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Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

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Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#151

If you would have shown me this headline 15 years ago I would have thought it was an onion article. Who would have thought they would have come this far?

I'm not so sure, I kind of feel like this is them following Embrace Extend Extinguish, except they realized they moved to step 3 too soon so they're going back to step 2 or 1. I do not have faith that they won't try step 3 again later.

Absolutely. There is zero regard for open source from Microsoft here. At the very least they must be trying to return to the "developers, developers, developers" days. With Bill Gates punching the clock, it's really anybody's guess what the real motivation is here, but it sure as hell isn't all the things we know and love about open source.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#152
Hot toes in springwater! I had figured out that since .Net was proprietary I really should ween myself away from the sweet, sweet F# and learn some clojure but it seems Microsoft has stumped on my plans for self improvement. Immutable by default, algebraic datastructures with pattern matching to boot, great concurrency story and now actually open with permissive licence. Mind. Blown.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#153

It's funny how Nadella has moved the needle more for developers in 9 months than Ballmer did in the last decade or so, and all that without running around like a madman too. Pretty good. I'll never switch back to MS for what they've done in the past but it is nice to see them try hard to become a nicer player in the software eco-system. Google and Apple need some other party to keep them sharp, it might as well be MS…

>I'll never switch back to MS for what they've done in the past I'm not sure what they've done to receive such hatred. They are just a technology company and are trying to sell the product.

> I'm not sure what they've done to receive such hatred.

Hatred?

I simply decide not to buy into a certain company's products and services because I recall some misdeeds from the past and that's equal to hatred?

As for what they have done, I thought Microsofts history was chronicled enough that it doesn't need repetition, especially not on a website for 'hackers'.

But if you need pointers, you can go visit groklaw.net (if it is still up) to read about SCO and Linux, you can read up on the Stacker case and you can try to figure out why Microsoft ended up in court over IE and a long list of other not so nice things they did in the past.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#154
post #125

It's funny how Nadella has moved the needle more for developers in 9 months than Ballmer did in the last decade or so, and all that without running around like a madman too. Pretty good. I'll never switch back to MS for what they've done in the past but it is nice to see them try hard to become a nicer player in the software eco-system. Google and Apple need some other party to keep them sharp, it might as well be MS…

Seeing comments like this “I'll never switch back to MS for what they've done in the past” always reminds me of this post from Hanselman http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftKilledMyPappy.aspx

I like Hanselman's blog a lot, but I found that post pretty disappointing. The reason there are a lot of people running around saying "Microsoft killed my pappy!" is because Microsoft actually did kill a lot of people's pappies, back in the day.

When someone comes into town and shoots your pappy, it's not something you forget or forgive easily. The burden is on Microsoft to prove that they're not the same company as they were back then, not on the people they wronged to get over it.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#156
Great news, but I think people need to realize this is really just Microsoft pledging to merge and support what Mono has already been doing. You won't magically be able to take a WPF app and run it on your Mac. You will however be able to write a server app or maybe simple command line tool that runs on Mac & Linux. It's great news to see Microsoft acknowledging and supporting Mono, but there isn't a magic switch that will flip and everything suddenly works on every platform.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#158

What happens to Xamarin business model now?

It improves it. We now get all these bug fixes for all of our products across Android, Mac, iOS, PlayStation, Xbox and every other embedded system we support. Some details: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2014/Nov-12.html

Let's hope that lowers the costs of Xamarin. It's a great product, but even Microsoft realizes that, in order to achieve wider adoption, you need something close to the freemium model, like Visual Studio.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#159
post #125

It's funny how Nadella has moved the needle more for developers in 9 months than Ballmer did in the last decade or so, and all that without running around like a madman too. Pretty good. I'll never switch back to MS for what they've done in the past but it is nice to see them try hard to become a nicer player in the software eco-system. Google and Apple need some other party to keep them sharp, it might as well be MS…

Seeing comments like this “I'll never switch back to MS for what they've done in the past” always reminds me of this post from Hanselman http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftKilledMyPappy.aspx

I've also been pretty unforgiving about things that Microsoft did in the past to crush competing web browsers, competing standards like OpenGL or ODF, Linux or open-source in general. And sorry, but I do not agree with that article by Hanselman.

Thing is, I treat companies like I treat people. Legally speaking, isn't that what they want, in the US anyway? So if you violate my trust, it's goodbye until I see serious amends being made.

However I must say that with this move I'm finally ready to forgive Microsoft. I've always seen .NET as a platform created for achieving lock-in with Windows, the ECMA standard (while better than Java's JCP, which is a farce) I've seen as an attempt to paint a turd and Mono, while a wonderful effort, I've never seen as good enough. Open-sourcing .NET is a wonderful move, because now we've got a credible alternative to the JVM and this move couldn't come with better timing, given the dickish moves by Sun/Oracle against Apache Harmony and Android's Dalvik / ART.

And don't get me wrong, compared to other people I do not have double standards in this regard. I've been a Google fanboy for years, but my eyes are wide open now and I'm making moves to escape their lock-in ;-)

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#160

I've reverted to WIN32 because users can run a single file, bare bones EXE without the Permission Police blocking you. Too often users aren't allowed to install programs. A simple program that can run on anything since XP is a good solution around Microsoft's sandbox strategy and DLL hell and install programs are big problems. With wine you can even run your simple EXE on Linux and Mac. Native x86 means you run faste…

Are you talking about the .NET misfeature that gave managed programs running from network shares less permissions than native programs running from the same network share? Because that was removed a long time ago (.NET 3.5 SP1?).
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