Miguel finally gets his job at Microsoft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Icaza#Early_software... Congrats!
He probably had some influence in making .NET "Open Source"...
Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
321–330 of 405 posts
Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
those were aquisitions by Google. Now a list of Microsoft:
There are some success stories even just limiting it to enterprise software. PowerPoint, Visio, and many products in the Dynamics family started out as acquisitions.
Not to mention SQL Server.
Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
#323from a 'top' comment ( http://goo.gl/t3WvOL ): "This will double the number of people at Microsoft who love .NET and don't think .NET developers are dinosaurs for not wanting to switch to a scripting language invented in the '90s."
You should avoid to repeat stupid comments. JS was invented in 1995 (and the last version in 2015), C# was made in 2000, so 5 years after.
Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's because I've been around for a while. The idea, and failed promise, of FOSS wasn't that there will be many "great FOSS projects around", it was that it will win the desktop (and not just as some FOSS released by some corporate behemoth, but by community -bazaar- FOSS projects). That, it never did. And in fact, in all those years, they've failed to even better Photoshop (Gimp is still far behind), MS Office (Open…
>And in fact, in all those years, they've failed to even better Photoshop (Gimp is still far behind), MS Office Your memory is selective: they did however, manage to make a better IIS (Apache, Nginx), a better IE (Firefox, Chromium) - even a better System X kernel (BSD as adopted by Apple). Win some, lose some.
It's not selective: it's specifically about the desktop space. I've mentioned that they did fine on the server.
So, IIS and xBSD etc is out of scope regarding what I've said. I also mentioned explicity community/bazaar projects, in the original FOSS spirit of the late nineties that was said to conquer the world.
As for Firefox and Chrome, both are based from code by big (at least at the time) corporations (Netscape, and Apple, and later Google).
If the latter didn't get involved with Webkit, I don't see us using KHTML 2016 today. As for the former, Mozilla (which begat Firefox) also started with big commercial backing with full time employees from Netscape for several years (until the company burned to the ground), and until today works with mostly paid Mozilla staff, not random community people. It was able to do that based on inheriting some of the momentum of Netscape (which at one point was the number 1 browser), and, based on that, to ask for millions from Google etc to have it as the default search engine. Without Netscape's legacy code, 2+ years of refactoring/engineering work, and initial user base (at the time of the transition) it wouldn't have gone far.
In other words, yeah, open source can do a great job on the desktop too, if it starts as a proprietary code donation and has huge funding. But that "open source" is just a licensing model, so of course it won't be any different in any characteristic to proprietary projects, apart from the licensing -- the CLR released by Microsoft is also "open source" under this metrics.
My comment was about the FOSS bazaar model of volunteers from all over the world, the one touted by the Gnome, etc teams, -- which didn't fare as well on the desktop space.
Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, here's another thing: Miguel has long advocated MS opening up their platform, and has welcomed every such move as it happened.
Companies have a long history of saying one thing privately and another thing publicly. If it were public then it wouldn't be a rumor.
Well, there's the public known facts and then there's a "rumor". I don't know why we're even discussing something as unsubstantiated as the latter.
Besides, even if the price was public, one could read anything it wants it that. "Oh the number is low because MS undermined them".
From what I've seen, the numbers for those companies like Xamarin are always much much lower that BS inflated unicorns with no actual business models...
And there's another thing: for what Xamarin offers (which is in the mobile space, with their support for iOS/Android APIs etc), the open source CLR and the VS Code, the basis for the rumor, don't even figure at all. Nobody that used Xamarin will gonna turn to those products, because they simply don't do the same thing at all.
Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
That makes no sense. It's pretty clear that .NET is Microsoft's future, and Xamarin extends the reach of .NET.
Look at Winforms, WPF and Silverlight. They are all .Net and all abandoned. I wouldn't bet my long term future on Xamarin.
I would call Winforms and WPF "mature and maintained" rather than abandoned. Especially if compared to Silverlight.
Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nonsense. The last 5 years show it's a whole new Microsoft. Disclaimer: I have been one of the ones pushing the last 5 years to make that statement true. ;)
>>Nonsense. The last 5 years show it's a whole new Microsoft Yeah, that's why Windows 10 sends all your data to Microsoft by default and Windows updates no longer come with detailed explanations of what is in them. /s edit: judging by the downvotes, there's a surprising number of Microsoft fanboys here. I guess all they had to do to win people over was make a few token contributions to the open-source community...
Windows 10 privacy settings and .Net as a viable technology platform from licencing and technology point of view are two different things, though.
"The different Microsoft" aspect comes from open sourcing the key technological components so migration away from Microsoft licenses is at least a legally plausible, and that people can indeed see what goes into the sausage.
From developers point of view this is a huge improvement and makes the .Net a much more appealing proposition.
Is a company evil? Does it make good products? To me, at least, it's not very helpful to mix these two discussions.
Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
#328With the new MS backing I hope Xamarin adds other languages like TypeScript to their product... This would be awesome.
Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
#329With the new MS backing I hope Xamarin adds other languages like TypeScript to their product... This would be huge.
Re: Microsoft Acquires Xamarin
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
That makes no sense. It's pretty clear that .NET is Microsoft's future, and Xamarin extends the reach of .NET.
Look at Winforms, WPF and Silverlight. They are all .Net and all abandoned. I wouldn't bet my long term future on Xamarin.
I can provide a similar list for any big corporation, including Apple and Google.