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by ant512 3793 days ago
Microsoft spent years telling people that OSS == communism and that OSS was stealing their IP.

I imagine that the MS developers who believed the FUD have a hard time accepting that going open-source won't cause Ghost Stalin to appear and steal their children because it contradicts what MS told them for all those years. For the same reason, existing OSS developers have a hard time accepting that MS has suddenly stopped trying to undermine their legitimacy or squash them with dubious lawsuits.

Honestly, what did MS expect?
1 comments
anonbanker 3792 days ago
Despite the kindler, gentler Nadella in charge, Ballmer's damage will never be undone.

Microsoft, while (maybe even genuinely) trying to embrace free software and open collaboration, has still tried to cling to their now-lost ability to dictate direction and standards. You can't have that cake if you want to eat it too. Either developers refuse to use free software outright due to political biases, or they use and don't contribute, because they've never learned how to be good neighbors in the free software community.

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EvanPlaice 3792 days ago
I wouldn't consider Nadella as 'kinder, gentler' so much as opportunistic.

The MS licensing model doesn't scale when it comes to server-side development. Managing 100 licenses requires a lot of unnecessary overhead and cost. At Google scale (100k+ servers) it's not worth the effort.

MS is embracing OSS simply because they're doubling down on Azure. It's hard to sell desktop software under a subscription model. whereas it's much easier and potentially more profitsble to sell services under a subscription model.

Sharepoint proved to be an early success but talented devs (ie the ones needed to drive the future of the MS ecosystem) need more power and flexibility.

The only standard they're aggressively trying to push is Typescript and that's only because the vast majority of the devs in the MS ecosystem can't think outside of the OOP box or work effectively without a dedicated IDE like Visual Studio or Webstorm.

It's kind of sad seeing OOP design patterns (ex factory, singleton) being used in Javascript where they're completely unnecessary. If that's what it takes to get .NET devs to quit bitching about 'what a horrible language' JS is, so be it.

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