What does a trustworthy Microsoft look like to you?
I don't really distrust Microsoft per se. I just find it tragic that the only way GitHub could survive (I guess) was to be BOUGHT. Like why couldn't they stay smaller, focus on what they were good at, and standardize with the community all the integrations in an orderly manner? Although, Microsoft has shown they care more about the developer community than Apple as of late. So for that, I can at least say my trust is…
I'm surprised there's not a single mention of "Microsoft" in this or the npm announcement [1], given the old-evil-history of Microsoft and the new-nice Microsoft we have today. I would expect that there was at least a mention, considering the reason that most modules in npm are still in ES5 is exactly because of the monopolistic practices that Microsoft followed back in the day which makes Internet Explorer still rel…
I'm surprised there's not a single mention of "Microsoft" in this or the npm announcement [1], given the old-evil-history of Microsoft and the new-nice Microsoft we have today. Maybe Microsoft's reputation is exactly the reason why it was left out of this announcement. Sometimes a brand is so tarnished that the owner tries to hide it from the people who hate it. (For example, Comcast → Xfinity. I expect Monsanto to g…
The latter already happened[1]. Bayer offloaded most of it's ag business (to BASF) and replaced it with Monsanto. Monsanto has been rebranded "Bayer Crop Science". Although I'm guessing much for the same reason, Monsanto never rebranded any of the dozens of seed companies it acquired over the years (e.g. Dekalb, Seminis, Asgrow, etc.)
Sleez'n their way into our hearts. I can't say I really blame them, but god I hate it all.
What does a trustworthy Microsoft look like to you?
I’ve been a developer for nearly 25 years. I’m not sure if there is anything MS could ever do to regain my trust. Unfortunately this seems to be the way of large tech companies. At one time I thought Google was the best thing ever (don’t be evil). Now I find that I view Google in much the same way as I do MS. A huge corrupt behemoth that needs to be broken up.
They do and I will give them props for that. But no company should have as much control over open source that Microsoft does.
They should & deserve to have full control over everything they've created. You can blame AWS/GCP for letting GitHub & npm be acquired, how many years were they on the open market? Most of the $$$ in OSS is being funneled towards rent-seeking major cloud providers that are hosting OSS software, whom should all have blank checks with the money they've reaped so far, but seems only Microsoft has the strategic savvy to…
It's also not like Amazon is being an amazing open source citizen; I don't see them acquiring the tech to be an automatically-better outcome than the current version of Microsoft doing so.
IMO this shows the importance of separating technology from platform. Ideally we would have non-profit groups with good governance & corporate support (rather than control) to grow these technologies. If an open source project can be acquired, it's only so free.
Hopefully they don't drop Linux support like they did with Skype, Minecraft, Xamarin[1], Corel Office and a long list of products. Their strategy from my perspective is to ensure Linux does not become a competitor for their desktop OS. 1: it never had Linux support.
Skype returned with a Linux client, and Minecraft never dropped Linux support at all.
Just like GitHub this is a cloud play to make Azure more appealing by meeting developers where they're at, increase dev mindshare/reach, hosting their packages, CI Scripts/Actions then making it seamless to deploy to Azure. Smart, have no idea where AWS or GCP's control team are at when these strategic plays are going down.
I honestly think that Google cloud platform will be shut down within a couple years. It seems like it’s losing the war very badly.
I am honestly amazed that there is no official way to install Fedora or Fedora CoreOS on GCP. There are no images even on the GCP marketplace.
Stuff like this is what irritates me. Even small vps providers have this.
Am I weird for thinking it didn't need to go anywhere?
My understanding was that financially they were not going to last long doing what they were doing.
There's a difference between "not going to last long" and "not going to return 10x to their investors". This seems like another example of the faustian bargain of taking VC money.
Sleez'n their way into our hearts. I can't say I really blame them, but god I hate it all.
What does a trustworthy Microsoft look like to you?
It would be interesting if they ended up with Brendan Burns (creator of k8s when he was at google) in charge of github at some point and made him like the OSS champion. He's running all the containers and linux stuff on Azure, so it seems like it would be a natural fit.