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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

#581

Post by imanaccount247 »

jbooth wrote: post #424
imanaccount247 wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How on earth does "I don't like operators" support your claim?

The claim was that scala code is very difficult to read and idiomatic scala code, as evidenced by their collections library, brings along a ton of conceptual overhead that creates much more complexity than it eliminates. That line alone drives home the point for me, you can read the rest of scala.collection.immutable if you need more convincing.

The claim was that you need to know category theory. Your post is still there, we can still read it. It does not make much sense to pretend it says something other than what it says.

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

#582

Post by snowwrestler »

tlb wrote: post #253
jacquesm wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Stacker - Netscape - SCO And many others besides. Companies have reputations just like people do (that's why we call them 'incorporated') and just like you can lose your trust in a person you can lose your trust in a corporation. This is not about Microsoft just doing 'stupid stuff sometimes' it is about institutionalized criminal behavior sanctioned at the highest level of one of the largest software companies in…

I'm curious whether, with the fullness of technological hindsight, you still deplore what they did to Netscape. Microsoft was the first to release a free browser included with the OS. That killed Netscape's business of selling browsers on a CD for $40, and Netscape was understandably upset. It now seems clear that an OS needs a browser included, at least so you can read documentation and download the browser of your…

Releasing IE for free did not kill Netscape, because Netscape was negotiating with computer OEM manufacturers for them to buy bulk licenses and factory-install Netscape.

This is exactly how Windows is sold through OEMs, and like Windows, the effect is that the consumer gets the software "for free" (since it is included in the total price of the computer). So: Netscape and IE would have both come with every new computer.

Microsoft told OEMs that, in effect, they could not buy Windows if they intended to install Netscape on it. That is illegal tying, and is what killed Netscape, as it cut off a major potential source of new revenue.

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

#583

Post by nas »

JackC wrote: post #385
tlb wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious whether, with the fullness of technological hindsight, you still deplore what they did to Netscape. Microsoft was the first to release a free browser included with the OS. That killed Netscape's business of selling browsers on a CD for $40, and Netscape was understandably upset. It now seems clear that an OS needs a browser included, at least so you can read documentation and download the browser of your…

It's not the "what" they did to Netscape (releasing a free browser), it's the illegal "why" they did it (to break the cross-platform web). As the government wrote in a trial brief: "In short, Microsoft feared and sought to impede the development of network effects that cross-platform technology like Netscape Navigator and Java might enjoy and use to challenge Microsoft's monopoly. Another internal Microsoft document…

> There are thousands of us here who have each spent hundreds of hours struggling with IE compatibility when we could have been building cool stuff.

This is the issue that pisses me off more than anything. There must be hundreds of man-years of development effort wasted on stupid things Microsoft did. Not because they didn't know better, that's forgivable, but they did to screw over the competition. It goes back to MS-DOS intentionally trying to screw over DR-DOS and continues up to now with document format standards.

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

#584

Post by mercurial »

yarou wrote: post #445
rbanffy wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maximizing shareholder value would also include, I suppose, keeping the company reputation good enough so that talented people would still want to work with them and their products. That's not what happened here. I too was a Microsoft enthusiast once, but their bad behavior made me turn my back on them. Jacques and myself are certainly not alone in that decision.

In theory, yes, and these days reputation plays an extremely important role because of the massive amounts of network effects social media and the like provide. I was never a fan of Microsoft because they historically shipped substandard products. (I remember the days of windows 3.1 on my p2) My post was merely trying to indicate that what Microsoft did in a monopoly position is not in any way unique or special. Ever…

Either that, or there is something about this theory that is usually the sociopaths who end up in top managerial positions.

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

#585

Post by alkonaut »

jacquesm wrote: post #542
alkonaut wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft is not your friend Nor is google or Oracle. So who is? To put this in perspective you need to look at the alternatives. Getting a free (as in speech) source CLR/BCL/JIT/Compiler and a free (as in beer) IDE is pretty sweet. Sure, you can do python or Node.js, but it's not covering all that you can do now with .NET. Only java/jvm really competes on "everything except high perf" (from enterprise to mobile to…

> So who is? Linus Torvalds, RMS, Guido van Rossum, and a very long list of other open source contributors who were writing open source code before it was 'hip' or good PR.

Those guys do (did) some great things. However, I wasn't asking about who was a cool developer or great OSS personality (Or a crazy person or obnoxius mailing list asshat for that matter :) )

I meant, when it comes to choosing a platform/language/IDE for enterprise dev or mobile/cloud dev, there are lots of options but most of the "big" ones also come from megacorps (Oracle, Google...)

What scared people most about .NET is usually the closed nature (will they continue to develop it? will they charge more tomorrow?) and the fact that it only runs on windows which makes it more expensive. When it's open sourced and available for other platforms, it's no worse than the alternatives in that respect.

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

#586

Post by eruditely »

glibgil wrote: post #280
jacquesm wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Stacker - Netscape - SCO And many others besides. Companies have reputations just like people do (that's why we call them 'incorporated') and just like you can lose your trust in a person you can lose your trust in a corporation. This is not about Microsoft just doing 'stupid stuff sometimes' it is about institutionalized criminal behavior sanctioned at the highest level of one of the largest software companies in…

That's not why we call them incorporated. 'Body' or 'corpus' are synonyms for 'organization'. They are called corporations because the embody some coordinated effort, not because someone realized "hey, this organization seems to have a personality. I'll call it a corporation."

http://szabo.best.vwh.net/jointstock.html

"The modern joint-stock corporation has many sources in medieval Europe. First among these was corporate law itself. Although the era is commonly referred to as "feudalism," for the hierarchy of individually owned "fiefs" of land and control of serfs as fixtures of that land, large amounts of wealth in Europe were actually controlled by corporate entities. Chief among these were church lands, the corporate entities being dioceses, religious orders and the Roman Church itself. These entities controlled a substantial fraction of the land in Western Europe. Furthermore cities (with varying degrees of political independence), merchant guilds, craft guilds, and many charitable entities (such as hospitals) were legal "corporations," i.e. artificial and perpetual legal persons under law. Some basic issues in corporate law (for example, when are officers individually liable for acts of the corporation, and when the corporation is liable for acts of its agents) had already been solved in canon law and urban law long before the joint-stock corporation."

and more on the "Origins of the Joint-Stock Company"

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

#587

Post by alkonaut »

MichaelGG wrote: post #570
alkonaut wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure I follow you here, rewrite what?

Sorry my misunderstanding. When you said it sounded like you'd have to go to Java/JavaScript, I thought you meant for the application you've been writing. Either way, I meant that even before this announcement, Mono was a choice (I use it at fairly high-scale server apps) in many cases. It wasn't C# and Windows or Java for anything else.

Yeah, Mono was at least realistic in the last year(s), but it was always a bit of a guessing game whether something was going to work or not.

Having an official linux/mac os ASP.NET will be huge, even if the functinoal difference is minor compared to Mono. Just knowing it will work tomorrow, and after the next major release is huge.

Yesterday I would rather have chosen Node.js than a .NET solution for a small service on Linux, simply because it's safer. Tomorrow I'll be back to rather having pineapples shoved up my nose than write JS.

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

#588

Post by daveloyall »

com2kid wrote: post #415
jacquesm wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Stacker - Netscape - SCO And many others besides. Companies have reputations just like people do (that's why we call them 'incorporated') and just like you can lose your trust in a person you can lose your trust in a corporation. This is not about Microsoft just doing 'stupid stuff sometimes' it is about institutionalized criminal behavior sanctioned at the highest level of one of the largest software companies in…

I'm just a low level drone here at MS, and I obviously am not involved in any important decisions, but I'd like to add that all the above things happened back when the current generation that works here was growing up. We were all on Slashdot, being outraged and angry 13 year olds. Except now my generation works here, and I think the changes (such as all the ones announced today!) are a good sign of that. At least si…

@com2kid Microsoft defined what computers are capable of. Let me clarify: most people heard Microsoft's version of reality first--and they were amazed!

We all were. Computers have changed life for all of us. But computers aren't what they could have been...

Microsoft's version of computers is a pale and sickly thing, it's engineered for--that is, optimized for--profit rather than productivity.

Some people use computers to save lives, right? How many more lives might have been saved over the past couple of decades if MS hadn't held features--ideas! concepts!--back again and again to enforce planned obsolescence? How many times did they obfuscate a communication protocol to maintain market dominance?

I appreciate that some current MS employees aren't responsible for what happened before they were hired on.

I hope you appreciate the magnitude of those past sins. There are reasons people yell!

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

#590

Post by louthy »

Filligree wrote: post #571
alkonaut wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean C#? Let's keep those separate shall we? Linq makes C# much better, especially compared to java. It's a whole different story in F# though.

What's the story for F#? I'm a Haskell enthusiast, but it's not so good at Windows support, or libraries. I've been thinking F# might be just the ticket.

F# has Query Expressions[1] which are just Computation Expressions[2], i.e. not a language extension, a library.

If you know Haskell then it's pretty easy to get into F#. The only thing you'll miss are higher-kinded types. Although they can be hacked in[3], it's not really worth the effort a lot of the time

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-GB/library/hh225374.aspx

[2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd233182.aspx

[3] https://code.google.com/p/fsharp-typeclasses/

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