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

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

#131

Post by Someone » Thu, Jun 16, 2022, 9:09 AM UTC

happymellon wrote: post #76

Someone wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple didn't take ownership and then start closing CUPS, but they have also never pretended to be a friend of OpenSouce. They haven't produced anything opensource since then. Two counter-examples: They open sourced Swift in 2015 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(programming_language)#H... ), and Swift-DocC in 2021 ( https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-docc/ ) Apple bought CUPS in 2007 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/w…

I'm not sure how they are counterpoints. Who would use a programming language that wasn't open? Except dot net devs. Which is the point. CUPS was critical infrastructure for Apple, so they bought it. Since it is GPL they couldn't close it, hence they abandoned it. Apple are not your friend, but they never claimed to be, you just might have an overlapping interest, Microsoft hold big "We Heart Linux" events.

The claim was “They haven't produced anything opensource since then”.

I think I clearly showed they have.

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

#132

Post by makeitdouble » Thu, Jun 16, 2022, 9:14 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…

> Public companies are inherently evil by default

The extremism of this positon makes it hard to swallow the message. You might as well be right, but accepting it at face value would be a huge cognitive dissonance for many people working in public companies.

Basically, the “are we the baddies ?” answer would be “yes” for a huge chunk of us, and I don’t think that’s how we see it personally. Companies have to make money, but the evil label needs way more nuance.

To apply this to another context: I genuinely think that IKEA has had an outsized positive impact on our everyday life, even as they aim to make money (not the core “charity”, but the rest of the group), or as they make truely dirty legal and commercial decisions to trick the system in their favor. And they didn’t improve flatpacks by accident, it is their stated mission, and I’d be crazy proud of my job if I designed the Expedit series.

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

#133

Post by jsmeaton » Thu, Jun 16, 2022, 9:15 AM UTC

EdwardDiego wrote: post #43

chenzhekl wrote: post #15

This 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…

Why didn't MS just contribute to the existing one, instead of writing its own from scratch?

The existing one was an open source Microsoft project. Then they built a new closed-source version as a replacement.

To be fair, pylance is orders of magnitude better with regards to performance. But I just don’t get what the reasoning was to make pylance closed source. It’s baffling.

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

#134

Post by mariusmg » Thu, Jun 16, 2022, 9:20 AM UTC

Microsoft pays quite a few people to work on Code. I assume the code is open because they gain some value from community submitting PRs and is good publicity to develop it in the open on Github.

But, make no mistake, this is not a OSS project in the true sense of the word. MS will ALWAYS be the decision maker here and will do whatever it benefits them. They pay people to work on this full time, they get to have the last word. IT'S THAT SIMPLE.

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

#135

Post by dustinmoris » Thu, Jun 16, 2022, 9:21 AM UTC

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…

Yup:

https://github.com/omnisharp/omnisharp-vscode/issues/5276#is...

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

#136

Post by klysm » Thu, Jun 16, 2022, 9:22 AM UTC

unhammer wrote: post #67

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…

is `dotnet watch` basically `git ls-files|entr dotnet build` ? (entr is http://eradman.com/entrproject/ – like inotifywait but easier)

It may as well be. It can do some legit hot reload, but the set of scenarios where it works is so small it’s effectively useless.

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

#137

Post by foota » Thu, Jun 16, 2022, 9:22 AM UTC

What was the outcome of the hot reload stuff?

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

#138

Post by ClumsyPilot » Thu, Jun 16, 2022, 9:23 AM UTC

makeitdouble wrote: post #132

someotherperson wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Public companies are inherently evil by default The extremism of this positon makes it hard to swallow the message. You might as well be right, but accepting it at face value would be a huge cognitive dissonance for many people working in public companies. Basically, the “are we the baddies ?” answer would be “yes” for a huge chunk of us, and I don’t think that’s how we see it personally. Companies have to make mon…

> IKEA has had an outsized positive impact

IKEA has been illegally logging forests in romania for decades.

The first public conpany was involved in slavery. Show me a large enough company and there will be a history of fraud, illegality and human rights abuses.

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

#139

Post by Ygg2 » Thu, Jun 16, 2022, 9:24 AM UTC

bayindirh wrote: post #118

Ygg2 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm willing to bet $100 that this discussion will look the same way in 15 years I'm willing to take it, but only because I think there won't be a Linux in 15 years. And yeah. Android doesn't count. It's essentially an enclave that runs Dalvik programs. Linux basic assumptions about hardware don't hold on mobile. I think Linux is suffering from the Lisp curse. Because they never choosed a DE, there is endless splint…

> I'm willing to take it, but only because I think there won't be a Linux in 15 years. Let's see. I've added a reminder in my calendar with a link to this comment. > Because they never choosed a DE... But they created a Desktop Standard which allows every DE to behave the same where it matters. This unified a lot of things. So every DE is a shell and workflow with same underlying principles underside. Much like POSIX…

> every DE to behave the same where it matters.

Sure. Except the end user won't care. As end user I don't see it implements DS.

I see that KDE has bug A and Gnome has bug B. Or KDE has feature C that Gnome doesn't have, and vice versa. All in all as user. No DE fits me because bugs and features are scattered around.

E.g. Haiku did it right. You don't get to choose. It's baked into the OS

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

#140

Post by headmelted » Thu, Jun 16, 2022, 9:24 AM UTC

rootlocus wrote: post #96

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…

> 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 off…

> They're spending up the wazoo on Xbox

2002 - Rare - $375 million

2005 - Lionhead - ???

2014 - Mojang - $4 billion

2014 - Gears of War - ???

2018 - Compulsion - ???

2018 - inXile - ???

2018 - Obsidian - ???

2018 - Ninja Theory - ???

2018 - Playground - ???

2018 - Undead Labs - ???

Sept 2020 - Zenimax / Bethesda - $7.5 billion

January 2022 - Activision Blizzard - $69 billion

This is just acquisitions, so it isn't exhaustive as it doesn't include first party costs and development expenditure, or Halo expenses / 343, as it assumes they essentially paid nothing to Bungie (or their costs were negative) after that split happened.

Microsoft don't publish extensive separate numbers for the Xbox division, but their Q1 2022 filing nonetheless states $3.6 billion - which is up 8%. They've also been open that they still, 21 years later, make at most break-even on their hardware sales.

That's a lot of expenditure relative to income. To state the utterly obvious: they're not getting nothing for that money, so it's not like they are sunk costs, but I'm not sure what standard would meet "spending up the wazoo" if not 20 times revenue (at minimum, as it only includes spending on acquisitions for which the amount paid is made public).