One fear seems to be that Microsoft will divert resources from omnisharp and it will die slowly. This should serve as a reminder that open source by a large company without a supporting community is basically the same as a project with a very low bus number -- manage your risks accordingly.
Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform
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Re: Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform
#62I've been using Omnisharp-VsCode extension for years on my daily job. It's far from ideal, especially the initial setup experience. I think here's what's going on: It appears VS Code is Microsoft's main IDE and C# is the main language. Not surprised they decided to obtain more control over the integration to improve the experience. In terms of management, it's always easier to cut all the external dependencies (commu…
I can echo this, while doing its job most of the time, Omnisharp has been one of the least stable parts of my VS Code C# experience (the least stable as usual being anything relating to Unity ;) ).
Issues like runaway compiler threads, slow response times, OmniSharp frequently losing the mono-path and requires restart (this is some config issue and interaction with Unity, but could have been handled automatically).
It's sensible to improve the C# experience on VS Code, but not saying the way MS is doing it here is the best way.
Re: Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform
#63The actual announcement is here: https://github.com/omnisharp/omnisharp-vscode/issues/5276 It's not quite as dramatic as the OP is making it out to be.
(I just posted it on HN, the domain and website is not mine)
I agree calling .NET closed platform because of the debugger and now LSP is over-dramatic simplification of the situation. However what else is it than Microsoft pushing a proprietary component into a thing which is currently open?
See the parallel thread about PyLance explains why it is a problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31763107
Re: Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform
#64This is exactly the same as what MS did for the Python extension when the open-source LSP was replaced by the proprietary Pylance. I get the feeling that MS becomes more and more likes Google. For example, on Android, the core experience is provided by GMS while the AOSP is provided as an open-source core. In terms of VSCode, the core editor is free and open-source, but some key experience is baked by proprietary com…
> And the trending is that more and more plugins which are controlled by MS are moving towards to a mixture of open-source code and proprietary components.
Other than this fact, what is the effect, supposedly detrimental?
Re: Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
These things almost never are, and the purists risk a purist death spiral. It reminds me of the closed source drivers debate. Someone has a proprietary component they want to incorporate into an open source system. The purists demand they open source that proprietary software if they want it integrated into the open source. The developer wants a compromise, but the purists won't allow it, so the developer is left to…
> The purists demand they open source that proprietary software if they want it integrated into the open source. ...and as a result we got GPLv2, GPLv3, open Intel, AMD and Broadcom drivers. Lastly Paragon donated NTFS source code to kernel tree (...and probably many smaller examples I've forgot). > The developer wants a compromise, but the purists won't allow it, so the developer is left to pick up their ball and go…
>MIT/permissive licenses are for developer freedom, but xGPL and other strong copyleft licenses are for users' freedom.
That's a bit to simple, being a user of FreeBSD i just want opensource, i would never use a FreeBSD-fork that is no open anymore, so i have even more freedom as a dev and a user.
>Again we have Intel, AMD/ATI,
The Intel driver is BSD and ATI is MIT, and i think it's absolutely logical for those two to take that license's, and not GPL.
But please don't get me wrong, GPL2 is a great license.
Re: Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform
#66Is this not pretty close to: "core open source" model that a
lot of the open source projects featured on HN has adopted?
They give you access to a lot of things for free, and then they offer proprietary solutions on top of that. and if they follow the pattern maybe they will start charging or some proprietary features.
Re: Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform
#67I can definitely say that for me, this is the straw that breaks the camel's back. I am turning my back on the .NET ecosystem, after having written C# for 7 years. The `dotnet watch` debacle from last year, still having key parts like the debugger closed-source and now again with this: It's just too much. I do not want to build anything of value on top of such a shady platform that's completely controlled by one Megac…
is `dotnet watch` basically `git ls-files|entr dotnet build` ?
(entr is http://eradman.com/entrproject/ – like inotifywait but easier)
Re: Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform
#68This sort of thing has been MS's playbook since I was a kid, or earlier. It surprises me that people are still surprised when things like this happen. I especially think someone with Miguel de Icaza's experience should know better[0]. It's interesting to see the generational difference here. Many of my somewhat-younger (even only by 7-10 years) programmer/techie friends just don't remember the Microsoft of the 80s an…
I think what's more likely in this case is that MS under Satya really does want to be a good corporate citizen, but are finding themselves in a bind that threatens the whole organisation.
They're spending up the wazoo on Xbox, still, to battle PlayStation. They were supposed to have conquered that market over 15 years ago and are still throwing money at it.
Windows is hurting as a retail business. License costs have been driven down by Chromebooks and resurgent Macs, and with all the free upgrades they get very little revenue from gaming PCs anymore (which is one of their biggest markets) while also battling Proton and Vulkan to keep users on the platform.
That leaves Azure and Office as the big cash cows. Azure is struggling to compete with AWS, and the big draw of Azure is the deep integration between it and Visual Studio (which, to be fair, is unrivalled anywhere else).
That's the bind. Microsoft needs the open-source community to embrace Visual Studio Code, and they have, but they also need to protect Azure's hegemony with .NET developers.
Can you build and deploy .NET on other clouds currently? Of course. Do you lose a lot of features by doing that? yes. Ones you may miss, or (if you've never been on Azure to become familiar with them), ones that may draw you to migrate later.
Re: Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform
#69This sort of thing has been MS's playbook since I was a kid, or earlier. It surprises me that people are still surprised when things like this happen. I especially think someone with Miguel de Icaza's experience should know better[0]. It's interesting to see the generational difference here. Many of my somewhat-younger (even only by 7-10 years) programmer/techie friends just don't remember the Microsoft of the 80s an…
Yes, a lot of younger developers and "tech citizens" think MS is a saint now. They need to love Open Source / Linux because their platform has lost to the openness, composability and lightness of Linux. They lost the server space, but they're retrying to seize desktop from Linux with WSL and invading the developer tools space and trying to isolate Desktop Linux as an "irrelevant layer which runs MS software and techn…
Yup, agreed. Didn't realize how much Canonical was helping with WSL, though it of course makes sense that they're doing so, unfortunately.
> De Icasa is not a saint either by pushing Mono on GNOME and Linux
Eh, I think interoperability is good, and reverse-engineering Windows frameworks/technology has a long history in the open-source world (WINE & Samba being two prominent examples). I was disappointed when they sold Xamarin to MS, though. That felt like selling out, even though I'm sure it made sense at the time.
Re: Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple is absolutely awful. That doesn't make Microsoft's double-talk okay, Apple never pretended to :heart: opensource.
They did kind of head that way in the early days of OSX, to try to bootstrap a development community by being close enough to Linux to make it easy enough to switch. I'd probably characterise them as having an abusive relationship with Open source.
This history doesn’t make sense - the early days of OSX predate widespread adoption of Linux. When OSX was released Linux 2.4 was just released and that was just the beginning of Linux becoming something interesting commercially in the data center (at the time Linux was more just slowly eroding incumbent commercial Unix - which is why Microsoft was concerned about it, since they had spent the 90s relying on commercial Unix vendors to fuck each other up) - there just wasn’t some huge commercial Linux community that Apple was trying to tap into - especially for a desktop operating system. The Darwin userland is BSD based after all. And while Apple made do with gcc, they’ve clearly never been too gung ho to get wrapped up with anything GPL related.
If anything Apple offered Solaris, Irix refugees a viable desktop transition.