[jdsully]

Not sure what you mean by “no free documentation” but even when I worked there we just used MSDN’s free online website like everyone else. VS did cost $$ but not sure it was overpriced, I’m still less productive on Linux than I was with the real VS (code is nice but not the same). I’d pay for a Linux version in a heartbeat.

The real reason Linux took over is Windows just didn’t make a good server. Even if you looked past the bloated footprint, licensing was a nightmare just to figure out what you needed to buy let alone the licensing costs themselves.

Even good dev tools can’t make up for a bad platform.

[horsemans]

I believe by "no free documentation" they are referring to the 90s, where MSDN was a subscription service, hence the "long time coming" comment.

[dataflow]

The comment was about the last decade? Seems kind of irrelevant to bring up an obstacle from the 90s.

> Over-monetizing their dev tooling was a significant contributor to Microsoft's loss of dev mind-share over the last decade.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

I don’t know about the author of that quote, but I mentally often think of the 90s as “last decade”

[dataflow]

Interesting. Is that a reason behind it? I can see why the 2000s might seem like "last decade" (it might still feel like the 2010s), but the 90s are another decade behind...

[fiddlerwoaroof]

I don’t really know, but Y2K and 9/11 were fairly notable in a way that most of the other decade transitions weren’t.

I also don’t really know if this is common: but the individual years of my adult life just seem less real than my childhood for some reason.

[mitchdoogle]

Because the human brain perceives time in odd ways.

[watt]

That joke was funny 10 years ago.

[mitchdoogle]

It's probably not a joke. Many people report things like this when talking about time. Our brains are just not that great at accurately thinking about long periods of time.

[ludamad]

Clearly his directly outer conscience thinks it's the 2010s

[sumtechguy]

Also at that time you could for about 60 dollars buy 'the win32 bible' which had pretty much every call you wanted in print form. Also about 50 bucks got you the CD with the docs. Only when you went to the 'I want MS in a box' MSDN that you paid more. MS dominated in that market in the 90s because they had tooling that was wildy cheaper than most of their competitors on other machines. Sun/IBM/Apple easily priced their docs in the 20k+ market. I bought many of these docs for these different archs at the time. MS was by far the cheapest of them. Borland and Watcom had 2 different setups with and without docs. You paid accordingly (usually 100-150). Also once the internet came around MS put its docs up on the web pretty quickly. They were about equivalent to the CD's. I would say around 96/97 they did it. I have not paid for MS docs since. I paid a few times for MSDN as I would need a lab of machines and ACLs were dumb expensive.

[thrower123]

There is an incredible UserVoice thread that's been going for years asking for a Linux version of Visual Studio. It's such a microcosm of Microsoft problems.

- Naming confusion between three completely different products Visual Studio, Visual Studio for Mac, and Visual Studio Code.

- Complete failure to comprehend how old VS's codebase is. "Dotnet Core runs on Linux, right?"

- Most people use about 10% of the functionality it offers. Unfortunately no two users use the same 10% of it's features.

https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/visual-studio-...

[stoolpigeon]

I think the cost of the tooling did matter but I also agree about licensing costs for their server products.

The first time I got to work with Linux for money (as opposed for fun at home) was when I had a project where the MS Licensing would cost a lot more than the hardware it would run on.

They let me do it with Redhat, PHP and PostgreSQL. They bought the box from Dell and that was it. No licensing to track or pay. The freedom was just amazing and made business sense.

[mattmanser]

You can now deploy .net core apps on Linux. Even SQL Server can run on Linux now. Plus, if you want to, debug it locally on your Windows machine on Linux using WSL (as simple as changing a drop-down to WSL and it'll install everything required on your WSL instance).

On the negative-side, the asp.net core team is obsessed with dependency injection and async, which results in tons of shitty boilerplate. So you either have to strike off the beaten path and get nice clean, terse code, but constantly fight the tooling, or accept their dogmatic styling and end up with ridiculously bloated code.

[deallocator]

I haven't worked with ASP.NET Core for a while now, but what exactly do you refer to with "ridiculously bloated code"? async-await doesn't add much extra code, save the occasional await keyword sometimes?

[mattmanser]

Yes, that's just the DI that does that, the async/await just gives you ridiculous call stacks and untraceable errors, usually for zero performance gains.

[laurent92]

> I’d pay for a Linux version in a heartbeat

We should enter a world where people pay for open-source. OSS has been fine, but they never had the correct resources for marketing and UX. The should be a paywall for access to repos, even if you could theoretically find the code everywhere else, but ey, want the code updated automatically? $5 per month. (I’m paying 1% revenue for OSS but as long as it’s not everyone, it doesn’t make the developers filthy rich and able to hire UX and marketers, and that is what we need).

[smitty1e]

There is zero blockage to paying for OSS right now. Just Do It. I've been a member of the FSF for years.

What hasn't happened is a culture of offering financial feedback to favored projects.

Patreon and Kickstarters seem a start.

Suggestions are welcome.

[laurent92]

> I’m paying 1% revenue for OSS

So I’m already paying, as you sure have read.

> but as long as it’s not everyone, it doesn’t make the developers filthy rich

You asked for suggestions, it is right there. Ask people to pay for access to the repos, or let them download for free from alternate sources. It will make big businesses pay because they require a chain of custody, while the amateur can still download for free, and it conserves all other advantages of OSS.

I do have a feeling that your comment was adverse, I constantly regret being generous when people talk to me like a thieve anyway, just because I give, but not enough (How much is enough for people like you?). Also, you are possibly trying to solve the problem of freeloaders by having possibly adverse comments, not seeing that I’m trying to solve your same issue of freeloaders by finding an incentive which both conserves all advantages of OSS and still leverage money en masse from larger businesses.

[pbronez]

FYI I also mis-read your comment. I had to double back to see you mentioned paying 1% of revenue for OSS.

“Assume good faith”; Hanlon's razor applies.

[smitty1e]

I admit to missing this point.

[michaelt]

The problem with paid for OSS developer tools is:

* The customers making serious money off improved developer tools - the kind of customers who'd pay $10,000 per seat for a great developer tool - are big businesses.

* Big businesses basically won't pay for things they can get for free. Oh, they might occasionally sponsor a conference for PR purposes - or even pay for developers implementing features they want - but nobody's paying $10,000 a seat for Eclipse out of the goodness of their heart.

* You might think I'm saying "Well then, closed source tools all the way!" but the tools in other engineering sectors that do manage to extract that much money from companies (SolidWorks, Altium...) have a bunch of problems as well - mostly around user lock-in efforts blocking anyone making compatible tooling.

[vagrantJin]

How about FOSS have a commercial licence and a body to collect payments from enterprises, pays out the open source devs. Basically a more focused and more opinionated/vocal patreon.