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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

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's just not true and it's plain to see if you stretch out the timeline. Is the Hudson Bay Company basically the same at it was in 17th century?

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

#262
post #90
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A problem of the .NET ecosystem is that there is no open source debugger for C#. The Microsoft-provided debugger has strict license terms that only allow it to be used in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. JetBrains needed to write their own debugger for their cross-platform IDE Rider. Luckily they already knew a lot about .NET to do this and it turned out very well but it's still not the official debugger and als…

you can use lldb that's open source

Are you sure about that? LLDB is primarily a native code debugger. For .NET you want to debug "managed" stack frames and variables.

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

#263
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…

> The directors have a legal responsibility [...] to boost the share price

What?

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

#264

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…

I am convinced that 99.999% of the people that claim to be "anti-Capitalist" are in reality anti- Corporativist . It's way too easy for people working at big companies to think "the company might be evil, but not me / my team". The Corporation gives everyone a moral shield that lets them rationalize all the shit that happens, but the money that pays their salary and the stock options they get all come from the same s…

> I am convinced that 99.999% of the people that claim to be "anti-Capitalist" are in reality anti-Corporativist.

Aren't they in fine the same thing?

If you believe that the logical consequence of a system is the emergence of amourphous amoral entities harming the greater good, aren't you actually fundamentaly against said system? I kind of get the opposite take-away from your line of thoughts: I believe that a lot of people who think of themselves as capitalist but actively distrust corporations are actually latent anti-capitalist.

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

#265
post #9

I'm somewhat confused what's going on here.

Now that .NET is easy to run on non-Windows platforms, Microsoft is likely trying to figure out what's the business case. By keeping the tools to them, Microsoft can try to offer the best developer experience. Hopefully (from Microsoft point of view) this pushes developers to use services from their ecosystem (Github, Azure). It's likely that in the future more developers are actually doing the development remotely.…

What’s frustrating is Visual Studio already has advantages over VS Code: the WinForms designers, XAML designers for WPF and WinUI.

Microsoft don’t need to turn the VS Code C# plugin proprietary, to give Visual Studio an edge.

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

#266
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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, downg…

Ok look, i have that TV that run's Linux, they even send me a "CD" with all the source-code of linux/gnu of it, BUT there is that highly proprietary module loaded into the kernel, firmware and so on, so patching my TV is as easy as re-engineering a whole closed-source system.

In theory the idea is great, in reality it makes nearly no difference.

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

#268

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…

Funny, I don't see any good from IKEA when you look at the greater picture. More waste, un-accounted for externalities all over the board (labour laws, environment exploitation), extremely well-honed organisation designed to evade taxes through "charities".

IKEA in a vacuum has many many flaws.

As I see it though, what IKEA displaced wasn’t the family owned expert artisans manufacturing built to order furnitures.

It was piss poor, badly designed, actual shitty materials, poor country labor intensive flat packs.

When I was a kid my family bought cheap mass produced furniture from shopping malls, the looks were fine, it came from Vietnam or China [0], and the quality was laughably bad. Finished product would be slightly crooked. Screws slightly loose. Smell terrible. And people would have that “what did you expect for that price” grin. [1]

I can’t imagine employees were treated in a stellar way either, we heard scandals after scandals about third world factories, and the quality itself was a testament to how much humans were involved in all of that.

So, I see IKEA as a provider of somewhat decent furnitures instead of shitty ones, most other parameters staying the same (they don’t, I genuinely think they’re not worse than the 80s~90s post colonialist euro companies)

[0] how the table turned, quality wise…

[1] to address the obvious “why didn’t they buy more expensive furniture that could have lasted way longer instead”…the answer is simple: upfront money. The same reason people don’t buy 5 story apartment buildings even if that would bring them more money in the long term.

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

#269
post #263

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…

> The directors have a legal responsibility [...] to boost the share price What?

I think the GP is referring to shareholders’ right to sue if they believe that a company’s executive/leadership is operating against the interest of the company (and therefore the shareholders.) But that’s a pretty high standard, one that isn’t coextensive with boosting the share price by any means necessary.

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

#270
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 wish I could dig it up in the way back machine, but there was a period in the early aughts where Microsoft employees blogged religiously (on orders from corporate).

Anyway, a group of them discussed lobbying the US government to charge Linus Torvalds and Eric Raymond for securities fraud, alleging that people promoting open source software were actually engaged in a pump-and-dump scheme for companies like VA Linux (a dot com company that crashed and burned)

To me this perfectly encapsulates Microsoft’s attitude of that era. It’s all there right in a bunch of early aughts blogs.

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