Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform • Hacker News Board

Re: Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform

#91

Post by jka » Thu, Jun 16, 2022, 8:09 AM UTC

xnorswap wrote: post #54

tempodox wrote: post #38

The 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.

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…

At the time of writing, the upvote:downvote ratio on the announcement issue is almost 1:20, so I'm initially skeptical about your implication that this is some kind of fringe part of the developer community.

To me it seems more likely to be a culture clash - one team is used to developing closed source tools that have been highly prized by the company in the past, and another team has had great success writing open source tools that are widely adopted.

My guess is that the adapter code project is currently within the former team's remit, leading to this situation -- but that's all complete conjecture on my behalf.

Re: Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform

#92

Post by rootw0rm » Thu, Jun 16, 2022, 8:10 AM UTC

Forever and ever ago I used OmniSharp to add C# scripting support to a game hacking tool I created. Syntax highlighting, code completion, and compiled to a binary when you hit run. My code was absolutely terrible, but I had a blast writing it all. Much respect to the OmniSharp crew.

edit - Man, the ways I abused .NET back then...hooking native code and jumping to a .NET 2.0 function...totally feasible, lol. Who cares if you have to inject the entire .NET runtime into the target process?

Re: Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform

#93

Post by bluehatbrit » Thu, Jun 16, 2022, 8:10 AM UTC

littlecranky67 wrote: post #82

I don't understand the fuzz about it. There are a lot of commercial/closed-source devtools out there (IntelliJ, Rider) for otherwise open languages/platforms that devs are obviously happy to use and pay for. We are not demanding that every Java/Python/PHP etc. tool is open source and free, why is there this double-standard for Microsoft?

In this case they didn't just plan, build, and release a feature in VS. They got all the way through the building and most of the QA for a feature in the core .net cli and decided to remove it, not for quality reasons, but because they wanted VS to have a feature others didn't. The work had been done and then they rushed through a PR to avoid community comment to remove the code.

If python removed a feature so a specific IDE could have it exclusively I think people would also be upset.

Re: Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform

#94

Post by ratww » Thu, Jun 16, 2022, 8:12 AM UTC

askvictor wrote: post #26

happymellon wrote: post #11

Earlier 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 part of the macOS developer community bootstrapped itself. Apple at the time was trying to sell Java WebObjects and Carbon/Cocoa in public.

The proximity with Linux was an accident. NeXT is from the late 80s, pre Linux, and NeXT was the baggage OS X had to work with. They didn't strip out the Unix parts, but also didn't widely proclaim it was "close to Linux". It was mostly the developer community touting it as an advantage of macOS, with Apple later admitting "yeah yeah that's also cool" and later shipping Python and Ruby alongside Perl just for completion.

Even when Apple clearly tried to help Homebrew by offering a Xcode-less toolchain there was not even a peep about the purpose of "Command Line Tools". It took them years to acknowledge it existed.

Also, like the sibling response said, Linux only started being as widely used later than OS X.

Re: Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform

#95

Post by adli89 » Thu, Jun 16, 2022, 8:16 AM UTC

littlecranky67 wrote: post #82

I don't understand the fuzz about it. There are a lot of commercial/closed-source devtools out there (IntelliJ, Rider) for otherwise open languages/platforms that devs are obviously happy to use and pay for. We are not demanding that every Java/Python/PHP etc. tool is open source and free, why is there this double-standard for Microsoft?

Because Microsoft claims they love open source, apparently they are not allowed to do anything closed source, ever.

Re: Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform

#96

Post by rootlocus » Thu, Jun 16, 2022, 8:17 AM UTC

headmelted wrote: post #68

kelnos wrote: post #37

This 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…

> They're spending up the wazoo on Xbox

> Windows is hurting as a retail business.

> License costs have been driven down by Chromebooks and resurgent Macs

> That leaves Azure and Office as the big cash cows.

Where are you pulling all this data from? And I don't mean coarse data from various articles, anectodal evidence or personal observations, I mean actual evidence that microsoft's revenue share is dominated by office and azure? Microsoft sells a lot of stuff to a lot of entities, I'm not convinced you can sum up their revenue so neatly without opening their books.

Re: Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform

#97

Post by short_sells_poo » Thu, Jun 16, 2022, 8:17 AM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #72

headmelted wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This reads to me as: > MS under Satya really does want to be a good corporate citizen ... followed by... > [a bunch of reasons why MS won't be a good corporate citizen] Wanting is great, but actions speak louder. Maybe instead of doing sketchy things to try to lock people into your cloud platform (and make using your framework on other platforms more difficult), they could, I dunno, maybe focus on Azure itself, and m…

I wonder how much inertia an organization like MS has. I never worked there, but the anecdotes I read/hear indicate that MS is really 4-5 semi-independent competing power structures. E.g. there's sometimes (often?) adversarial relationship between them even, which then projects into baffling end user experiences. The windows shut down menu or the highly schizophrenic situation between the new and old control panels comes to mind.

Steering something like that is not even analogous to captaining a single large ship, it's more like trying to steer a flotilla where each captain hates the other bunch and they are all continuously pulling in different directions.

Satya may be doing his very best to improve the culture, but management has to change or be replaced on multiple levels below him to make things stick. He has to do this in a way that doesn't unite the leaders of the sub-groups against him in mutiny.

Again, I'm not trying to excuse MS's behavior in any measure, just highlight that even with the best of intentions it may take decades to change firm like MS to give up it's old ways.

Re: Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform

#98

Post by oblio » Thu, Jun 16, 2022, 8:17 AM UTC

headmelted wrote: post #68

kelnos wrote: post #37

This 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…

> Azure is struggling to compete with AWS

It's not. Everyone's darling, Google, is. So are IBM, Oracle, Alibaba.

Azure is the only true threat to AWS and the only actual peer.

Re: Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform

#99

Post by gigel82 » Thu, Jun 16, 2022, 8:19 AM UTC

konsuko wrote: post #33

I 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…

.NET was open sourced in 2016, that's 6 years ago. It looks like you were 1+ years fully within the ecosystem before any part of it was OSS, and now you're demanding new features they write get open sourced as well?

Reminds of that time they introduced WiFi on planes; it was a brand new thing, and they let folks on the flight use it for free - but of course being a new tech it broke down after about an hour. There was this guy on the flight making a big fuss about the WiFi stopping working, like truly upset and vocal about it. Dude, how are you owed something you didn't even know existed an hour ago?

Re: Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform

#100

Post by oblio » Thu, Jun 16, 2022, 8:19 AM UTC

someotherperson wrote: post #71

kelnos wrote: post #37

This 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…

Opinions like this have always been weird to me. Not wrong, but weird. Any contribution that M$ (remember when people would sub the S for a dollar sign?) makes to open source or open standards is to support their own bottom line and we shouldn't expect anything else. The directors have a legal responsibility to the company and to boost the share price, not for the betterment of humanity. To this effect, companies wil…

People forget that before about 2000 or so, Microsoft was bigger than the next 10 or so software companies, >. And had much higher profit margins that the other tech companies.

IBM created the playbook, Microsoft perfected it, FAANG copied it.