Can we trust Microsoft with Open Source? (2021)

I am.

It's been on my radar for a long time and I have prototypes for one that are bitrotting on gitlab. There are three major design pieces of it.

First, It has an executable that runs in your development container (environment/etc) which means you can load libraries/typelibs/girs/etc just like the app would without crashing the IDE (or Glade in the old days).

Second, everything is an AST node so doing fun manipulations, unlimited undo, etc is just tree mutations.

Third the worker process does the rendering to a render node tree which is then shipped over to the Designer process to render.

The cambalache author and I are friends, so we occasionally talk about how we can make things work to integrate from Builder.

As for blueprint, that is outside of my knowledge area. I still do everything in XML and would prefer a designer to work with trees anyyway. Not sure I'd go the route of mutating a blueprint AST, but I hear it has back-and-fro to XML so that would probably be fine.

Also, if you want to make this a higher priority, lobby my employer (Red Hat) to make sure they know it's important to you.

Secondly, help me with _any_ of my other projects so I have some cycles to dedicate to it. People rarely notice but Builder, Sysprof, Text Editor, D-Spy, Manuals, Ptyxis, etc... are all one-man (split between many) projects and libraries.

>> The thing about open source is that you can just fork it. You don't need to trust them.

That's not always true, particularly for things where a company is the primary developer.

You can prevent takeovers by using GPL license with no CLA.

Microsoft has also been one of Linux' top contributors. The old days are over, and the shift has been from selling a product to selling a service and making sure those open source projects work best on your service. Ironically both Elasticsearch and Redis didn't like this in spite of having dedicated AWS employees contributing to their projects. At least Microsoft and AWS have a financial incentive to maintaining open source.

I think that this is spot on. Microsoft can't be trusted with open source... and nor can any other company. The exact logic that the author of this piece (correctly) uses to scrutinize Microsoft also applies to every other business. As soon as the right/wrong person gets sway in the company, the companies will be only too happy to burn their reputation for a short term profit.

I wish that it were simply a Microsoft problem, because that would be easy. Don't do business with them (or build open source efforts around them) and you would be good. But unfortunately, bad actors abound and they will screw you if they get the chance. So you have to make sure no one organization gets the power to cripple you, no matter who it is.

This is true to a point. But there is the risk of building open source applications that are tied into closed source OS stuff. Like you could build some great thing that is completely dependent on Dirext X for instance. Sure you have ht code but it is functionally useless without that missing piece.

There is also the issue of sheer code size/complexity that means even if you have the code, do you have enough people to verify it or is it a case of just waiting until it breaks/gets exploited? That second point is a larger issue of open source nowadays, not just Microsoft.