developer considering BSD to use GPL instead[1]. Basically, anything that is not 100% copyleft is considered non-Free by GNU and FSF. Again, that doesn't bother me; to each their own. I'm not a developer so you might say I have no skin in this issue. However, I stand by my assertion that BSD gives the lone developer more…

That's not a campaign against BSD-style licenses. It's a campaign against the advertising clause that was present in the "old" 4-clause BSD license. (And the page you link to couldn't really be clearer.)

It's also worth pointing out that the "campaign" originated 20 years ago and was more or less successful—Berkeley themselves agreed with the campaign and dropped the advertising clause. FreeBSD stripped the license down further to 2 clauses. Nowadays, the 2- and 3-clause BSD licenses are the most popularly adopted versions for anyone choosing BSD—if you hear anyone talking about the BSD license, they're almost definitely referring to one of these two—and this campaign is the reason why.

So, no, that's not a link to an historical campaign against BSD. If anything, it was a campaign that strengthened BSD by making it a more attractive license choice.

EDIT:

I just reread your comment, and it makes me sad and wonder how people get away with convincing themselves it's okay to outright lie about things or pretend to know more about something than they do.

> Basically, anything that is not 100% copyleft is considered non-Free by GNU and FSF.

This is unequivocally false. Not only is this not the FSF's position (e.g., that you might be able to infer based on what they don't say and trying to read between the lines), but there's a wealth of information that the FSF and GNU have published that directly contradicts this. I get the terrible feeling that you've never actually read any of FSF or GNU's firsthand opinion pieces; that you instead respond to the distorted phantom arguments that appear in message board conversations after RMS and Co's position has been filtered through n retellings in the comments. Worse still, you're helping to propagate this to other people.

Please don't contribute to the problem. Please stop doing this.

Re: Microsoft Becomes Sponsor of Open Source Initiative

#154

Post by Fnoord »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #152
Fnoord wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, I've been part of the open source community for 25 years, and I remember the brutal marketing against the "cancer" of open source. 25 years, so that's since 1992. Do you also remember IBM? Did you hold it against IBM when they started to become actively part of the open source community? Microsoft is changing from a proprietary software company pur-sang to a more service-oriented (and, like Google & Facebo…

I can't help but think of the irony of mentioning IBM in your comparison to Microsoft considering Microsoft indirectly bankrolled, via BayStar, the SCO lawsuit against IBM for the alleged violations of IBM's Unix licenses in the development of Linux code at IBM.

Yeah, that's irony. There's more.

A former monopolist getting flak from a current monopolist who tricked IBM with MS-DOS [1].

If you want to be pedantic on the history of Microsoft, however, I'd like to remind you of the history of IBM [2]. Of particular relevance are the parts "IBM in Germany and Nazi Occupied Europe" and "1969: Antitrust, the Unbundling of software and services".

Do we still (respectively ~75 and ~50 years later) hold this against IBM? No, we don't. Its longer ago than Microsoft's practices, so I understand people still hold a grudge (heck, I'm one of them, I still tend to avoid Microsoft products). It'll take some time. But that doesn't mean my grudge is still rational.

[1] http://thisdayintechhistory.com/11/06/ibm-signs-a-deal-with-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM

Re: Microsoft Becomes Sponsor of Open Source Initiative

#155

Post by belorn »

watwut wrote: post #73
belorn wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rewriting software just because it do not perfectly match a communities opinion about licenses is the least pragmatic way to go about software. It is the my-way-is-the-only-way approach, rather than working together and work with a mix of licenses and focus on the code. Diversity in licenses is a sign of cooperation.

What is the alternative, break the license or change your own? If I want to allow my library in closed code, I cant import GPL. Hence, I have to rewrite it. Rewriting Apache into GPL makes little sense, but is little work. You can just import it and slap GPL on top. You cant just mix licenses, because licenses disallow/allow activities.

Take a operative system like debian. It has a huge number of packages in every combination and mix of open source defined and free software defined license. It does not limit itself to only use code that closed code can use. The community embrace license diversity, and thus has very little "my-way-is-the-only-way". As a practice, if they can avoid writing their own stuff they do so, always look around them and see if someone else has already written what they need. They use the "if-you-want-something-different-then-me-you-might-be-right" attitude to code, happy abandoning anything home brewed.

You can't have both a no-ideological community and "no gpl welcome". Either you welcome everyone and focus on getting code to work, or you exclude based on licenses and reinvent the wheel. The question you need to ask is what is important for you. If the most important thing for the project is the license choice, then be upfront about the ideological choice that such goal is. If the goal is to get working code that will use any software you can legally use, then a more pragmatic approach is more suitable.

I personally don't run operative system which focus more on the license rather than getting things done. My work also don't pay me for license choices, but they do for code that works and create value for the customers. I could put agpl code on the servers and you know what, no one would object.

Re: Microsoft Becomes Sponsor of Open Source Initiative

#156

Post by morganvachon »

carussell wrote: post #153
morganvachon wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure about that? gnu.org has a huge beef with BSD, they are actively campaigning for any developer considering BSD to use GPL instead[1]. Basically, anything that is not 100% copyleft is considered non-Free by GNU and FSF. Again, that doesn't bother me; to each their own. I'm not a developer so you might say I have no skin in this issue. However, I stand by my assertion that BSD gives the lone developer more…

That's not a campaign against BSD-style licenses. It's a campaign against the advertising clause that was present in the "old" 4-clause BSD license. (And the page you link to couldn't really be clearer.) It's also worth pointing out that the "campaign" originated 20 years ago and was more or less successful—Berkeley themselves agreed with the campaign and dropped the advertising clause. FreeBSD stripped the license d…

From the link I posted (emphasis mine):

There are many variants of simple non-copyleft free software licenses, such as the Expat license, FreeBSD license, X10 license, the X11 license, and the two BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) licenses.

They outright say BSD is not copyleft, which means it is not Free Software by the FSF definition, though it is Open Source.

Anyway, all I was trying to say is that GPL and BSD are both sensible licenses, the main difference being that the GPL restricts developer freedoms in order to provide user freedoms, while BSD does not restrict either. That doesn't make GPL bad or BSD better, it's simply two different philosophies and I for one am grateful to both. If you are intent on calling me a liar for that, so be it, though you should know that ad hominem attacks are not welcome here.

Re: Microsoft Becomes Sponsor of Open Source Initiative

#157

Post by rasz »

Provokator wrote: post #69
tyfon wrote: post #2

This is all fine and good. I hope their efforts are sincere. All money and support to free software is most likely good. However, I've been part of the open source community for 25 years, and I remember the brutal marketing against the "cancer" of open source. It will take a lot to convince me that there is not some underlying goal here that is not beneficial to free software. How much has Microsoft really changed? I…

You can Uninstall the XBOX app, actually. It takes like five seconds in Powershell. You should be able to find the method with a quick search, but give me a few hours and I can tell you what I used to do it.

sure, you can even turn off xbox service ... using registry editor, because its blocked in service management.

Re: Microsoft Becomes Sponsor of Open Source Initiative

#158

Post by justinclift »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #142
cjsuk wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only there because they know no one can fork and commit to maintain a codebase that size. Same reason no one forked Linux. They still have 100% control over it.

https://github.com/flagello/Essence That's one fork of VS Code. Not sure how to find projects implementing .NET Core I do know Mono is implementing code from .NET Core though see: http://www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/dotnet-integrati...

That Essence repo hasn't received any new commits in months. Maybe not a good example of a successful fork?

Re: Microsoft Becomes Sponsor of Open Source Initiative

#159

Post by justinclift »

kakarot wrote: post #25
z3t4 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their new strategy might be to join open source communities and kill them from the inside. Although they probably just mean well and everything bad is just coincidence of incompetence. Btw, you can play a lot of games on Linux!

Btw, you can play a lot of games on Linux! Depends on what your tastes are. If you have a soft spot for SkiFree or bland, cookie-cutter shooters then maybe gaming on GNU/Linux is enough for you. But most of the games available for GNU/Linux are candy, games for games sake, and don't have much intellectual value. Wine helps a bit but a lot of things still break especially with modern titles. My solution is running Win…

Several of the Borderlands titles work on Linux. Civ 5 (not sure about 6) works on Linux. It's not as bleak as it used to be. :)

Re: Microsoft Becomes Sponsor of Open Source Initiative

#160

Post by carussell »

morganvachon wrote: post #156
carussell wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a campaign against BSD-style licenses. It's a campaign against the advertising clause that was present in the "old" 4-clause BSD license. (And the page you link to couldn't really be clearer.) It's also worth pointing out that the "campaign" originated 20 years ago and was more or less successful—Berkeley themselves agreed with the campaign and dropped the advertising clause. FreeBSD stripped the license d…

From the link I posted (emphasis mine): There are many variants of simple non-copyleft free software licenses, such as the Expat license, FreeBSD license , X10 license, the X11 license, and the two BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) licenses . They outright say BSD is not copyleft, which means it is not Free Software by the FSF definition, though it is Open Source. Anyway, all I was trying to say is that GPL and BS…

> They outright say BSD is not copyleft

Do you think this contradicts something I wrote above? Are you intentionally trying to use misdirection here? No one would dispute that BSD is a non-copyleft license. You're using a really underhanded style of argumentation, where you make some statement X that is controversial and untrue, and when pressed about X, defend some obviously true statement Y. This can come off looking like a "win" for you, but only if nobody is paying attention.

> Anyway, all I was trying to say is

This is the written word, so it's easy to see what you said--and it's easy to see if you're attempting to rewrite it, too. Here's what you did say (and consequently, what you should be defending, not whether or not BSD is not a copyleft license):

> they are actively campaigning for any developer considering BSD to use GPL instead[1]. Basically, anything that is not 100% copyleft is considered non-Free by GNU and FSF.

> If you are intent on calling me a liar for that, so be it, though you should know that ad hominem attacks are not welcome here.

I know what's permissable, thanks. And Person B making some claim that Person A lied is not an example of ad hominem, by the way. This form of misdirection is something else that only works if no one is paying attention.

EDIT:

> [Not copyleft] means it is not Free Software by the FSF definition

Sorry, you're not going to be able to get away with saying so many untrue things—especially when they are verifiably[1][2] untrue. It is not the position of the FSF (or GNU or RMS or...) that licenses must be copyleft to be considered free. Stop propagating falsehoods. Please spend 15 minutes reviewing the actual positions of the people you're trying to comment on. Otherwise, what's the point of saying anything at all?

1. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#OriginalBS...

2. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#ModifiedBS...

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