| I've always maintained that Open Source is less an ideological movement opposed to capitalism than it is a different sort of contract for capitalist interactions. Of course, it was inevitable that in order to survive Microsoft would adapt its business to utilize the kinds of interactions fostered by open source. Acquiring Github represents the first attempt by Microsoft to own some of the culture of open source. Microsoft is still very far behind in several key ways that the Github acquisition won't fix. But the acquisition signals a willingness to move in that direction. Some of these are: - The "Microsoft account" is a hugely complicated mess, far more complex and unwieldy than a google account. This is a serious miss and it's not rocket science. Look at the places where users are having to reset passwords all the time, getting failed logins, incomplete profiles, etc. Those are major warts that should not exist. - Microsoft should push hard for adoption of PowerShell on unix/linux, and if it fails at that task it should adopt bash as the main shell for Windows, sunsetting cmd.exe and PowerShell. - Microsoft should figure out a way to provide integrated X Server (and next generation variants of X) support in Windows. There is a big opportunity to one-up OSX by doing this in an open way. - Microsoft should offer all of the "pro" and "enterprise" features of Visual Studio free to all developers and should provide high quality command line based tooling to allow for seamless integration with other open source development tools. - Microsoft should simplify and fix code signing and make available (for free) all tools and utilities and infrastructure for trusted software distribution across multiple platforms. - Microsoft should make firm committments with respect to any APIs or Azure services in terms of life cycle, EOL committments, etc. This would be a big differentiator with Google. - Microsoft should fully open source some of its products that are duds, such as outlook for ios, and let the community make them awesome. |