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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

#441
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm willing to bet $100 that this discussion will look the same way in 15 years I'm willing to take it, but only because I think there won't be a Linux in 15 years. And yeah. Android doesn't count. It's essentially an enclave that runs Dalvik programs. Linux basic assumptions about hardware don't hold on mobile. I think Linux is suffering from the Lisp curse. Because they never choosed a DE, there is endless splint…

>I think Linux is suffering from the Lisp curse. Because they never choosed a DE, there is endless splintering and re-invention of the wheel. But who is "they", Linux the OS doesn't exist as Linux is just a kernel. There are countless distributions that assemble operating systems from parts, throwing GNU userland on top of Linux kernel and other bits of software on top of the GNU userland and the kernel. FreeBSD, Net…

> But who is "they"

People that wrote if not the original kernel. So l guess Linus and co.

If an OS is to "win" desktop, or mobile, or whatever, it needs to minimize forking between its libs. Go for one way to do it, rather than a muriad of related ways

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

#442
post #8

Such a great, pragmatic, versatile programming language (C#), having a great FP side-kick (F#) that can be used next to it, and years of corporate experience and a great ecosystem of closed and open-source libraries, 3rd party tooling that really brings the experience to another level (LINQPad, Rider, Resharper)... .NET could stay closed source and everyone would happily keep using it, of course with very limited ope…

If it was closed I certainly wouldn’t choose it for something new.

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

#443
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And most likely deprecate support for the open Language server, as they did with Pylance/Jedi...

What do you mean by "deprecate support"? Do you mean stop developing a project that's open source / free software?

They did remove support for Jedi language server in their Python extension. Sure, you can fork it, but nobody will actually use it, since their extension is also free and also looks open. And I didn't find any extension which does that :/

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

#444
post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are unaware of how much better it is with the other ecosystems. Probably all of them except the ones controlled by Apple, Oracle and IBM. 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. That's not just a dream, that's the standard way of operating for most l…

You can do this in the .NET ecosystem too, they accept pull requests from the community regularly. I have a few merged PRs in Roslyn, one in particular I made because I knew it didn't affect very many developers and would have trouble getting prioritized. Also personally the ideal situation for me is for someone who is getting paid to fix the issue to go fix it without me having to get my hands dirty.

I ran open-source teams for Microsoft for a number of years, all through GitHub. We had contribution policies, encouraged PRs, and would bend-over-backwards for external developers contributing code.

It's not an exaggeration, but I don't know how it could be better done.

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

#445
post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "deprecate support"? Do you mean stop developing a project that's open source / free software?

They did remove support for Jedi language server in their Python extension. Sure, you can fork it, but nobody will actually use it, since their extension is also free and also looks open. And I didn't find any extension which does that :/

> They did remove support for Jedi language server in their Python extension.

No, they just switched the default to Pylance. Jedi is still a supported option.

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

#446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Didn't realize how much Canonical was helping with WSL, though it of course makes sense that they're doing so, unfortunately. Eh, they have a dedicated team for enabling WSL/Ubuntu desktop in Canonical. They're fueling the effort. > Eh, I think interoperability is good, and reverse-engineering Windows frameworks/technology has a long history in the open-source world (WINE & Samba being two prominent examples). IIRC…

Yeah you don’t remember correctly at all.

This is why I added Techrights reference here, which fixes what I've been wrong about and supports me what I was right about.

The most important thing is, De Icaza is with Microsoft for much longer than people remember (or want to accept), and the events I remember (albeit a bit blurry), when I was a grad student were actually happened.

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

#447

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…

I think you are missing some things here.

For Microsoft the Xbox hardware was always intended to be "aspirational" for PC owners and push developers to build better PC games. Even the name choice from "DirectX-Box" has always come from that relationship back to the PC (even with the brief side jump in the Xbox 360 era away from traditional PC hardware).

Just as the Surface line of hardware isn't designed to "replace" the PC but encourage innovation in PC hardware design.

For a really good example since you already brought it up: "the really fast SSD enables cool stuff" you mention with respect to the PS5 is a big part of the Xbox Series X/S hardware too. They are only sold with really fast SSDs and even the expansion slots only support those kinds of SSDs. (Some gamers have been upset by this that they can't just plug in any USB drive like on the Xbox One.) But also Microsoft also added a lot of that exact same "cool stuff" to Windows and PC games can use "DirectStorage" APIs to get some of those exact same benefits when PCs are built with really fast SSDs that support DirectStorage. But right now the easiest (and cheapest) to find "PCs" with all that hardware and configured correctly to use it "fresh out of the box" are: the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S. (Even despite the supply chain issues.)

That's an interesting circle around the hardware: the Xbox hardware pushes PC standards that are aspirationally available sooner and easier on Xbox hardware. Xbox hardware puts "high performance gaming PCs" in living rooms in homes that might now otherwise consider a "high performance gaming PCs" while also giving those that love building their own "high performance gaming PCs" performance goals to shoot for and a baseline hardware standard to judge their gaming PCs by (is your gaming PC at least as good as an Xbox One X? do you have the RTX and NVMe SSD with DirectStorage support to hit Xbox Series X fidelity in Xbox Series X optimized games? etc).

Surface doesn't want to be the only PC hardware, it wants to be PC hardware that gives ideas to the other PC hardware companies. That sets benchmarks even for home PC builders to measure themselves. Xbox as a console seems to want to do the same thing: it isn't designed to be the last or only gaming PC in a household: it's designed to be the "first", it's designed to be easily accessible for those that wouldn't otherwise buy a gaming PC, it's designed to be the measuring stick for what a "gaming PC" means and give ideas to PC manufacturers of things they can also be doing. (And it is designed to keep Windows as the most innovative OS for gaming. Microsoft "wins" either way if you buy an Xbox or a gaming PC so long as it still includes Windows.)

(Personally, I tend to own a gaming PC for 7+ years and watch it slowly grow out of date with new releases, because a PC is also a lot of other things and stability is great. When I choose to play "keeping up with the Gamer Joneses", I do it by following Xbox cycles. The Xbox Series X does outclass my gaming PC on quite a few specs and I'm happy with that arrangement. I also like the fluidity that I often buy the games only once and can run them on my PC in the other room, at my discretion. Some games you want "latest and greatest looks on the couch" and some games you want the freedom to jump over to the other room and "slightly dated graphics fidelity but I just need to hop on the game from my desktop where I'm multitasking a TV show and a Discord chat in my PC chair".)

I have a lot more questions for what Sony's strategy is with current PC releases of games and that the PS5 is again back on "ordinary" PC hardware. They certainly don't "win" anywhere near as much by making their PC games available on Windows.

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

#448
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.

> isn't going away any time soon.

Funny you think that. That's one of the major complaints about .NET 5+ is that WCF was dropped as an officially supported library and .NET is pushing people to REST and/or gRPC. (I think gRPC will suffer many of the same SOAP problems eventually, but it's the current hotness, thanks Google.) Every .NET HN article is full of complaints that WCF is dead and they have SOAP services to maintain and .NET is telling them to go away and do something new. There's a community project named CoreWCF trying to make the transition easier and even they are not trying to implement all of WS-* and SOAP madness and trying to make the transitions easier to REST or gRPC if you like that Google-branded SOAP smell better.

In .NET 5+ SOAP is already dead and good riddance. It's probably going to live forever on .NET Framework 4.x servers for legacy apps, but the message seems to be loud enough: "those are legacy apps now".

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

#449
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…

It seems like semantics, but it's public corporate entities that are amoral and not all companies. There is a designation of a "Public Benefit Corporation" which has more restrictions and audits as well as a different mission statement.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/public_benefit_corporation

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

#450
post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do this in the .NET ecosystem too, they accept pull requests from the community regularly. I have a few merged PRs in Roslyn, one in particular I made because I knew it didn't affect very many developers and would have trouble getting prioritized. Also personally the ideal situation for me is for someone who is getting paid to fix the issue to go fix it without me having to get my hands dirty.

.NET PRs sit unmerged for years if they're not a priority for MSFT. I'm glad it works well sometimes and that MSFT seems to care about .NET on Linux, but it's not that open.

Point out a major language that doesn't have a graveyard of PR's with similar stories.
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