Maybe not first class, but I think Microsoft's eaten a bit of humble pie (ala IBM ~15-20 years ago when they started ramping up Linux efforts) and generally playing nice.
Who ten years ago would have imagined so much of .NET would wind up MIT licensed, not just some 'shared source' malarky, on Sourceforge's ~2015 successor?
This isn't the Microsoft of the Halloween memos anymore.
No, we are making them first class. When we have a bug that breaks one of our three build queues (Windows, Linux, Mac), it will not be acceptable to break any of the platforms.
Some people are never going to get over the past...guessing if the poster is American, they must not trust the British either for burning down the White House 200 years ago. I lived through the late 90s and 00s Microsoft era and know as well any developer the shenanigans that went on for better or worse. I always had a fondness for C# over Java for its willingness to innovate while Java stagnated, but never wanted to commit myself to being stuck only in the Windows ecosystem.
That said, I am excited to see the direction Microsoft is heading. It enthused me enough to start using Xamarin when I want to build cross platform for personal projects and to recently switch my day job to a company that uses .net for most of the their software. Not overly fond of cmd.exe and powershell on Windows still, but for most things, there's always Cygwin and it too has come a long way. Main issue is Powershell inherited all of cmd.exe's bad user interaction design (tab completion, select/copy/paste, buffer, history up/down scrolling) when compared to a typical *nix terminal.
> guessing if the poster is American, they must not trust the British either for burning down the White House 200 years ago.
Huh, what a fantastic point you make. Because I can trust the British in spite of something they did before any current living human being was alive, I should be willing to forget things that Microsoft did 10 years ago in an industry that hasn't fundamentally changed.
Just countering your argument with an equally absurd one.
I probably wouldn't even bother if you hadn't dragged out the tired old "embrace, extend, extinguish" meme/mantra that was popular 10-15 years ago (and then wiki linking to it like no one is aware of it). I respect the differences in our opinions, but having to convey your point by adding that line in 2015 make one's argument a bit hallow.
Fair point about Wikipedia. I suppose that was unnecessary. I do think that's a bit of an ad hominem though.
> equally absurd one.
You must be trolling me. You cannot possibly think that the statement "Britain cannot be trusted, after what they did in the 18th century" and "Microsoft cannot be trusted after what they did in the early 2000's" are on equal footing.
But let's not resort to making this argument about analogies. How about you respond to my statement in the highest comment: What Microsoft can possibly stand to gain, fiscally speaking, from open sourcing .NET? From future profits to the current market.
Okay you're correct about the comparison, it was slightly more absurd to highlight the absurdity I saw in your original remark.
> What Microsoft can possibly stand to gain, fiscally speaking, from open sourcing .NET?
What does Google, Facebook or any other public, for-profit entity have to gain from open sourcing? I don't see Microsoft's motives as being any different. Companies aren't individuals, despite what US Corporate Law states. They're a system composed of the good and bad individuals currently working there and are subject to change. I would keep going, but I would basically end up saying everything coldtea already said to you a couple days ago.
If you you're looking for an official answer, you might want to ask the core .net developer in this thread as I don't work for or have any affiliation with Microsoft.
Microsoft hasn't had some crazy awakening like, "Hey, have you guys heard of this open source thing? We should embrace open source and free software!"
They've realized that they're beginning to fall from #1 in the eyes of developers. So they're throwing some bones to try to dissuade people from leaving their platforms.
Microsoft stands to gain NOTHING from open sourcing their platforms besides developer marketshare and perhaps a bit of PR from those who are stupid enough to think that Microsoft suddenly turned altruistic.
They're scared shitless. They shipped a bunch of products that are not so popular with consumers (Windows Phone 7, WP8, Windows 8, Surface Pro, etc.) and developers are starting to care less about targeting people on Windows. This is just damage control.
Yeah man, it's all capitalism, they don't do it out of the goodness of their hearts!
What a revelation!
Pass the bong.
Response #2:
They're is no "Microsoft" as a person. That's a company, an aggregate entity which doesn't have either brains or a strategy.
What DOES exist is people running the company. Those people can change (and have, Gates->Ballmer->this new guy), and these new people can have different ideas about how to go about things.
If there are any propritary companies you like, then imagine that MS could be turned to behave like them. There is no "evil brain" behind it all making sure MS will always be like in the 1998 carricature you have in mind.
IBM circa 1999-2004 was hailed by OSS advocates for supporting Linux and OS -- yet the same company was the fearful Microsoft equivalent of its era, a few decades back.
Oh, and this evil AT&T that everybody feared and they had to break up in an anti-trust case? This is the company that gave us UNIX in the first place. (Not to mention Xerox Parc, another company's proprietary research facility, without which we'd have shit today).
And vice versa: those "nice" companies could change course if the wrong people came on board, or their current people saw an opportunity and got greedy.
Response #3:
A lot of us don't give a flying fuck about the success of OSS as some ideological venture.
We like some OSS software, and we like some proprietary software. Heck, some of us make a living creating proprietary software for proprietary companies, from small indie firms to Adobe to Microsoft to what have you.
And even as users, a lot of us won't settle for an inferior OSS product is there's an (affordable) superior proprietary one (and vice versa).
Who ten years ago would have imagined so much of .NET would wind up MIT licensed, not just some 'shared source' malarky, on Sourceforge's ~2015 successor?
This isn't the Microsoft of the Halloween memos anymore.