31–40 of 104 posts
This is a Chesterton's Fence situation. Suddenly the .NET foundation is receiving lots of spotlight on its flaws but one needs to understand the historical progression of the organization. Miguel speaks this clearly: > The transition from the old model to the new model was a major concession from Microsoft The current .NET Foundation is an improvement on what existed before. Is it independent? Not completely, but .NE…
I may be an out of touch old-timer but I still find it kinda sad and weird that Miguel and Nat, both of them heroes of mine in the early 2000s now work for Microsoft.
Would you feel better if they worked for Apple? Microsoft is a much more open company than Apple, just look at the immense output of Microsoft Research over the years.
Of course, this is all based on whether they actually thought about it strategically before deciding to go with C#. Perhaps they were thinking they'd get larger roles at Microsoft, perhaps they didn't think about it all and Microsoft was the most direct option due the the C# language choice.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well they have 5 five permanent members of the UN Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) with veto power ...
So they are all one-fifth special then.
It feels like it only exists to try and emulate the look and feel of a community-driven and community-governed FOSS construction while at the same time being in commercial control of Microsoft since that it what the value is to them. This makes sense, being beholden to shareholders and profit and all that, but not even pretending it's just commercial developer advocacy/evangelism (which would have been fine - lots of…
It is also ridiculous considering that .NET runtime development would never work with the deep pockets of Microsoft.
I may be an out of touch old-timer but I still find it kinda sad and weird that Miguel and Nat, both of them heroes of mine in the early 2000s now work for Microsoft.
The takeaways from this are:
1. This is likely a lifelong dream for them. I'm not comfortable with shitting on people's lifelong dreams.
2. I definitely saw it coming. As soon as I saw Microsoft acquired Xamarin and retained both of them, the first thing that popped into my head was "this makes perfect sense". You can draw a straight line from their early work on Mono to their acquihire.
3. They are still spending their lives enabling Microsoft tech to play well with open source; the only difference is that Microsoft is now paying them to do it.
This is a Chesterton's Fence situation. Suddenly the .NET foundation is receiving lots of spotlight on its flaws but one needs to understand the historical progression of the organization. Miguel speaks this clearly: > The transition from the old model to the new model was a major concession from Microsoft The current .NET Foundation is an improvement on what existed before. Is it independent? Not completely, but .NE…
As a slave any new privilege is better than having less than before.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So essentially, this means that the foundation is setup for the benefit of companies that would otherwise deem the use of open-source software too risky since they cannot be legally sure that they will be able to use this software for their business.
Well, it also means that you as an open source dev don't have to constantly worry about someone challenging your copyrights or trademarks. And if they do, you don't have to worry about the legal expenses.
My understanding is that the legal benefit of being a member project is essentially just that they run the CLA bot. If you actually get sued you're still on your own.
It is obviously not great news if the purpose of the .NET Foundation is to control this ecosystem on behalf of Microsoft. But, establishing that is better than "Let's continue to be vague and hope nobody notices that in practice that's what it's for".
† One of the things to like about the IETF is that it isn't an organisation. The Internet Society is an organisation, several related entities (e.g. the IETF Trust) are organisations, but the IETF isn't, it's just an activity - like dancing. Anybody can do it, if they want. If the people doing it start doing it differently, that can't be wrong, because that's just how they're doing it now.
I may be an out of touch old-timer but I still find it kinda sad and weird that Miguel and Nat, both of them heroes of mine in the early 2000s now work for Microsoft.