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Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform

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281–290 of 500 posts

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

#281

Microsoft can't have it both ways. Crippling open tooling in order to extract more revenue or drive lock-in will undermine their efforts to make .NET relevant outside of the niche occupied by traditional .NET shops. I can't imagine that there's a business justification for this decision that is compelling enough to offset the long-term damage to .NET adoption and community trust.

How are they going to extract more revenues with a proprietary Intellisense VS Code extension? At best they're locking you in their ecosystem, but they don't profit from VS Code directly (emphasis on directly).

> but they don't profit from VS Code directly (emphasis on directly).

When they achieve enough lock-in, that'll likely change.

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

#282
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…

> someone with Miguel de Icaza's experience should know better

Surely RMS told him this exact thing would happen when he left gnome for ms.

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

#284

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?

The base edition of IntelliJ (and also the base edition of PyCharm) is open source: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community

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

#285
post #165

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…

IKEA is private. Do you not think it would behave quite differently were it a typical public company?

Thanks, I forgot they were private. To my defense, their corporate structure is a mess (on purpose) and the franchise shops could probably be public while the controlling entities and holdings stay private.

The structure is so deliberately conceived that I wouldn’t be surprised if it kept the same functioning even as a public entity. They’d make less money, but would probably still concentrate decision power into a few chosen hands and lock the whole from external influence.

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

#286
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 the company and to boost the share price, not for the betterment of humanity.

I think this is true for large organisations, the larger they are the more their behaviour seems to become dictated by the rules of the environment it operates within; whereas the smaller the organisation the more principled they can be as individuals have the power and will to override those rules.

Also with something as large as Microsoft there are so many departments that one can be actively working against the interests of another, i.e MS can and probably does simultaneously do good and bad faith activities for open-source - and yet we commonly anthropomorphise them as if they have the integrity and consistency of an individual... A human flaw i guess.

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

#287
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations are sociopaths by their very design. Their number one mandate is to make money for their shareholders and to grow. This colours every decision they make.

It doesn't have to be like that. The focus on shareholders started sometime in the 80s.

But it does have to be like that now. Because if you're not growing (not growing the bottom line), you're almost certainly losing market position to other companies that are chasing growth. If there was some group altruism that made all companies in a sector collectively say "ok, we're big enough now, let's hit pause", then companies could afford to be a bit more about being good for the sake of being good. This is obviously a pipedream though.

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

#288

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.

> Existing users will be able to choose between the open-source OmniSharp powered system that exists today, or the new “'LSP Tools Host” which will provide access to additional experiences. If OmniSharp remains open-source, I think people can still add more features to it, right? Do C# developers really use VSCode? I use IntelliJ (closed source) to write Java application because IDE provides far more features than an…

OmniSharp is not going away, but as a project it is significantly more limited in resources than the closed competitor.

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

#289

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…

> 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.

> Show me a large enough company and there will be a history

The specificity of your comment (large enough company) is misleading. The flaws you call out are everywhere, not just large companies.

Humans are imperfect. Human organizations and institutions (companies of all sizes, governments of all types, schools, churches, and so on) are also imperfect.

I don't mean to say that we shouldn't set high goals, devise mechanisms to deal with imperfection and so on (checks and balances, regulations, etc), just that there isn't anything particularly unique about "large companies" in this regard.

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

#290
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)

No, it has a lot of bytecode level intelligence to surgically replace the parts of the program that need replaced (as I understand it). Your version just re-runs the project from scratch whenever a change occurs.
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