[deno]

I really don’t, it’s more of a feeling. With an open-source release like .NET it seems more like better documentation. In fact that was the case for early commercial Unixes—you needed the source code to actually use the system, but it wasn’t open-source.

Open-source as-documentation (for lack of better term) is still useful. It makes bug fixing a whole lot easier, for one thing. But it’s not quite the same as open-source ecosystem. For that you need to have a diverse set of actors, sharing the same goal. That’s what I think successful open-source project makes. You need to accept the fact that the project is not just yours. Something like that.

Of course Microsoft could do all those things. Who knows, it they’re determined enough they might turn it around. The problem here is like I said Java is just good enough. No one really cares, except people that could use some better documentation, that have been already invested in the ecosystem. That’s why open-sourcing is still valuable, but also why they’ll never gain any adoption of the kind they’d need.

Sorry if that sounds like rambling, it’s sort of late.

[johnny22]

by that definition, it'd be hard to call Python open source.

[RubyPinch]

do you more mean like, the decisions, and planned changes, etc, aren't open? (along with being tied to the whims of the CEO and the company's money?)

[deno]

They might be open, but there’s democracy and then there’s democracy. See for example recent MSBuild incident (but don’t try to argue about it it’s just an example).

As I said, it’s a feeling. The feeling is it’s Microsoft’s project, everyone else is along for a ride. And that’s fine, but it’s something different. Let’s just not pretend technical merits drive adoption, that’s rarely true.

[cyphar]

> They might be open, but there’s democracy and then there’s democracy. See for example recent MSBuild incident (but don’t try to argue about it it’s just an example).

> As I said, it’s a feeling. The feeling is it’s Microsoft’s project, everyone else is along for a ride. And that’s fine, but it’s something different. Let’s just not pretend technical merits drive adoption, that’s rarely true.

Uhm. So many free software projects work like that. A company creates something, releases it as free software. Yes, people contribute (and that's awesome by the way) but in general all of the engineering talent works at the company because they wrote it in the first place (and they hire contributors). At SUSE this is how YaST, zypper, spacewalk, et al development works (with significant contributions from the openSUSE community, but we have teams of people working on those projects so our contributions are more of a concentrated effort). There's nothing new or different about this model of free software development (Sun did the same thing with OpenSolaris and Joyent does the same thing with SmartOS). Yes, GNU and Linux follow the hobbyist model but that's not how all projects work.

[deno]

I was too harsh with the ‘open-source as-documentation’ term.

My point is this is just not enough to compete with JVM, which is already a vibrant open-source ecosystem.