[jeswin]

Honestly, I am a little tired of all the articles (edit: I meant posts) claiming MS is suddenly in the Open Source camp.

To truly support Open Source, they should show a willingness to work against Software Patents. The essence of Open Source is the freedom for anyone with a computer to turn their imagination into code. MS remains one of the biggest obstacles in that path.

Instead here is what they do:

1) Directly attack the Linux kernel in Android through patents

2) Sell patents to trolls like Intellectual Ventures, and directly fund them via investments

3) Support the cartel called BSA, which includes other luminaries like Oracle (http://www.bsa.org/about-bsa/bsa-members).

Honestly, say what you will about Google, but I can't imagine them ever threatening another software company with software patents.

[nivla]

>Honestly, say what you will about Google, but I can't imagine them ever threatening another software company with software patents.

That is a naive fanboy outlook towards a company. Its a well known fact that Google bought Motorola only for the patents. Google has also managed to use the patents to sue other companies including Microsoft. Although I still believe it is the game that is flawed and not the players. Google has also done things that could hold back the Windows Phone ecosystem. However, none of that should discount how much Google has contributed to betterment of the web just like Facebook or Microsoft. Open-Source is open source, the only thing that matters is license here and it is as liberal as it could get MIT.

[jeswin]

I am not a Google fanboy, I am merely saying they abide by the spirit of Open Source. I just used them as an example. RedHat is another example.

> Google has also managed to use the patents to sue other companies including Microsoft.

Can you post a link to Google suing Microsoft first (not in retaliation)? Google was way behind in the patent game until they got hurt. Google bought Motorola to have a defensive patent portfolio. Also, see their Open Patent Non-Assertion Pledge https://www.google.com/patents/opnpledge/

> Open-Source is open source, the only thing that matters is license here and it is as liberal as it could get MIT.

Open Source is where it is today from the decades of hard work by many, many people (in the early days, just for the love of it with no pay). MS is doing Open Source today because it really has no choice. There is no comparison between these two.

Open Source can welcome MS, but it should demonstrate a willingness to work towards the best interests of the movement. There are bigger goals here.

[scrollaway]

Google replaced their XMPP messaging system by Hangouts, a 100% closed protocol with no signs of even wanting to open source it.

From a FOSS pov, both Google and Microsoft have positive and negative sides to it. They're massive companies, you can't judge them as one giant blob.

What MS is doing right now with .NET is fantastic for open source. Just like what Google is doing right now with Hangouts is frankly bullshit. Judge actions, not entities.

[zanny]

Google's treatment of open messaging, albeit terrible, has nothing to do with its patent behavior.

Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, and many other companies are known aggressors who use software patents as weapons of war to destroy competition and extort other companies. Google has consistently refused to participate in such immoral behavior without first being attacked by similarly sized companies.

[MichaelGG]

XMPP had a fair amount of shortcomings and the real issue is that federated systems don't solve spam. So everyone living in this "we'll run our own IM systems, just like email" is deluded, as spam in email is barely a solved issue. And much of the solution involves blocking "independent" servers.

[scrollaway]

You missed the part where Google is not open sourcing Hangouts.

[ifdefdebug]

> MS is doing Open Source today because it really has no choice

And that's a good thing. It shows the strength of open source.

MS is a company. Just as Google. Companies will "work towards the best interests of the movement" as long as those interests converge with theirs: make money.

AFAIK large portions of Google's core business are closed source. They are not in open source for love.

[lottin]

MS has had in the past a systematic pattern of bullying, lying, cheating and a willingness to destroy social welfare by eliminating the competition and making their products the only option available in the market. This is extremely damaging. Yes every company wants to make money, but not every company will resort to that kind of sociopathic behaviour. Maybe they've changed, although I doubt it. I'm just saying - be careful.

[ifdefdebug]

In my opinion the sociopathicness of Microsoft's behavior has always been highly overrated.

[jeroen]

Read about DR-DOS. And then realise how long ago that is.

[naasking]

> Maybe they've changed, although I doubt it. I'm just saying - be careful.

Corporations aren't people where past behaviour predicts future behaviour. If MS's original executives are all gone, the fact that MS is behaving differently isn't surprising at all.

[manigandham]

Companies are not people and describing them as "sociopathic" is meaningless.

> eliminating the competition and making their products the only option available in the market.

This is business and this is how you win.

[throwawaykf05]

Throughout all the patent wars and all the rhetoric Google produced about competitors abusing patents, it was Google, as the owner of Motorola, that was the only company penalized in court for actually abusing patents:

http://patentlyo.com/patent/2015/08/agreement-microsoft-moto...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Motorola_In....

Sure, the lawsuit was started 2 months before Google acquired Motorola, and it was in response to an MS lawsuit, but the continued abuse of FRAND patents and the ensuing 14M penalty happened on Google's watch. Literally no other company in the smartphone wars suffered this fate.

[bmaupin]

"Those demands from Motorola should more properly be seen as a counter-offensive prompted by Microsoft’s demands for royalties on every Android implementation."

http://patentlyo.com/patent/2015/08/agreement-microsoft-moto...

[fsloth]

There is the licensing and the ecosystem side which are part of the 'meta runtime' of the code and then there is the political story.

Is it possible that since the superiority of the open source model in several places is so obvious (i.e. when the code itself contains no secret sauce) this political narrative of whose development model is better is no longer pertinent?

I would say privacy is partly a different arena altogether, as well are software patents.

My head is too small to fit all of this into a coherent view. All I see is a delightful and shiny MIT license.

[apayan]

Google purchased Motorola for the patents as a defensive measure, so they ward of suits from Apple, MS and Intellectual Ventures. Google has NEVER sued another company over patents. Examine the timeline of patent suits on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone_patent_wars

It's all Apple and Microsoft, and then Samsung started firing shots at Apple in retaliation. Google has never gone offensive with a patent suit.

[bitmapbrother]

>That is a naive fanboy outlook towards a company

Last time I checked Microsoft was still threatening Android OEM's with their prior art ridden / pile of junk patents (M-CAM analysis). I don't believe Google has ever used patents for offensive purposes, but Microsoft continues to collect quite a bit of money from shaking down Android OEM's.

[osweiller]

"Its a well known fact that Google bought Motorola only for the patents. Google has also managed to use the patents to sue other companies including Microsoft."

Really? Which suits were that?

Google has never sued another company over patents. They've made counterclaims when themselves sued, but claiming otherwise is just a fiction.

And they bought Motorola because Motorola was threatening to start suing all of the other Android makers, causing infighting that Google didn't want. So Google bought Motorola....to stop those patents from being used to sue, further diminishing your point.

On the whole, Google is very much the good guys, and Microsoft are very much the bad guys.

However I will say it is naive to assume this will continue forever. There was a period where Microsoft seldom threatened anyone, and we all held quaint notions about all of their "defensive" patents. Situations and markets change, and suddenly desperation takes foot and the company that was hugs and kisses becomes claws and kicks, so I would never assume that Google will always be a fairly good citizen. It could change.

[sremani]

A project under MIT license and accepting PR is good enough for me and is an open source project by definition.

No one is taking away your right to hate Microsoft, but picking OSS as bull-work of your argument is not there any more.

edit: bull-work(tm)

[treehau5]

> A project under MIT license and accepting PR is good enough for me

He is not pretending to be an arbiter but speaking generally to what many people, including myself, believe. And in any case, you attempted to refute what you reduced down to his own subjective opinion, with your own subjective opinion.

Working against software patents is part of the larger essence of OSS, and it was just a specific example of it. If you are for software patents, and somehow magically "for" open source, then you aren't really "Open Source" you are just hiding behind that facade so you can now accept free labor when it serves your purposes.

So, in that regard, it isn't difficult to see where the negative sentiment is coming from in regard's to the recent media blast of the "new Microsoft."

[sremani]

Lets agree there are levels of open-ness and not being a Gnu-level or RedHat level OSS does not mean the contributions are not worth it nor should not be acknowledged.

[treehau5]

Well I will most certainly agree there is "publicly accessible" source, which is essentially what Microsoft, Facebook, and the likes have, where you can view the code, but getting a pull request accepted requires signing a CLA (with varying levels of avarice) and conforming to the goals of the organization, rather than the project. (Actually I will defend facebook by saying their CLA is not that egregious, and according to most, the version of react that is open sourced is actually different than the version they use internally), but calling that "Open Source Software" is disingenuous at best.

[dsp1234]

Well I will most certainly agree there is "publicly accessible" source,

It's not just publicly accessible, it's MIT licensed with a patent grant. You could take the code, modify it in literally any way you want, wrap it in a commercial product and resell it. It doesn't come more free or open source without actually being public domain.

What you're asking for appears to be some sort of 'super open source' where not only are free to view, modify, and distribute your code, but also have to a right to have your code merged into the mainline of the code. What you're asking for goes well beyond the four freedoms.[0]

[0] - http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

[treehau5]

> wrap it in a commercial product and resell it.

The PATENTS.txt file seems to suggest otherwise, you must stay within the bounds of "covered code". IANAL so I do not know what the side effects of this seemingly intersection of their patent/license coverage curtails, but it does seem like you lose protection and could have a Android/Oracle situation if you innovate something on top of the core CLR outside of the 'covered' bounds and then decided to sell it.

There's a slightly older writeup about it here http://endsoftpatents.org/2014/11/ms-net/

In any case, as the name suggests, it's only a promise, not a guarantee of rights.

[serge2k]

If you have a strong objection then you are free to fork it and do whatever you want. If other people feel the same you can build a community around your fork.

It's FOSS.

[spicyj]

> the version of react that is open sourced is actually different than the version they use internally

That's not true; we use the same code.

[treehau5]

Thank you for confirming. A few people told me this but I was a little suspicious, but again you can never truly know.

[csours]

OT Nitpick: I think you mean bulwark: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/bulwark

[throwawaykf05]

It's a fallacy that you cannot support both open source and software patents. Religious opinions aside, they are both simply different forms of IP, each effective for different things.

[pjmlp]

IBM and Intel are two good examples of it.

[BinaryIdiot]

> Honestly, I am a little tired of all the articles (edit: I meant posts) claiming MS is suddenly in the Open Source camp.

Okay...but this isn't one nor is it really an "article". It's simply the page about Xamarin being opened source. That's it. It's MIT licensed and opened sourced.

Did you not read the page or did you just want to rant about the same things people complain about with Microsoft in almost every HN thread about their open source efforts? I'm not saying some of these are not issues but when they're unrelated and don't add anything to the context of the content I don't get the point.

[Aldo_MX]

I honestly disagree with your stance against patents, disregarding dull patents and the issues they bring like patent trolls, I really believe that the industry needs patents to prevent unfair competition.

The issue is the length of patents, the Software industry doesn't need 20 year-long patents, it's too much time, at most a patent should be valid for 5 years...

And well, we also need mechanisms to punish people who abuse the patent system with dull patents.

[Tenhundfeld]

I don't understand exactly what you mean by "dull patents". Is that a standard term? I'm not well versed in this space, but Google's not returning much for that phrase.

I'm guessing you mean overly broad or generic patents, i.e., not sharp and specific. I'm thinking something like a patent for adding an item to a virtual shopping cart. Am I inferring correctly?

[Aldo_MX]

I used `dull patent` as a synonym of `stupid patent`[1], so you are right with the meaning you inferred.

[1] https://www.eff.org/issues/stupid-patent-month

[incepted]

Agree that software patents but to me, the issue is patent trolls.

Patents should only be applicable if the company can show it's actually working in a domain that will apply this patent.

With rules like this, patent trolls would cease to exist and software patents would go back to being extremely useful to software innovation, like they were designed to be.

[munificent]

> To truly support Open Source, they should show a willingness to work against Software Patents.

See: http://www.cnet.com/news/google-microsoft-settle-long-runnin...

It is very hard for large software companies to unilaterally work against software patents because it puts them at a competitive disadvantage, at least temporarily. It's sort of like arms limitation talks where you can't put down your nukes before anyone else does or it's an open invitation to attack.

[anonymfus]

"To truly support Open Source" MS should open the source of their main products like Windows and Office.

[pjmlp]

Like IBM and Intel?