[TheRealDunkirk]

I actually suffered through corporate pressure against my use of Linux for applications I developed (and users LOVED), because of the press onslaught in the trade magazines about the ridiculous SCO trial. (And then I see from a comment above that this is being appealed. Still. 13 years later. OMG.) So, my cynicism may be intractable.

You may see a "new" Microsoft, but all I see is a Microsoft which is making moves they HAVE to in order to survive. In this world of "the cloud" and the utter dominance of Linux in everything with a CPU that ISN'T a desktop computer, what else can they do but the things they're doing?

That Microsoft is executing WELL is a byproduct. If they didn't, they'd have become the IBM they defeated 20 years ago, and we wouldn't be having this discussion. (They'd offer legacy support for Windows XP, and we'd all wish we could cut them out of the budget, along with the mainframe.) I credit Nadella for this, but none of this is due to some sort of newfound egalitarianism or philanthropy. It's just business.

I find the bright and cheerful comments like yours depressing. They seem to belie a belief that the upper management of Microsoft has somehow been knighted with a sense of civic duty. I see it as the same business shrewdness they've always shown. They no longer have the power to dictate absolute terms to corporations, and must play nice with the rest of the IT world.

And I bet it chaps some of the old guards' asses.

[quanticle]

I credit Nadella for this, but none of this is due to some sort of newfound egalitarianism or philanthropy. It's just business.

So, how does that make the outcome any worse? RedHat isn't contributing to the Linux kernel out of a sense of charity. IBM isn't contributing to OpenStack as a philanthropic endeavor. Facebook isn't improving PHP because it's a fun hobby project. They're all doing the things that they're doing because it's good for business. Why is it any worse when Microsoft does it?

[TheRealDunkirk]

No, they're not different from anyone else for having a profit motive, but Microsoft, on the other hand, had a very long stretch of using underhanded and illegal tactics to stifle competition. I would argue that they're STILL abusing their monopoly position on the desktop. THAT is what makes them different than the rest, and that, to me, is what tempers my attitude about these recent announcements.

Another difference is that the other examples you've listed here are all free software. Of all the glowing coverage Microsoft has been getting of late, only .NET on Linux is comparable. But you're never going to get Windows-forms-like applications on Windows (which a surprising number of people seem to think will happen). It's only the web stack. Does ASP.NET really stack up well against Rails or Node.js as a web application stack on Linux? I don't know, but at the least, they have some catching up to do.

But, really, I think it's another example of my main point. Microsoft could have used some pre-existing open source project and built on top of that, but they chose to create another language for the future. It's even pretty good, by all accounts. It's just that, in a world of PHP, Javascript, C++, Ruby, Python, Erlang, and all the rest, what place does a closed-source language and compiler have? They had to make it open source.

[benaadams]

> Does ASP.NET really stack up well against Rails or Node.js as a web application stack on Linux?

Yes; have a look at the language column one this page:

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r13&hw=...

[TheRealDunkirk]

I wasn't thinking about speed benchmarks. I was referring to the whole "ecosystem" of the work, from language to plugins to the editors commonly used to community activity around it, etc.

[quanticle]

But you're never going to get Windows-forms-like applications on Windows

You absolutely will be able to get Windows-forms like applications. You just won't be using WinForms or WPF. Instead, you'll use Mono and its bindings to GTK or QT. This is exactly how it should be. WPF is an OS specific GUI library. Using WPF on Linux makes about as much sense as using Cocoa on Windows.

But, really, I think it's another example of my main point. Microsoft could have used some pre-existing open source project and built on top of that, but they chose to create another language for the future.

I think you're misremembering history. C# was created because Sun specifically cut Microsoft off from using Java. Microsoft had a project to write its own Java compiler. Sun took legal action to prevent Microsoft from doing so. And this was during the early 2000s. Python, Ruby, etc. were nowhere near mature enough to serve as the primary systems programming language for something like Windows.

Moreover, Microsoft gets a lot of criticism for making C#, but Google gets no criticism for making Go? Isn't that just slightly hypocritical?

[blub]

Sun cut off MS from Java because MS was creating an incompatible version of Java. That's the extend step.

[prodigal_erik]

They were not only dropping standard features like RMI and JNI but also sneaking proprietary methods into standard classes. They could have clearly and honestly put them in a com.microsoft package, but they couldn't trick anyone into writing unportable code that way, so they forked the whole language instead of contributing anything.

[TheRealDunkirk]

> Instead, you'll use Mono and its bindings to GTK or QT. This is exactly how it should be.

Oh, I'm quite clear. My point is that, if the stack had delivered on the premise of the idea of WinForms-level-easy GUI development, why haven't Mono-based GUI apps proliferated on Linux? Yet, after many years of including Mono in Ubuntu, they've pulled it from the default install.

> Microsoft had a project to write its own Java compiler. Sun took legal action to prevent Microsoft from doing so. And this was during the early 2000s. Python, Ruby, etc. were nowhere near mature enough to serve as the primary systems programming language for something like Windows.

Fair enough, but even all the way back in 2000, it was obvious that, if you were going to start from scratch on a language, there was no point in making it closed. There wasn't any more real money to be made in compilers by that point. GCC was being made available on everything, and $1,000 proprietary compilers were dying out.

> Isn't that just slightly hypocritical?

Sigh.