Meet Bill Gates, the Man Who Changed Open Source Software • Hacker News Board

Re: Meet Bill Gates, the Man Who Changed Open Source Software

#11

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Jan 30, 2012, 2:11 PM UTC

xcthulhu wrote: post #7

Isn't Microsoft's schizophrenic relationship with FOSS old news? The same company that claims "Linux is a cancer" also employs K.Y. Srinivasan, a topic linux kernel contributor [1], and Simon Peyton Jones of Haskell fame. Microsoft's competitors Apple and Google have dealt with OSS much more gracefully. While I don't approve of this approach, these companies 'embraced' open source with projects like Darwin and Androi…

Yes they are quite schizophrenic and it is funny that you mention Simon Peyton Jones.

There are actually many open source technologies, whose development is done by Microsoft Research employees or mainly funded by Microsoft, Haskell and Ocaml being two of them.

But working for big corporations was taught me that they are quite schizophrenic usually.

Re: Meet Bill Gates, the Man Who Changed Open Source Software

#12

Post by DrHankPym » Mon, Jan 30, 2012, 11:07 PM UTC

ryanbrunner wrote: post #9

The article seems to be more about how Open Source changed Microsoft than how Microsoft changed open source. I do think Microsoft is doing many things that should be viewed as admirable around open source - they've opened up portions of the .NET framework such as ASP.NET MVC, they (as this article states) contribute back to open source projects, they support projects like Mono, and they started initiatives like the O…

What kinds of negative opinions about Microsoft and Open Source are really outdated?

Re: Meet Bill Gates, the Man Who Changed Open Source Software

#13

Post by boubountu » Tue, Jan 31, 2012, 7:43 AM UTC

I don't like the fact that people either love Microsoft or don't. The same applies to Google and Apple. As developers, we should always objectively question all big companies and give them credit when they deserve it. I, for instance, hate Microsoft for not living up to its potentials. I don't hate because it sells its software, but because, it creates a vendor-lock set of software, preventing integration of third party tools and making their clients completely dependent on them.