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Can we trust Microsoft with Open Source? (2021)

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Re: Can we trust Microsoft with Open Source? (2021)

#111

Post by slaymaker1907 »

elviejo wrote: post #66
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No license, GPL or otherwise, can prevent the situation you describe. If the project is licensed under the GPL, and the company decides it's not turning sufficient profit while remaining open source, then they'll simply stop working on the project and the outcome is the same. Any open source project can only thrive if the community puts the effort in. Choosing GPL does not prevent or even lessen the risk that a compa…

But with GPL you are warranted the freedom to fork and even build your own company on top of that. Look at MariaDB. It was forked from MySQL once oracle decided they didn't want to invest heavily on a competitor from their product. In the same vein Percona built a succesful product and company on top of MySQL

After all the fiascos of companies changing the license on stuff, I’m a fan of what Linux. No copyright assignment and lots of contributors so relicensing is nearly impossible.

Re: Can we trust Microsoft with Open Source? (2021)

#114

Post by JackSlateur »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #16

Trust is a complex thing. It's much more than a rational, game-theoretic or economic equation, it's emotional. Nobody "trusts" Microsoft. People need it. People fear it, or fear losing it. People suffer it. Or they have no choice due to pressure or policy. Or they don't know any better. Or they are tricked into believing something about it. But in the end, the often forced choice to use Microsoft is a strategically c…

Gullible people trust microsoft. I work with some of them, sadly.

Re: Can we trust Microsoft with Open Source? (2021)

#115

Post by JackSlateur »

Salgat wrote: post #36
firesteelrain wrote: post #35

I know a lot of Microsoft people who work in Azure who are big on open source. They know all about KeyCloak, Kubernetes, HashiCorp Vault, Terraform, etc It’s not your Dad’s Microsoft

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 ope…

Yes. And why ? Because some heretics are not using hyper-V as hypervisor. So microsoft works with Linux to make sure windows can be run as guest.

The day AWS and GCP migrates their workloads to hyper-v will mark the end of microsoft's upstream contribution on Linux.

Re: Can we trust Microsoft with Open Source? (2021)

#116

Post by katzinsky »

audidude wrote: post #17

> Yes, that is right, Visual Studio for Mac is a closed source version of the formerly open source MonoDevelop IDE after Microsoft acquired Xamarin. Having all of my GPL code ripped out of MonoDevelop so it could become Visual Studio for Mac was the straw that made me write GNOME Builder, GNOME's flagship IDE.

When I used to work as a freelancer MonoDevelop was awesome since it meant I could work from a decent OS instead of Windows. Thanks so much for your work.

Re: Can we trust Microsoft with Open Source? (2021)

#117

Post by iLemming »

xet7 wrote: post #72

Microsoft is able to keep GitHub and npmjs.com online, despite all the DDoS attacks. It requires a huge amount of servers, bandwidth etc, to have all the repos, downloads, etc online. Having those online makes coding FOSS possible. There are some FOSS alternatives to GitHub, but they have had more problems staying online.

> Microsoft is able to keep GitHub and npmjs.com online

Somehow they were also capable of killing Skype, Nokia, and Yammer, among some other things. They've also made LinkedIn less user-friendly and overwhelmed with ads.

GitHub (I feel) never had so much downtime before the acquisition. I'm dreading the day when they finally make something so stupid that would drive hundreds of thousands to move their repos someplace else.

Re: Can we trust Microsoft with Open Source? (2021)

#118

Post by NikkiA »

mystified5016 wrote: post #54
recursive wrote: post #7

I've been using some of the most expensive Visual Studio subscriptions for probably decades. This thing is so jam-packed with features, I'll probably never know what half of them do. But I definitely have access to hot-reload. Anyway, it doesn't really go to the point, but it's funny to me that I've had this hot-reload feature the whole time, and just have never found much use for it. Or maybe I just don't trust it.

IME it can be unreliable and just doesn't end up being all that useful. C# compile times being what they are, it's not such a burden to stop and rerun for minor changes. Not like my C++ projects which take several minutes to build because Windows Defender wants to use 50-80% of my CPU to monitor the compiler for malware. Wish I could hot reload one TU or something.

I have used it a few times for debugging, as long as you are aware that it's not a guarantee that your changed code works perfectly when run from scratch, it can be useful to iterate changes to a single function without a whole compile>build>debug cycle, just edit the code and see if it changed the behaviour in the debugger.

Re: Can we trust Microsoft with Open Source? (2021)

#119

Post by iLemming »

shiroiushi wrote: post #89
HKH2 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google still distributes AOSP. The Android ecosystem is quite diverse and healthy. They've done a great job IMO I wouldn't trust Apple with anything open source, but Apple's not trying to look like an open-source-friendly company. Microsoft is.

It's more than that. Google started out as an open-source-friendly company. Furthermore, their business model has never been to sell proprietary software to end-users, so supporting or opposing FOSS has never been an existential issue for them. Apple has never tried to look like an open-source-friendly company, but has never really been actively opposed to it either. Their whole business model, for a long time now, h…

Yeah, anyone who remembers 1990s knows that MSFT is not to be trusted. I am appalled to see how they lured thousands of programmers to use VSCode.

How are people so naive to think that a colossal corporation with a capitalization comparable to the GDP of Germany is spending an enormous amount of resources to build "a free" code editor, and that they are doing so with absolutely the best and benevolent intentions?

Re: Can we trust Microsoft with Open Source? (2021)

#120

Post by anticensor »

travisgriggs wrote: post #51
yoyohello13 wrote: post #26

Can we trust Microsoft with anything? I certainly trust them to put profit above all else in every situation.

This the crux of the issue. And it’s why you can basically ask “Can we trust with open source?” and always answer definitively No. one is collaborative “commons” economy, the other is an attempt to make a deal between a baron and their serfs. Ultimately, each is striving against each other.

Wouldn't a for-profit company like legalised free labor coming from open source project? Or does the control motive interfere with profit motive there?
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