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Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform

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171–180 of 500 posts

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

#171
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think that the point here is that as a user, with MIT you may not have a choice. Of course, you would never choose a FreeBSD fork that isn't open. But if you buy a TV running a closed fork of FreeBSD you might never even find out. In that case, it was great for the developer: they were able to get a great OS for free. However, it was not great for the user: they get a closed OS that they can't patch, upgrade, downgrade, or change in any way that the developer doesn't approve of.

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

#172
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

> 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.

Can exactly the same not be said for Windows or MacOS? The difference being that you're basically locked into your choice with Windows/MacOS.

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

#173
This reminds me somewhat of golang - ostensibly open source project but in reality all meaningful decisions are made by those at the company (including shameful throwing away of community work). Perhaps we need a different term to differentiate between open source projects that truly have open governance vs. ones that are essentially bolting on some open source shaped stuff.

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

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> His joint venture with MS what turned everything sour for many people, incl. me. Why did it turn things sour for you? I mean, ever since the Xamarin acquisition, MS .NET has become open + cross plattform and Xamarin which was a commercial/paid-for product is open too. VSCode is a first class citizen for free C#/.NET development on macOS and Linux. Not saying all of this is related to de Icaza getting bought by MS,…

If you're a .NET developer who uses Linux, yes that sounds nice. On the other hand. Consider a prominent member one of the biggest open source projects leaves the project, joins Microsoft, and praises Microsoft and pushes semi-closed Microsoft technologies on every project, claiming Linux is dead without Microsoft, and we need to compromise by allowing these non-free technologies and porting almost everything to it.…

VSCode is free software, and also used a lot outside .NET development (TypeScript). It is extension based, and not all extensions every written for it are free software. And VSCode is not essential in any way for .NET development, and I am saying this as someone who learned C# with MonoDevelop on Linux around 2010. There are commercial IDEs like Rider, and you don't need an IDE to compile code - the build toolchain of .NET is free software.

I don't buy into this "All tools associated with an ecosystem must be free software". That is not even true in Java/C++/Python land, where there is a plentheora of commercial and succesful developer tools (i.e. IntelliJ, CodeWarrior etc.)

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

#175
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…

That companies (or their officers or directors) have a legal obligation to boost share price (or maximize profits or similar) is one of the most widely believed myths about companies.

Google for something like "obligation to maximize shareholder value" if you want to find numerous articles debunking the myth. Here's a good one [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

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

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 exh…

They are building Xbox as a brand/service not as a product these days. Sure they ship consoles but you can subscribe to Xbox Gamepass and and use it on both Windows and Xbox (and I think they also have game streaming? I could be wrong).

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

#177
post #156
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…

Companies aren't people. The set of people in Microsoft is completely different in 2022 than it was in 1995. A quarter-century has passed. It's not the same organization as it was back then. It has very little relationship to it. I've been consistently surprised by Microsoft doing non-evil things over the past decade, until I accepted that I no longer had reason to hate it. Conversely, for a while, I was surprised by…

Second the people selected for a company are selected based on their conformance to that companies culture. So even if not a single human in Microsoft is the same, the company culture is the there.

This reminds me of an old story, might be fiction, that conveys the idea. five chimpanzees were put in a cage, bananas in the center everytime one tried to get a banana they would get cold water untill they simply stoped trying. Then one by one they replaced the chimpanzees do one one of the new ones, tried to take one of the bananas the old ones would stop him. Slowly they replaced all of them and none of the new chimpanzees, who had never received a cold shower, took the bananas.

The same with corporations.

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

#178

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.

Is MS contributing to Omnisharp or is it an independent open source project? They can still suck its Oxygen, as it will no longer be default C# lsp and MS version will have lot more investment.

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

#179
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Azure struggling to compete with AWS? I wonder if this is specific to particular spaces, like very large enterprises maybe? In the SME space, Azure is significantly more dominant in my experience. All those companies where "Can't get fired for buying Microsoft" applies, went to Azure.

GP seems to be oblivious to actual stats [0]. Last year, Azure was the 2nd biggest player in cloud computing, being "only" 2/3 of AWS' market share, but still having more than 3x the market share of the next biggest competitor (Google). Indeed hardly something I'd call "struggling". [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1202770/hyperscaler-iaas...

I can't remember the source, however, I believe Microsoft is overstating the usage of Azure as a cloud computing platform. For example Office 365 is hosted on Azure and counted towards the cloud computing figure.

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

#180
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've worked with MS solutions and I've worked with *nix solutions for 2 decades. I can't for the life of me understand how people choose to inflict the pain of MS on themselves in anything except "office productivity". I must admit, that's an area they have got pretty good at. .NET is horrible to work with. C# is a decent language mind you, I like the language features. It just needs a better "standard library".
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