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Discussing Microsoft's open-sourcity

Arek Nawo on May 20, 2020

Embrace, extend, and extinguish - these 3 words briefly describe the strategy Microsoft used in the '90 to further expand its multi-million do...
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Elena.NET

I love how step by step you break down all the topics. I was pretty skeptical of Microsoft myself, but looking at the actions of the past few years, including all the Build 2020 announcements! I think they are taking good decisions. They are really embracing open-source.

I collaborate in a Medium group, PuntoTech, where we talk about different technologies and programming news in Spanish, would it be possible to translate your post into Spanish and publish it in this group, linking to this article and (obviously) with proper attribution ?

See u!

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Arek Nawo

Sure thing! Iā€™d just prefer that you link to the original source from my blog. šŸ˜

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Elena.NET

no problem! I would let you know as soon the translation is posted, thanks a lot! <3

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Shadab Khan

I think ROI is always great when you open source 'tools' and keep 'products' proprietary. A direct example is GitHub, which, despite being the largest platform for open source software, continues to be proprietary.

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Michiel Hendriks

Embrace, extend, and extinguish was not briefly the strategy. They have been doing that for more than two decades.

Also the statement that Microsoft is the biggest Open Source contributor is not true. It's based on a subset. Not all Open Source happens on GitHub. And just because MS has a lot of GitHub accounts doesn't make it the biggest contributor.

But even besides that. Microsoft Open Source contributions are mostly on their own Open Source projects, and maybe a few others but only out of self interest (e.g. improving Linux kernel compatibility for Azure. Microsoft is hardly involved in projects which are not their own.

If Microsoft cared so much about Open Source, why haven't they helped out the Samba team with documentation on the latest version of their SMB/DFS/etc. protocols, something which is important for Linux interoperability with Active Directory ?

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Bhupesh Varshney šŸ‘¾

I really like what Microsoft is doing but what I don't understand is why are they ignoring Linux based OS, I mean why visual studio is not available for Linux?

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Arek Nawo

I wouldn't say they're ignoring Linux. Sure there's no Visual Studio, but the VS Code is arguably getting better and better for majority of coding-related tasks thanks to its vast extension ecosystem. And it's available on Linux. Personally, I look at Visual Studio as more of a Windows-focused IDE - something a bit similar to e.g. XCode on MacOS.

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Gayan Hewa • Edited

I also think its a much bigger project to port Visual Studio to run on Linux with little ROI. Whereas VSCode being a new editor built ground up was an ideal candidate to be cross-platform.

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Dima

Yes, Microsoft is doing great job :) Visual Studio is Windows only because Microsoft also wants you to buy the Windows license, it is simply one of the main streams of money for Microsoft ;)

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Jon Randy šŸŽ–ļø

I despise them more now than ever

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Elena.NET

why?