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Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform

isdotnetopen.com

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

#391

Post by jrochkind1 »

bob1029 wrote: post #250

.NET is the most open, non-trivial ecosystem I have ever participated in. I experienced 2 different problems with .NET (back in 2.x/3.x days), and was able to have interaction with the actual MS developers on their Github issue page without any sort of bullshit overhead process. Within days, I saw traction on my comments and within months I saw PRs that ultimately resolved the issue I presented. The following year, I…

"open" can mean lots of different things, and refer to different aspects.

I think the OP is talking about "open" in large part in terms of open source licenses, and intellectual property. They complain about "subvert[ing] an active open source project by ramming in a proprietary extension to continue to lockdown .NET" and "Over time, the .NET platform is becoming closed, to ensure it is only useful if you are a customer."

You are talking about "open" in terms of access to developers at Microsoft, who you can commicate with, and who then respond by getting fixes to your problems in.

These are actually pretty different things. You and OP can both be entirely right. .Net can be a platform where Microsoft is working to make sure that the platform is only useful if you are paying customer, and where you have access to communicate with developers who take your concerns seriously.

> Are we upset that we have to pay money for the privilege of using other peoples' intellectual property

Well, I mean... you know what open source is, right? Yes, it means you don't have to pay money for the privilege of using other people's intellectual property. That's literally what open source is.

That's fine if you don't care whether or not .Net is open source. That's fine if you think it's silly to be upset that something isn't open source when you think it should be.

But... .Net claims to be open source, right? So, yes, it is reasonable to expect you can use it without "paying for the privilege of using other peoples' intellectual property". That's literally what open source is?

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

#392

Post by rglullis »

_-david-_ wrote: post #374
rglullis wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I said about institutions. Lawmakers are (or should be) subject to public scrutiny. An employee from a corporation benefits from a corporation that abuses their power. Ordinary citizens that vote for a corrupt politician do not, and have no invested interest in them.

I agree, but until something comes to light abuses could still be happening. I was mostly pushing back on the idea that a system can be created that would allow the average person to not pay attention. I think individuals must be vigilant even if we think we have a good system. I probably wasn't as clear as I should have been.

"Not worrying about it" is not "not paying attention", maybe that is the point that you assumed more than I intended to convey with my comment.

It's less about matter of eliminating abuse, and more about damage reduction. We can have systems that even if someone screws up, the consequences are not catastrophic.

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

#393

Post by robertlagrant »

lovich wrote: post #385
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 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. Has that not been a critique of software engineers working at FAANGs? That they think they are working for a moral company while the “Don’t Be Evil” company mottos are replaced in the background with anti comp…

What political school of thought is that?

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

#394

Post by lovich »

p1necone wrote: post #123
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, still, to battle PlayStation. Microsofts decision to release all of their new XBox games on PC was kinda bizarre to me. It basically guarantees the XBox as a gaming console is going to lose market share to the PlayStation and eventually die out because the core gaming market is going to pick PC + PS5 + Switch (or some subset of those) as the sensible combo to be able to play a…

> But hey, maybe I'm missing something here.

Most consumers want appliances. Having to debug software and hardware issues that frequently come up on PC gives them zero satisfaction.

For example, most people want a toaster when they want toast, instead of a more versatile fire

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

#395

Post by tinco »

renewiltord wrote: post #382
csmpltn wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "You want to know what's better than having actual MS developers interact with your issue on GH? Being able to submit a MR yourself and actually have that MR be merged in within days of it being good to go." .NET isn't your average hobby project - it's used everywhere. It's imperative that changes go through the proper due process here. It takes time to prepare design documents and review them, discuss the changes…

The guy's got code into Ruby, rustc, and Rails. I'm pretty sure he knows what it takes to get things into master at a widely used project.

Just so no one's deterred, it's actually not very difficult to do this. The rustc and ruby patches I submitted as an exercise. I went to the issue tracker, sorted by oldest first, and then picked the first issue that had little/no discussion on it. I purposefully avoided picking an issue with significant architectural impact or political context this way.

So there's also not much designing and reviewing needed. The merge requests were assigned to very senior reviewers each time. The automated test suites made sure I didn't waste much of anyone's time with trivial errors. Of course the requirement is that you're actually at least proficient with the languages (C for Ruby and Rust for rustc) but beyond that I think anyone can do it with a couple of sunday afternoons spent diligently digging through the codebase.

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

#396

Post by lovich »

pianoben wrote: post #389
svick wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody does anymore, so I don't see how that counts as a valid criticism of current .Net.

If you deal with (some parts of) the public sector, you certainly will encounter SOAP. For example - those online drivers-ed courses you buy in California to get rid of a ticket? They all talk to a SOAP backend maintained by the State. Certainly SOAP isn't everywhere the way it used to be (thankfully), but it's out there and isn't going away any time soon.

SOAP and the related libraries in .NET are pretty unfun to work with. However they are so old and unused compared to modern development that it’s not really a good comparison.

Like I have a Java app I am struggling with currently and not a fan of, but its on Java 8 so I don’t consider it representative of whatever I might find in modern Java despite the fact that I am working with it in modern times

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

#397

Post by lovich »

yonaguska wrote: post #367
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…

> Bill Gates has also done an amazing job rehabilitating his image through philanthropy. I think this is no longer true following the pandemic and his vaccine work. And his Epstein connections. In retrospect to this, it's hard for me personally to take his philanthropy into account. I went from childhood, disliking Bill Gates for his anticompetitive Microsoft stuff, to college age, admiring him for his philanthropy,…

The Epstein connection is obviously bad to me but what did he do wrong with vaccines? The only complaints I’ve heard have been conspiracy theories along the lines of 5G microchips in the vaccines

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

#398

Post by benbristow »

pianoben wrote: post #389
svick wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody does anymore, so I don't see how that counts as a valid criticism of current .Net.

If you deal with (some parts of) the public sector, you certainly will encounter SOAP. For example - those online drivers-ed courses you buy in California to get rid of a ticket? They all talk to a SOAP backend maintained by the State. Certainly SOAP isn't everywhere the way it used to be (thankfully), but it's out there and isn't going away any time soon.

SOAP isn't actually that bad if you use it with a typed language like C#. It's hell trying to use it with something like Ruby/Python though - I remember struggling to talk to a SOAP API with Ruby and getting into headaches that my data was being rejected until I realised that the XML properties had to be in the exact order unlike JSON which doesn't care usually.

Import a WSDL into Visual Studio and you've got your client code automatically generated & documented (if the API was written properly), works pretty nicely to be fair. Even easier than using something like Nswag to generate JSON clients from Swagger/OpenAPI specs.

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

#399

Post by lovich »

robertlagrant wrote: post #393
lovich wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Has that not been a critique of software engineers working at FAANGs? That they think they are working for a moral company while the “Don’t Be Evil” company mottos are replaced in the background with anti comp…

What political school of thought is that?

Communism?

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

#400

Post by soSadm4n »

robertlagrant wrote: post #387
soSadm4n wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-trust aimed at individuals is called taxation. Being able to shelter wealth accumulation through loopholes that only benefit rich people asset classes is so obviously classist (and tacitly ageist against youth since it’s all old people calling these shots). Their ad and marketing budgets are basically to woo public opinion into belief billionaires should exist, however. Look at the Coinbase story; employee and i…

Employees did not lose the money they were paid for their labour. What employee wealth is gone?

Offers that got pulled, 18% who were laid off, compensation based on speculative value that’s gone, while the CEO walks away with a much more certain personal position. All for placing a logo adjacent to others engineering feats (unless the Csuite at Coinbase is secretly Satoshi Nakamoto).

Billions locked up in deference to a handful of CEOs means less liquidity in the open market. Which is intentional, I understand; if dollar value collapses these guys might have to work to survive, and of course humans could no longer do the necessary trade of real things to stay alive and prosper if an arbitrary financier cannot claim an arbitrary % of economic activity thousands of miles away.

Human agency is coupled to wishful thinking still. Which is understandable; we only just crossed the threshold of <50% of adults believing in higher powers. Was still 80% around 2000.

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