Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

CoreCLR is now open source

blogs.msdn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 347 posts

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#281

Post by pmontra »

adolfojp wrote: post #183
pmontra wrote: post #117

I wonder how this strategy is going to affect the bottom line of Microsoft. People writing with CLR languages are deploying web apps mainly (or only) to Windows now. They're going to have an option to deploy to Linux soon. This means less revenues from OS and DB licenses, so it looks bad. Do they expect a large number of people leaving Java, Node, Python, Ruby and picking up C# because of the Linux deploys? Those peo…

Making ASP.NET Windows Server only wasn't driving Windows Server sales, it was destroying Windows (and Visual Studio) as a developer platform, and thus, ensuring that no one had any motivation to develop for Windows Phones and tablets. It was a certain path to irrelevance. Making ASP.NET Linux deployable ensures that Windows stays in the hands of developers. Making Azure Linux friendly ensures that Microsoft can take…

I had to google what Universal Apps are (Windows is a very remote technology stack for me), got it now.

About the .NET on Linux move, so the strategy could be to make more people willing to develop with .NET, bet that they buy VisualStudio, which means Windows desktop licenses and be prepared to see Windows Server replaced by Linux instances running (hopefully for them) on Azure. For that to work they must be bold in selling Azure and luring developers to the .NET stack. I don't foresee developers leaving their 5/10 years investment on other stacks en masse. Maybe new developers will consider .NET as a viable alternative to all the other open source tecnologies. It's a generational gamble and it's going to pay only if they really can compete against AWS and the other VM providers.

However I understand that they must do something, or they'll end up as the company that makes a console and an OS for video gamers and for cheap computers.

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#282

Post by pmontra »

sourc3 wrote: post #257
Nelkins wrote: post #48

I would be curious to see the effects of completely open-sourcing Windows. Businesses would continue to use it, because it's Microsoft and they want enterprise support. I think it would get even more love than it already does from the development community. Piracy of Windows is already rampant, so they're not really in a worse position from that (plus I think that most people who can pay for Windows do so already). F…

Nadella has worked on the cloud computing at Microsoft. Microsoft is betting big time on the cloud. Although MS never publicly admits, the OS business for the end user is slowly fading away with the tablets, smart phones taking over and Browser becoming the new OS. You can see this by looking at their Office 365 strategy (iOS, Android release, online version push). Making Windows 10 free to 8 users, removing licensin…

I'm not sure Windows (and transitively Microsoft) is a positive brand and its continuity an illusion worth keeping. It reminds me of antivirus, slow boots, periodic reinstalls to make XP quick again, BSOD and many other things that drove me away from it years ago. Anyway, if one never tried anything else not to leave home could be reassuring and it seems that Win7 wasn't so bad anymore (but I still get calls from friends with infested Windows machines).

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#283

Post by pjmlp »

zanny wrote: post #221
yellowapple wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oracle Er, no. The entirety of Oracle's dabbling in "open source" has been by shaking free software products out of the rotting carcass of Sun Microsystems and - in many cases - adding those products to the grave (see also: OpenSolaris, OpenOffice, various others). The exceptions - namely MySQL (which wasn't a Sun product) and Java (which is still doing reasonably well) - are few and far between. Oracle Linux certa…

MySQL got worked into MariaDB. Don't think many people are recommending you use the Oracle version much anymore. And Oracle Java has also died on every platform that is not Windows. OpenJDK took over the Unix space, and Google has Dalvik and the ART implementing the JRE. Virtualbox still exists. I guess. It has not done anything in about half a decade, though.

> Oracle Java has also died on every platform that is not Windows

Really?! I am yet to see any production deployment of OpenJDK in any of the consulting projects I work on.

It is either Oracle JVM, a commercial license of it, or a third party certified JVM.

As for Android it has become even worse than J2ME.

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#284

Post by pjmlp »

logn wrote: post #237
zanny wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MySQL got worked into MariaDB. Don't think many people are recommending you use the Oracle version much anymore. And Oracle Java has also died on every platform that is not Windows. OpenJDK took over the Unix space, and Google has Dalvik and the ART implementing the JRE. Virtualbox still exists. I guess. It has not done anything in about half a decade, though.

OpenJDK is unofficially ported and built for numerous platforms. But OpenJDK is Oracle's JDK. To contribute to it, you sign Oracle's contributor's license agreement. Oracle's no golden example as a leader in open source (let alone libre software), but they demonstrate the probable trajectory for the Microsoft projects at this point: a healthy, cohesive community of developers (developers!) using the technology in an…

> But OpenJDK is Oracle's JDK

Not quite. There is some code that isn't the same due to license agreements with third parties.

Some JavaFX components are an example thereof.

There are also some enterprise features there are only available in the Oracle JVM version, in terms of security and monitoring.

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#285

Post by redacted »

chinpokomon wrote: post #247
derefr wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first and biggest effect (presuming a GPL-compatible license) is that Wine would suddenly work much better, and so Ubuntu and OSX would likely ship their following versions with "the ability to run Windows software alongside native software with no performance loss" as a feature. OSX N+3 or so might even eliminate Boot Camp, saying that there's no need to install Windows as a whole if all the software "Just Works…

Then why would anyone build native applications when Windows apps would be WORA? The only incentive I see for Apple is that they are in many ways a hardware company first. They want to sell hardware and this is one reason they haven't feared bootcanp. Years ago I saw a demo of a Windows subsystem running an ELF Apache server directly on Windows NT. It isn't anything that Microsoft would release though, because once y…

I dunno about Linux, but OS X has resisted cross-platform applications to a ludicrous degree. It's a good thing in my opinion, moving to Windows recently really highlighted the quality (in design and general OS fit) that indie OS X apps achieve.

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#286

Post by floatboth »

mdaniel wrote: post #251
wtetzner wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is what you're looking for: http://www.ikvm.net/ In particular: http://sourceforge.net/p/ikvm/wiki/Ikvmc/

I had heard of such projects back in the day, but didn't know if they were still in service (and I didn't take the time to research it). I had some skepticism about whether IKVM had kept up with the rapid moving target that is the JRE, but after seeing that it runs Minecraft[0], I'm guessing it'll likely be alright :-) But holy shit, who in their right mind still uses CVS?! 0 = http://weblog.ikvm.net/default.aspx?dat…

OpenBSD uses CVS :-)

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#287

Post by koyote »

mythz wrote: post #131
pmontra wrote: post #117

I wonder how this strategy is going to affect the bottom line of Microsoft. People writing with CLR languages are deploying web apps mainly (or only) to Windows now. They're going to have an option to deploy to Linux soon. This means less revenues from OS and DB licenses, so it looks bad. Do they expect a large number of people leaving Java, Node, Python, Ruby and picking up C# because of the Linux deploys? Those peo…

Microsoft have already announced that Visual Studio community edition is free, which also means less revenue from VS.NET licenses as well. Although VS.NET is not a major revenue source, most of the revenue comes for Server licenses, e.g. Windows Server, SQL Server and other integrated products. But it's fairly easy to determine what their strategy is, given that they've been open sourcing most things that touches Azu…

>Microsoft have already announced that Visual Studio community edition is free, which also means less revenue from VS.NET licenses as well.

Is it though? I would believe that the people using the community edition are the same people that were previously using the express edition, i.e. hobbyists and students who were not going to pay for it anyhow. And as you already described in your last paragraphs: if their plan works out, I would imagine visual studio license revenues to go up in the long term as more people are attracted to the eco-system.

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#289

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

zanny wrote: post #220
jussij wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect for the average Windows user they don't care what their machine is doing. They just want it to work. That black box model has been with Windows from day one and it hasn't stopped Windows owning 90% of the PC market.

Wanting your machine to work is also caring what your machine is doing. I'm sure the IRS is kicking themselves for running XP for over a decade, building up such an extreme dependency on it that they are now paying huge sums of money for Microsoft to continue to support them. The black box is only great so long as it actually works, and when it breaks you are completely screwed. It is in Microsofts business interests…

>The black box is only great so long as it actually works, and when it breaks you are completely screwed.

To most users Linux is just as much of a black box as Windows is.

Even among Linux fans, the number of people who actually need to customize the kernel is tiny. The number of people who can customize the kernel is even smaller.

So where's the freedom? At the OS level, all that's happened is that the lockdown has moved from corporations to a subset of the developer community.

Most end users aren't any more empowered than they used to be.

Now - it's different in the web and language spaces, where there's a steady simmer of framework development, and many popular web projects/products wouldn't have been possible without framework sharing.

But there's still plenty of proprietary content there. Just try to get Google or Facebook to share their data collections with you and see how politically relevant open source 'freedom' is then.

If that seems like a tangent, it's missing the point that the value of a system doesn't come from the source code - it comes from the system as a whole, and includes usability, community reach, innovation, invention, and data.

Open source pretends to be a huge lever for freedom, but it's more like a battered fork caught in an avalanche.

In computing, the world-changing leverage is elsewhere, and always has been.

Re: CoreCLR is now open source

#290

Post by tokenizerrr »

fsloth wrote: post #273
jsprogrammer wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality of your software being a black box is not a matter of marketability. It is a matter of what you are able to know and control about what your personal machine is actually doing. Obviously there are manifest examples of people running all manner of black boxes, but as someone else pointed out, they are at the complete mercy of their black box vendor (unless someone wants to reverse engineer the box). If you…

I think you are a bit too idealistic about the hacking capabilities and willingness of people in general. It is convenient the correct functioning of my car or my phone is the responsibility of someone specific else than me. Civilization is characterized by specialization of people. I cherish the notion that hardware and software should be based on open standards. For day to day work, I just want my gear to work. If…

> As an extreme example if I owned a plane I would not like to hack it's software under any circumstance unless I were a professional aeronautics professional, and probably not even then.

But would you download an alternative distribution made by a group of enthusiastic aeronautics professionals that has been used by tons of other people with no problems? Think Cyanogenmod.

Post reply on HN