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what are your thoughts on Microsoft going opensource?

Rubin on September 21, 2019

As you can see in the recent years Microsoft has open sourced many of their projects to show their adoptation of open source despite it's hatred for Linux and opensource in the past? What are your thoughts?

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Alan Solitar • Edited

It's great for the community and I am very happy that we have vs code as an open source project. some people are wary of big tech controlling large open source project, but I think in general it's a good thing as it funnels a lot more resources into open source.

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Rubin • Edited

That's actually good because open source is thriving and the more hands on the deck the better. However what worries me is their all time theme : Embrace extend extinguish

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Sebastian Vargr

Im cautious, their history is anything but spotless when it comes to abusing their market position.

Embrace, extend extinguish was an internal saying at one point from what I’ve heard.

Ring any bells?

On top of that they have a tendency to break things they buy, Skype comes to mind.

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Rubin

Yeah that is a hard pill to swallow. Lets just hope for the best

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mt3o

I don't believe them. Those who forget their past are doomed to repeat it.

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Rubin

Let's hope for the best

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saint4eva

You should tell .NET Core developers that. You should tell Visual Studio Code users that. You should tell Xamarin developers that. You should even tell Linux developers that.

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Michael Maitoza

I, personally, think Microsoft is taking a step in the right direction. I understand, from what I have read, there is some perception bias here. Microsoft, the big, bad, corporation against the world crushing everything in its path. While much of that may be true of Microsoft in the past, we do not read into the future. Yes, hindsight is important in looking at trends. What is to say that Microsoft might learn a few things from the open-source community? I am cautioning some to put on the brakes of judgment until we see things unfold. I think, looking forward, this might be a good thing for developers and the like. Why shouldn't we play a cautious "wait and see" approach? Today is a new day.

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Ben Sinclair

Why shouldn't we play a cautious "wait and see" approach?

Because Microsoft has been incredibly damaging in the past, and many of their efforts focused on official policies (i.e. not just speculation or paranoia on the part of the media) like "embrace, extend, extinguish" where they push the image of themselves being nice until it's too late to stop them.

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Rubin

I agree with that

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James Eastham

I think it's fantastic for the general .NET development community. You only need to look at how fast .NET core moves along as oppose to the .NET Framework to see the real wins.

It also allows us, as developers, to delve into the internals of a particular library (Entity Framework as an example) and see what is happening 'under the hood'.

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Rubin

True! Devs are getting benefitted. I myself use typescript developed by microsoft

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saint4eva

Microsoft is the largest open source contributor on GitHub.

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Rubin

True that