Microsoft is a completely different company than it was even just 5 or 10 years ago. Saying that MS is an enemy of open source is uninformed at best and idiotic at worse.
Do me a favor, look at Facebook [1], Apple [2], Amazon [3], Netflix [4] and Google [5]. Now tell me which one has more Open Source repos than MS [6]. I'll give you a hint... none of them. Sure, volume of open source repos may not be the best metric, but to say in 2021 they are enemies of open source with almost 4k open source repos is just dumb.
Hell, even the new MS terminal [7] is open source. They realized that FOSS isn't the enemy and is actually good for the tech industry at large.
You're factually correct, but you've probably forgotten the "3 Es": "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" [0]. Microsoft is a business and is therefore about maximizing profits. I'd rather not assume anything, especially not that they are somehow friendly to the OSS movement. Lets give it a few more years before we assume that OSS is something they are gonna do long term. Otherwise, it's like "free" google products; here today, gone tomorrow.
EEE is from a meeting in 1996 by someone who left the company in 2000. It's really hard for anyone to claim it represents the company today or even a decade ago.
You act as though Open Source is somehow mutually exclusive with profits and a sustainable business.
> Otherwise, it's like "free" google products; here today, gone tomorrow.
Respectfully, I disagree... google products are introduced as services, not open source and they shut them down often. If an OSS project is useful and has community support, you can always fork it.
And this, btw, is the KEY to show that if MS decides to be evil there's a LOT of motivated players that would happily step in with a new platform and take over.
The fact that Apple is trusting MS with their source code really should tell you that your open source project will be fine. What you'll want to watch out for is when these other competitors decide to abandon ship.
>Microsoft is a completely different company than it was even just 5 or 10 years ago.
Counterpoint: No they aren't. Counting Git repos is totally nonsensical, and open sourcing their terminal is a meaningless gesture, but I guess that's enough to fool some people.
Microsoft has a very, very long history of being a shitty company. Fucking over DR DOS, fucking over Stac, war profiteering, patent trolling, up to the privacy dumpster fire that is Windows 10. That's just off the top of my head. And I've been around for all of it, so excuse me if I just don't fawn over Microsoft suddenly claiming to be the good guys now. Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose.
> Microsoft is a completely different company than it was even just 5 or 10 years ago. Saying that MS is an enemy of open source is uninformed at best and idiotic at worse.
Rather than fighting the target directly, they are embracing it at first; and this time, the target is open-source and the developers. They are doing it again and are targeting where the developers are: Hence their involvement with GitHub, Xamarin, Linux Foundation, Chromium (MS Edge), WSL 2, VS Code, TypeScript and Azure and it is working for them.
The company has not changed. Only the target has, and they are already embracing them and slightly started to extend.
Sounds like no amount of evidence will convince you, even with evidence that contradicts your opinion. The stuff you are talking about was the strategy for most big software vendors in the 90's/early 2000's. They sold software licenses and support.
If you look at current MS, it is all about services. Services do better when you have a larger addressable market and not embracing OSS will reduce who they can sell to, which is why they are going to.
VS Code is a perfect example, MIT License... OSS, wide support and well regarded.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...