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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

#201

Post by blackoil »

headmelted wrote: post #140
rootlocus wrote: post #96

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…

Buying companies is not same as spending as the acquired companies are independently profitable. e.g. Mojang in hind sight is a steal for 4B. Same should be true for Bethesda/Blizzard.

These investment need not return profit in excess of the sticker price but increase the valuation of MS proportionally. If MS tries to offload Mojang it will get an impressive ROI.

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

#202

Post by bayindirh »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #174
bayindirh wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> VSCode is free software...

As in beer only [0]. This license [1] states otherwise for free as in speech perspective.

> and also used a lot outside .NET development (TypeScript). It is extension based, and not all extensions every written for it are free software.

I know, and some of the non-free extensions are just the essentials, so they're what make VSCode, VSCode. So it's open-core, and it's not completely open source, and definitely not free.

> And VSCode is not essential in any way for .NET development,

I don't develop C#, but I know there are other tools and IDEs.

> 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.)

It may not be a necessity for you, and it's definitely not a necessity for closed source software or tools. However, I license all my code with GPLv3, and want my project to be buildable by anyone, regardless of anything. So I prefer a free and open toolchain (GCC/Eclipse/GNU libc) and libraries in my codebases.

If I was writing a commercial application, I may make different choices IDE/Library wise, but I'll still continue to use GCC family.

You don't have to buy into this. I'm not selling anything. This is my stance and a recommendation, but not an insistence.

[0]: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/supporting/faq#_is-vs-cod...

[1]: https://code.visualstudio.com/license

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

#203

Post by bigpeopleareold »

oblio wrote: post #103
bayindirh wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> trying to isolate Desktop Linux as an irrelevant layer They're obviously doing that, but they don't really need to. Desktop Linux is its own enemy. 2 major GUI toolkits, frequent upgrades to them, generally with breaking changes, multiple DEs, frequent upgrades to them, also with breaking changes, a full decades of bickering over a solution that solves actual end user and operator problems in a standardizing way (s…

I think the goal of a single, quality "desktop linux" (or really a "free desktop", whatever kernel drives it), in the face of so much software diversity, is a lofty and improbable goal. The only issue probably is to match an ideal ("all IT departments use free software") with the practicality ("there is too much software diversity") with a fear that our current free software will fall out of favor with people seeking to work on and maintain software.

It is unfortunate though that some free competitors to commercial software still struggle a bit. GIMP has worked fine for my rather simple image editing needs though.

I think mobile is another beast, I'm not going there yet :D

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

#204

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

elviejo wrote: post #177
blagie wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Exactly. Corporations are Ships of Theseus. Even if you change top leadership, the Board is still the same, and looking for the basically same kind of people.

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

#205

Post by Beltiras »

rmeby wrote: post #200
Beltiras wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

What sorts of things are wrong with .NET in your view? As someone who recently started working with it after using Java for years, it has been refreshing and largely enjoyable for me.

You must have not had to work with SOAP then.

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

#206

Post by rglullis »

notriskfree wrote: post #184
makeitdouble wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The other problem with "Public companies are inherently evil by default" is that saying that "the whole system is wrong", is just providing leaders with an excuse. Public Companies can serve their customers, shareholders, and look after their employees while still being ethical, there is always a choice, and there are many positive benefits to behaving ethically, for one, it means you are a trustworthy company to dea…

It's like the story of the scorpion and the frog.

If you know that the system is broken and it is setup in a way that rewards bad behavior, what do you think is the best course of action: to expect that exceptional individuals will be always in charge to avoid the mistakes, or to fix the system so that even normal, fallible humans can be at helm and not having everyone else worried about potential abuses?

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

#207

Post by justsomeguy123 »

blagie wrote: post #156
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…

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…

The culture is still there. They just learned to do better PR and how to make money in this new environment (which they couldn't entirely control).

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

#208

Post by arminiusreturns »

mort96 wrote: post #75
xnorswap wrote: post #54

Earlier 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…

What do you wish was done differently in the open source drivers debate exactly? We have closed nvidia drivers, they're shitty but they work, people who don't want closed drivers can avoid them, people who don't mind them can use them. It seems to have successfully pushed AMD to open-source their drivers, and now even pushed nvidia to make the in-kernel component of their drivers open-source. Would you have wished th…

I've dealt in high-compute situations where the next-gen networking equipment required linux kernel shims. Always thought it sounded like a backdoor personally.

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

#209

Post by blagie »

elviejo wrote: post #177
blagie wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

As a point of experience, I know of only a handful of corporations from my childhood which preserved the same culture. The vast majority are entirely different.

Most software engineering and executives jobs have a tenure of three years, and I think culture is definitely preserved for longer than that. However, it's very rarely preserved over decades.

You're citing a classic joke. The experiment doesn't replicate when people tried to test it:

https://www.answers.com/Q/Did_the_monkey_banana_and_water_sp...

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

#210

Post by goodpoint »

oblio wrote: post #103
bayindirh wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> trying to isolate Desktop Linux as an irrelevant layer They're obviously doing that, but they don't really need to. Desktop Linux is its own enemy. 2 major GUI toolkits, frequent upgrades to them, generally with breaking changes, multiple DEs, frequent upgrades to them, also with breaking changes, a full decades of bickering over a solution that solves actual end user and operator problems in a standardizing way (s…

> 2 major GUI toolkits, ... multiple DEs, frequent upgrades to them, also with breaking changes, a full decades of bickering

I was using Linux desktops 20 years ago and the same arguments were made. They were FUD and they still are.

1) having "too much" choice is nothing to complain about.

2) if you are a beginner, pick a stable distribution and your desktop will be completely immune to churn. Use it as a productivity tool, not as a playground.

3) if you are not a beginner you should be able to maintain a desktop. If you are busy, pick a simple DE and use it on a well know distribution.

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