[mdpm]

Really the simple issue has always been the same with MS-platform based OSS; People look to MS to provide the canonical frameworks, tools, and libraries. MS is far more used in corporate environments as a portion of their market, and are more subject to business decision making; much of that focused on RAD / designer tooling.

There's a different philosophy in the open source world - python, perl, c - none really have 'de facto' answers to persistence, logging, services, etc so There's a plethora of approaches and libraries for any needs. MS provides EF, so you have to defend any alternate solution to business; it's perceived as risky. Even using tools not of MS origin, despite no close surrogate from the 'official' tools (ala Redis, 3rd party libs) is something you have to find approval for. MS tooling is automatically excluded from this. This isn't great for MS either, because they now have to produce these 'ideal' libraries, and the strength of their platform is now judged by library implementations.

I'm really not sure what the solution to this problem is unless they really get to sponsoring projects with effort, money, and tooling. They have programs in place for this, and I can see there's a lot of outreach going on for this reason.

[tpetricek]

There is a lot of truth in this.

I think there is a shift happening slowly that simply needs to progress and happen fully. With more developer stuff coming from Microsoft embracing open-source, people just need to realize that Microsoft is a part of a larger .NET ecosystem space. Not the other way round.

[mdpm]

Absolutely. They've pulled an amazing turnaround, momentum is going to take a while still.

[bmir-alum-007]

I've worked on open+closed source in enterprise startups with people that come from both MSFT- and Linux-centric worlds respectively. The MSFT centric-people tend (not all) poo-poo open source as a complete waste of time and/or lack of business savviness (helps competitors too much). There is some open source contributions in such shops, but usually only if it helps (and doesn't seem to hurt) the bottom-line.

PS: Unfortunately, most Fortune 2000 enterprise (ms and non-ms shops) abuse the fuck out of open source and give zero back (time, $ or help). I really think there should be some "community charge" funding model which doesn't make it nakedly for-profit but rewards people that contribute, maintain and support useful code that is widely deployed so they're not completely abused as unpaid crowdslaves.

[pmontra]

I understand your feelings but legally speaking the only abuse of that kind would be taking GPLed software, modifying it, distributing it and not sharing it back. If the software has been licensed with BSD or similar licenses that don't require to share modifications, then the original developers are perfectly fine with not seeing anything coming out from those corporations. Their choice, no abuses.

[geon]

Absolutely. It is in their own interest to share contributions upstream. If they don't, they are forced to re-apply their patches over-and-over or just not upgrade.

[Asbostos]

If MSFT centric people think open source is a waste of time that helps their competitors, and open source contributors are wasting their time helping their competitors, then doesn't that mean the MSFT centric people are perfectly right, and people really should avoid contributing to open source unless it help their own interests directly?

If you want open source and user pays at the same time, then it's not really open source. What you end up with is closed source which has already worked well for a lot of companies.