Microsoft President Brad Smith Acknowledges They Were Previously Wrong On Open-Source

[increasechief]

It's hard to underestimate the privacy risk that using any MS technology (including even open sourced IP) will have on your desktop and online experience.

[computerquip]

Is Windows or Microsoft Office Free software yet? No? Guess this guff is so much hot air from the rear then. So much for the importance of "open source". I'm sure they enjoy making money from Gnu+linux on their stupid online virtual machine and virtual container service.

So, while I don't advocate for Microsoft generally, making non-open software open just like that is a legal nightmare. There is so much bullshit put into proprietary licensing that it's often not even feasible or worth it, even if it is the right thing to do.

For stuff that is already closed-source, you should really just assume that it's screwed and can never be open-sourced again.

[Terrablit]

what are you talking about it's 2020 and still some Wine programs don't run because of Net Framework 4.5 ... it´s clearly a lock-in. Deprecating Net Framework 4.5 or older is still not enough there's literally millions of apps using Net Framework 4.5, what will be your options when Net Framework 4.5 gets removed from Windows OS? Use an unsupported OS?
(and also there is devs using NetFramework 4.5 on 2020.)
Besides every major technology? what do you mean? UWP? (another lock-in)

You should really do your homework before talking. Most .NET Framework programs that don't run on Wine don't run because of WPF. It's been this way since the mono days, which doesn't do WPF and only has some WCF stubs. WPF apps not running on Wine is because Wine is missing a lot of platform calls that WPF makes during the rendering. I've been following the compatibility of several major products on Wine for a decade now since VS switched to WPF in 2010, and most of them run into the same issues. The new WPF on .NET Core won't fix this, but it might make it easier for Wine developers to track down missing or incomplete libraries and fix them. Most of the related bugs in Wine have a deep dive on the issue waiting by Anastasius Focht ("Hello folks") explaining the root cause of the failure. One example is this: https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36461. Wine emulates core windows functionality. It's a big target, so it's to be expected that less common stuff is still missing. Games tend to get more attention, anyway.

There'll still be issues with (overly) complex applications like Visual Studio that do a lot of native interop, or things with C++/CLI. Once again that's because of an incomplete Wine implementation of Windows libraries and functions. But vanilla .NET console and WinForms apps tend to work fine through wine.

The good news is .NET Core makes cross platform much better. But that won't fix programs compiled for .NET Framework. On the other hand, for most simple apps rebuilding it isn't hard, and if it's not obfuscated, an enterprising user can go about rebuilding it themselves since it's all in IL.

As far as UWP, that's not based on .NET. It's an evolution of WinRT stuff, and is callable from .NET and C++. It's just another win32 framework with .NET headers.

[mike456]

Wonder if Defender will also work on Desktop and not only servers.

[onlyLinuxLuvUBack]

I think calling MS on their bluff is more than fair. Clearly they are making more money gathering and selling personal information (Microslurp) than they can on their shallow code quality and QA practices. Open source is looking more and more like a gambit as their recent acquisitions has been fairly transparent attempts to purchase quality developer communities largely owing to the fact they are incapable of building this themselves. I mean only GitHub has really accomplished this so not saying it's easy by any stretch. Nothing new there, they have a looong earned reputation of buying (borg'ing) others nice things.

The irony is the guy in charge is "president brad smith" which is also "president BS" for bull sheet.

[Grumpy Cowboy]

Too late. No trust.

[increasechief]

In the early and mid 2000's, sure, however now its a completely different ballgame, i.e. Visual Studio Code. Believe it or not, Microsoft has changed (to what degree is debatable but its not trivial).

I think calling MS on their bluff is more than fair. Clearly they are making more money gathering and selling personal information (Microslurp) than they can on their shallow code quality and QA practices. Open source is looking more and more like a gambit as their recent acquisitions has been fairly transparent attempts to purchase quality developer communities largely owing to the fact they are incapable of building this themselves. I mean only GitHub has really accomplished this so not saying it's easy by any stretch. Nothing new there, they have a looong earned reputation of buying (borg'ing) others nice things.

[mdedetrich]

as

Most people saying "make Office open source or gtfo" are just being facetious, but the points about Microsoft working against standards and going to great lengths to make their formats opaque and non-interoperable are still very valid.

Microsoft are most definitely not acting in good faith when it comes to open source. It's so clear as day that I seriously have to question the motives (or mental faculties) of anyone stating otherwise...

In the early and mid 2000's, sure, however now its a completely different ballgame, i.e. Visual Studio Code. Believe it or not, Microsoft has changed (to what degree is debatable but its not trivial).

[JustinTurdeau]

Companies are profit driven. More news at 11.

You can handwave and act the apologist all day long, but the fact is: most other companies haven't been caught red-handed engaging in systematic behavior like this. Microsoft has been rotten to the core for the longest time and the only thing that's changed is the marketing...

[k1e0x]

I know that almost all responses here have been dismissive of Microsoft. And I concur that they have done some pretty nasty things over the years, including going as far as needlessly integrating a web browser in an OS, just to destroy Netscape, and in doing so not only killing a competitor and holding back the web for about a decade, but also unleashing an untold number of needless security headaches upon the world.

But let's give credit where credit is due. This is an actual admission that they were wrong and that they regret those words. And I have to say, I've been liking the new Microsoft since Satya Nadella took over the helm. Although at the end of the day they are a large publicly traded company that will of course put the interests of their shareholders first, the means through which they have been doing so has made them far less of an evil company than Facebook, Amazon and, sorry to say, also Google these days.

Linus Torvalds once said: "Talk is cheap. Show me the code." And by that metric, Microsoft has been putting their money where their mouth is. Aren't they one of the largest contributors to the development of the Linux kernel these days? Visual Studio Code has been by far the most heavily developed open source project on GitHub in the last few years, IMO even having reached the point where it may start cannibalizing revenues from the commercial Visual Studio IDE.

Plus .NET is now entirely open source. Which is especially nice, considering another company that is many times more evil and a much bigger threat to Open Source at the moment:

Oracle.

Thanks to their greed, the worldwide software development community is now holding its breath, pending an upcoming decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, regarding the question whether APIs are copyrightable. If the decision ends up being favor of Oracle, it will be desastrous to the entire software industry, not to mention the open source community. And all of this due to Oracle's greed and spite for not having profited off the success of Android.

Microsoft is no longer a threat to open source. I'm not claiming that because I'm naive, it's simply because Microsoft's interests no longer conflict, and in some ways now even happen to coincide, with those of the open source community. Will that change again eventually? Perhaps. But for now, Oracle is the company we should all be rooting against, and against those scumbags, I welcome almost any ally, including Microsoft.

I respectfully disagree.

It isn't Microsoft per say, it is the corporate structure on a whole and if they can destroy competition, gain market share and advantage and dominate opensource projects for their own benefit they will. it's not a personal thing or the people at Microsoft.. it is just the nature of the beast. Any company faces these problems when they become too large and powerful in an industry. it takes extreme restraint for them to do the right thing as opposed to the profitable thing when their bosses and shareholders put so much pressure on them to make money.

It's not a knock on capitalism, it's a wonderful thing when there is competition.. it's when you don't have competition where the abuse starts.

We should be very leery of these giants.. Oracle, Google, Yes Microsoft.. Even RedHat.

Microsoft is essentially telling us "Hey, we are dominating open source, isn't that great?!" I would say, no.. because at the same time you can see WSL is being developed for the sole purpose of running Linux docker containers on Windows $erver turning Linux into a run time layer.