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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

#461
post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The important distinction is that the PR graveyard of other projects isn't determined by MSFT's corporate priorities.

Every major open source project is in no small way driven by the interests of corporate users, from which a non-trivial number of PR's and contributions come from. This is true from Linux and Postgres to Rust and Java.

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

#462

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.

I have a problem with that. You have essentially done work for multi-billion corporation without remuneration. That would probably violate many laws like minimum wage requirement and volunteering at for profit corporation (minimum wage must be paid). I wonder why this is not pursued.

Nearly everything that is open-source depends on people doing work for free that is used by other people who use it for profit. Maybe OP is making profit through the software they're writing using C#. Should Microsoft charge them for C# usage? Microsoft is the ones paying for development costs after all.

The purpose of open-source software is to be able to fix problems for your use case and continue using the improved software. OP could have just chosen not to upstream their changes (I'm assuming you'd be okay with that since Microsoft doesn't get their hand on the fix) but then they wouldn't be able to easily update their compiler.

I guess the only real option here is to use a community-developed language with no for-profit company behind it. Then write all the libraries that Microsoft wrote for C# and published for _free_. Hmm.

I wonder what percentage of popular languages / libraries out there have the level of reliability & support that C# and other open-source software with big corps behind them has.

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

#463
post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The important distinction is that the PR graveyard of other projects isn't determined by MSFT's corporate priorities.

Of course Microsoft only include functionality they want. Just like any other platform only include what they want. It is entirely their prerogative. Just because they don't include anything and everything other people want, it does not make them less open source.

We are entirely free to fork the project, embed the change and compile our own binaries. You don't have to strongarm a change into upstream for that.

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

#464

Microsoft pays quite a few people to work on Code. I assume the code is open because they gain some value from community submitting PRs and is good publicity to develop it in the open on Github. But, make no mistake, this is not a OSS project in the true sense of the word. MS will ALWAYS be the decision maker here and will do whatever it benefits them. They pay people to work on this full time, they get to have the l…

It's true but the same thing is true for almost every open source project. Instead of Microsoft it's usually a single guy or perhaps a duo who has the ultimate say. Everyone else's word is just a suggestion. It's a rarity for an open source project to work under some sort of democracy where random developers have a say.

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

#465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The .NET debugging tools in VS code are proprietary. If you get the OSS build from your distro and try to debug a .NET program it'll fail with an error. (Telling you it's only available with proprietary VS code from MS) For other languages this might be a minor pain. For C# it kills one of its best features, it's debugging support.

This is also an ecosystem thing. Rust has pervasive support for printf debugging (#[derive(Debug)] and you're done), while .NET's default .ToString() method is completely useless (which I'm sure has nothing to do with Microsoft wanting people to rely more on their debugger...).

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

#466

.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…

We are not upset. MS can do as they wish. We are warning people to not consider this platform the same way they consider fully free ones, despite the obvious wish of MS that they do so. This platform comes with invisible strings attached, some of them will likely turn into chains in the future. And it's MS new marketting strat to say they are open now for everything, so it's only fair we point out that the player mat…

> This platform comes with invisible strings attached, some of them will likely turn into chains in the future.

Can you go into more detail about this?

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

#468
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been; how gloriously different are the saints." - C.S. Lewis I still recall people fawning over how Google was going to be "different" in 2006, and how it was going to save us from Microsoft. Nowadays, they are essentially what MS was in its' heyday. Blind faith in corporations is not the way forward. I've always understood the hacker ethos to have str…

Well, this site isn't about hackers in the classical sense. It's about people working on building businesses and startups. The URL tells you everything: "news.ycombinator.com". This is, first and foremost, about the business, not the people or the technology.

I’ve yet to find a better watering hole for technologists. If you know of one, I’m all ears.

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

#470
post #209

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…

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…

So we could define the medium live of culture as 3 times the average executive tenure?

So if in the company the average tenure is 3 years, then the culture is what has been practiced in the last 9 years... Even if the company itself is 20 years old.

In another company with tenures of average 5 years then company culture is what has been going on the last 15 years.

What do you think? Does this idea mire closely match your experience?

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