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

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

#91

Post by kleim »

crdoconnor wrote: post #30
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.

>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 IIRC they're still doing that. In India I think? >This is a less harmful Microsoft than it was 5-10-20 years ago. The key to that is Microsoft being far less powerful than it was 5-10 years ago. Where MS can throw it's weight around, it still does. The af…

> IIRC they're still doing that. In India I think?

They still do this in France and they are being sued for this. Actually this is in today's French headlines.

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

#92

Post by douche »

mikegerwitz wrote: post #59
douche wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for putting words in my mouth. How many people would have used jQuery, if it was GPL? Full-on GPL taints your software, such that you have to be extremely careful not to use any libraries that are GPL'd if you want to release it under any other sort of license. Sure, you can get exemptions, but can you imagine the clusterfuck if, say, the NPM community defaulted to using GPL? Trying to trace back and make arra…

You are taking an incredibly harsh (and coming across as almost vengeful) position on the GPL advocating a position that misses the point of the GPL. Software that chooses a copyleft license like the GPL cares for freedom more than broad adoption of their software. I would never want you to help you create non-free software---that's antithetical to everything I stand for. Many feel that way. You say "trace back and m…

I'm really not trying to shit on the GPL and free software, or pooh-pooh any philosophy. You just can't touch anything that's GPL if you build closed-source commercial software. That's kind of my job, and I have to be pragmatic and practical about it.

I'm glad Microsoft is cognizant of the fact that they have legions of partners, vendors, and independent developers that have built their businesses on top of Microsoft libraries and technologies and has chosen appropriate licensing to reflect that.

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

#93

Post by amelius »

edpichler wrote: post #83

This is very good, with this I learned that it's never too late to a company change. A very slow and large company like MS took decades to make this change, but they did well. And, they do that not because they are "good guys", but because this is the strategy to make them grow on their business. They are thinking on themselves.

Um, Microsoft has also been a steady producer of academic research papers.

Just as an example: http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html

(Scroll to the bottom, and see that MS is #1, ahead of e.g. MIT, which is #3 on the list, and far ahead of Google which is #17 on the list)

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

#94

Post by secfirstmd »

edpichler wrote: post #83

This is very good, with this I learned that it's never too late to a company change. A very slow and large company like MS took decades to make this change, but they did well. And, they do that not because they are "good guys", but because this is the strategy to make them grow on their business. They are thinking on themselves.

Pity they changed and became even worse in relation to privacy with Windows 10...

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

#95

Post by bad_user »

sremani wrote: post #52
bad_user wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what changed about them. Do you think that dumping some code on GitHub is enough? I disagree. "Linux kids" hated Microsoft because of their dirty tactics, exemplified for example in the "Halloween documents" [1], which shows among other things how they sponsored the SCO lawsuits against Linux. "Linux kids" also hated Microsoft for how they always tried to subvert open standards, like for example the Open…

You should be more worried about Google and Facebook tracking your spatial and temporal data than Microsoft racking fees from Android OEMs.

I'm not sure how that's relevant to the topic at hand. Do you think I'm not ranting on Google or Facebook's behavior? If you'll look at my history, I'm doing it all the time.

But this is some sort of fallacy. Does the existence of other companies that engage in bad behavior somehow exempt Microsoft or makes them less bad?

And in case you're not up to date, Microsoft is also collecting your data and they forced that upgrade on all Windows users, in addition to behaving like patents trolls. So what's your point?

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

#96

Post by whatever_dude »

davexunit wrote: post #85

Yet they are still opposed to user freedom on computers. Microsoft hasn't changed.

Companies are rarely of a single mind. I like to believe some departments within it are less prone to self-reflection and still need a bit of nudging. In Microsoft's case, I think they went user analytics crazy in recent times and see it as a path to invest resources on. And in true corporation fashion, they are being a bit too heavy-handed with it.

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

#98

Post by eDameXxX »

us0r wrote: post #80
Illniyar wrote: post #37

How is that calculated? I mean Microsoft only has 2561 members ( https://github.com/orgs/Microsoft/people ) , so it isn't how many microsoft members contribute to open source. Is it how many contributors their open source projects have? nope, FontAwesome has maybe 100 contributors to all of it's 5 projects but it's listed as having 9000+ contributors. From what I can gather it's mostly based on the number of people t…

Microsoft also has: https://github.com/azure https://github.com/OfficeDev https://github.com/mspnp https://github.com/dotnet https://github.com/aspnet https://github.com/powershell https://github.com/nuget - not sure this counts plus probable another 100 i'm not aware of.

and many more but this is still not the entire list:

https://github.com/Xamarin

https://github.com/PowerBI

https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge

https://github.com/yammer

https://github.com/OneDrive

https://github.com/MicrosoftResearch

https://github.com/LIS

https://github.com/DynamicsCRM

https://github.com/MicrosoftDX

https://github.com/ms-iot

https://github.com/microsoft-mobile

https://github.com/thaliproject

https://github.com/OneGet

.

Please take a look here: https://microsoft.github.io

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

#99

Post by aandrieiev »

baldfat wrote: post #48
l0b0 wrote: post #43

Leaving aside the obvious methodology issues, whenever such a huge company starts using a third party extensively I start worrying that they will buy them and lay waste to the values of the original company. At least we'll have GitLab and the like.

> whenever such a huge company starts using a third party extensively I start worrying that they will buy them and lay waste to the values of the original company. The issue is the financial health I would be worried about. I haven't seen GitHub as anything special and it is clearly not the most Open Sourced company and their price structure has been all over the place. I am not worried about MicroSoft doing anything…

At this stage the value of GitHub doesn't have much to do with git per se. It's about the projects' communities hosted there. That said, I don't see much of uniqueness in what GitHub provides, it just happened to be good enough and popped up at proper time.

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

#100

Post by bad_user »

josteink wrote: post #14
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 whe…

The problem of these licenses is that they don't come with patents grants. Which given that this is Microsoft we are talking about, it's a big deal.

Of course, their projects does come with a patents license, in addition to the copyright license, but it's unclear to me whether this license applies to derivative works for example. I'm not a lawyer of course and I have a very limited understanding, but interpreting their license as an English text, I really don't think it applies to derivate works. Would like an analysis of somebody knowledgeable, because a project that can't be safely forked isn't open source. Here's their license: https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/blob/master/PATENTS.TXT

Anyway, my point is that I would have preferred something like the Apache License, which is still permissive, but was written by lawyers that know what they are doing and has an explicit patents grant in it. You see, people think of BSD and MIT as being "permissive", but that's only true as far as the copyright law is concerned. Patents are a whole different thing.

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