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Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub

businessinsider.com

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Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub

#11

Post by ldjb »

Retr0spectrum wrote: post #6
akerro wrote: post #4

It's a bit different when a corporation open sources their product because it brings them more business value than a corporation actually contributes to not their open source projects. Does MS do that?

Are there any examples where a company contributes to Open Source software, without any (direct or indirect) benefit to themselves? What difference does it make anyway?

I think akerro is asking about the motivation for Microsoft's contributions to OSS, rather than whether they benefit from it (clearly they do).

My impression, having spoken to people from Microsoft involved in OSS, is that they are pretty much entirely driven by what will make them the most profit. Sometimes that means making software "open source" and accepting contributions from the public (free labour!), other times that means keeping their software proprietary. They don't seem to care about ethics, or software freedom. It's a shame, but Microsoft aren't the only ones with that mentality. Big businesses are, more often than not, primarily motivated by profit.

Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub

#12

Post by executesorder66 »

It seems to me like they are only open sourcing the products they wish more people are using, and not their actually useful products like MSOffice and the Windows OS.

Edit: to be clear, I know it is in their best interest not to open source those products, because that's where most of their money comes from. But it really looks to me like the want to flood the market with random open source stuff, so that they seem more open source friendly. But in reality they are not actually contributing anything very useful to the community.

Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub

#13

Post by [deleted] »

executesorder66 wrote: post #12

It seems to me like they are only open sourcing the products they wish more people are using, and not their actually useful products like MSOffice and the Windows OS. Edit: to be clear, I know it is in their best interest not to open source those products, because that's where most of their money comes from. But it really looks to me like the want to flood the market with random open source stuff, so that they seem m…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub

#14

Post by josteink »

chha wrote: post #2

This is quite an improvement from the olden days when a certain Microsoft executive described the GPL as a cancer, and open source in general as a thing to avoid

> This is quite an improvement from the olden days when a certain Microsoft executive described the GPL as a cancer, and open source in general as a thing to avoid

Absolutely.

And don't take this the wrong way... I much appreciate the improvements. But there's still a very strong trend that Microsoft code contributions tend to be in MIT or similarly permissively licensed projects. They still tend to avoid the GPL where possible.

(Disclaimer: Have contributed code and patches. I don't personally don't mind permissive licenses)

Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub

#15

Post by oblio »

aries1980 wrote: post #8

AFAIK Angular is part of Google. But a quite decent improvement from the era when the company bribed government officials to purchase bulk licences for pupils and govn't, distorting the job market. This is a less harmful Microsoft than it was 5-10-20 years ago.

It still has split personality, unfortunately. You can't turn such a huge company 100% around in such a short time.

Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub

#16

Post by raesene6 »

akerro wrote: post #4

It's a bit different when a corporation open sources their product because it brings them more business value than a corporation actually contributes to not their open source projects. Does MS do that?

Yeah Microsoft contributes to a bunch of projects. I'm sure at least in part that's to help compatibility with their systems, but it still helps those projects that are not theirs.

A good example is Docker where, IIRC, Microsoft people were the top non-docker contributor for a while.

Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub

#17

Post by stinos »

executesorder66 wrote: post #12

It seems to me like they are only open sourcing the products they wish more people are using, and not their actually useful products like MSOffice and the Windows OS. Edit: to be clear, I know it is in their best interest not to open source those products, because that's where most of their money comes from. But it really looks to me like the want to flood the market with random open source stuff, so that they seem m…

they are not actually contributing anything very useful to the community

'very' useful is of course subject to debate, but did you even bother to check what they have on github? F#/msbuild/vscode to name some bigger ones, then there's smaller things like ffmpeginterop etc which I was looking into just last week.

Re: Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub

#19

Post by douche »

chha wrote: post #2

This is quite an improvement from the olden days when a certain Microsoft executive described the GPL as a cancer, and open source in general as a thing to avoid

If you're trying to write commercial software and make money off of it, the GPL is a cancer.

MIT or the MS-PL is much more practical.

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