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

[moilami]

He prefers web developers these days.

I would believe if someone said Balmer is the father of Trump.

[mhartzel]

It would have been nice if they said: "Sorry guys for all the FUD, misinformation, mud throwing and the SCO lawsuit we backed". But no: "We were on the wrong side of history" = "We did what we did and now we are concerned history will show us as jerks. No matter the harm we done".

[LubosD]

What's going unnoticed is that while Microsoft is definitely opening up, Apple is doing the exact opposite.

Apple used to make some important parts of their system open source under APSL, but that's changing. Over the past ~4 years, they stopped making public releases of some of their own important components (launchd, CoreFoundation, libm, ...), new components never get released or they get released under a license that makes them unusable (CoreCrypto) and they don't even bother publishing the tarballs of 3rd party OSS they use (like Python 3, BoringSSL etc.).

So Apple is going the old Microsoft way nowadays.

[TemplarGR]

When I listened that Free Software was a communist cancer I thougt it was the best selling point ever given to me for free software. Thanks uncle Bill xoxo

The hilarious part is that it is exactly the opposite, Closed Source is the communist cancer equivalent and Open Source is liberty, free market, and democracy.

[JackLilhammers]

What's going unnoticed is that while Microsoft is definitely opening up, Apple is doing the exact opposite.

Apple used to make some important parts of their system open source under APSL, but that's changing. Over the past ~4 years, they stopped making public releases of some of their own important components (launchd, CoreFoundation, libm, ...), new components never get released or they get released under a license that makes them unusable (CoreCrypto) and they don't even bother publishing the tarballs of 3rd party OSS they use (like Python 3, BoringSSL etc.).

So Apple is going the old Microsoft way nowadays.

So is Google, and very few in the linux world seem to care!
By the way MS seems to listen much more to users' feedback than Linux or Gnome devs. Or at least they're seem to admit their mistakes a little more

[Jabberwocky]

Thanks Microsoft. Grabbing attention using past fundamental mistakes and turning the conversation into taking credit for code that you did not develop.

Brad Smith could be wiser than his predecessors, but Microsoft or Apple won't ever have (at best) a semi-honest CEO.

[kpedersen]

One day I hope that Microsoft apologises for holding back the industry for years.

It also worries me that their choice of owning GitHub, LinkedIn and NPM looks like they want to rule the "portfolio / job seeking" market.
Perhaps from up there they can favour the distribution of developers who use their software above others?

"When we look at GitHub, we see it as the home for open-source development, and we see our responsibility as its steward to make it a secure, productive home for [developers]."

No.. you criminals maneuvered yourselves to profit from it whilst slowly rotting it from the inside. No-one sees you guys as stewards of anything XD.

[For the record, I only ever use GitHub as a mirror these days, I highly recommend anyone setting up a project to do so on a local server but create a repo in GitHub, Gitlab and BitBucket and simply push to all three each night as a cron job. That way you get the benefits of owning your own shite but also the benefits of "cloud" backups]

[Mez']

I can't see this as a good thing. Even if they could be trusted on this. And the reason is simple, whatever they do software-wise, is non-intuitive and buggy.

I've been using Windows only at work for the last 12 years (which is the last time I booted Windows at home). So it's been managed by several different experts admins with different machines, in different environments and in different companies.
And yet one thing they all had in common is how crash-prone MS software is. I've had so many issues with MSO, Outlook, Skype (years after they bought it out) and now Teams. Non exhaustive list. It's a very MS specific thing. I don't get anywhere near as many crashes with other software, even old ones badly maintained. Maybe just Cisco Communicator (the VOIP phone client) was as bad.

There's always some flaw making it unstable or non-intuitive. As recently as in the last 3 years (on different machines), after 2 weeks of suspend/resume, every Windows 10 machine starts to sink and somehow to break, permanently losing network folders, or starting to mess with the download file naming process (even in Outlook), and little things like these starting to add up with more uptime days. Or RAM consumption is uncontrolled.

I don't have admin rights on my machines and I still manage to BSoD them once in a while.

I'm not even going to start discussing about updates and necessary reboots in 2020. Sometimes I can manage to push them back by one week or 2, but sometimes it's admin-forced at max 8 hours.

Try to write an elaborate email with bullet points in MS Office, it's always going to screw up somehow. Bullet points, font colors (that automatic non black crap and then it goes blue for no reason)... Although not many people use it, the worst is the horrible certificate management, which made it impossible to exchange encrypted and signed emails in a mailbox where critical attached files had to be processed by an app. Or to simply change the signing certificate depending on which contact you're talking to, we even had problems to reply to signed emails while we had their public certificate, etc...
Once I had Lotus Notes, and while it was certainly not perfect, it was a blast compared to Outlook. Maybe not visually, but intuitively and stability-wise.

And MS Office is really counter-intuitive to me on many respects. Whenever you want to write a more advanced document, with breaks, automatic table of contents, and several level of bullet points, different page numbering or header/footers depending on the section breaks, it's just horrible. And why does Word always assume paragraphs before or after spacing for me? I didn't ask for it. And it's such a mess It always ends up in me removing all paragraphs formatting and spacing it myself. What a loss of time.
Why does the justify alignment makes a mess even before reaching the end of the line is beyond me? It's so dumb. You need to push enter then remove an extra line to get the expected result. Just keep it normal before reaching the end then have the full line justified. How hard is that?

Excel is also a horrible mess intuitively speaking, especially to write on several cell lines with alt + enter required not to change cell and that ' required to make text permanent.
I prefer LO any day and that's exactly why I originally switched at home. I was fed up of dual booting for MSO while it was not satisfactory and ended up writing my thesis on OOo.

I mean, I'm a very quiet person at work, and whenever I lose it, it's because a MS product is acting up on me. Then I'm able to throw the computer through the window in a cliché GIF way.

There's always some flaw making MS software unstable or non-intuitive. It's hard to like anything they do in this context. And if they start to implement that crap in open-source projects, it's a time bomb.

PS: MS software is not horrible for me because it's proprietary, that's just not an important criteria for me. I have no issue using proprietary software.

[JustinTurdeau]

One day I hope that Microsoft apologises for holding back the industry for years.
[For the record, I only ever use GitHub as a mirror these days, I highly recommend anyone setting up a project to do so on a local server but create a repo in GitHub, Gitlab and BitBucket and simply push to all three each night as a cron job. That way you get the benefits of owning your own shite but also the benefits of "cloud" backups]

I just push to GitLab and have it push to the mirrors. I also make sure to use the GitHub repo as a big ad for GitLab.

[board]

Sorry to break it to you, but Office 365 and all the apps that accompany it all run very well on Linux in a browser window. So that pretty much means Office now runs on any OS that Firefox will support. Is it open source? No, but neither do most Office users much care. Microsoft is moving towards platform agnostic deployment of most of its software. Linux and MacOS are both the beneficiary and the cause for that movement.

Microsoft has been de-emphasizing native deployment in favor of cloud based and remote software services along with most of the rest of the industry. Basically, the center jewel in Microsoft's crown now runs on just about any OS or platform you want to run it on so long as you use a supported browser, not just Windows. Back 10 years ago, no one would have even guessed that would happen. And yet, Linux as a desktop is still not a major Thing even though Office can now be used on it without Wine or Cross Over. The problem is no longer Microsoft as the impediment for desktop Linux. The problem is much closer to home.

Cloud based applications are arguably much worse than native, if you're concerned about your privacy and your documents not being stolen. But there are other issues, like always having to stay online and as Sonadow mentioned:

The Microsoft 365 is still badly gimped on the browser. Word for Web does not allow images used for document headers to cover the entirely of the header, so there are still ugly white borders all over the page's top. And they still refuse to allow the web version of Word to generate its own Table of Contents.

Cloud-based solutions are not practical for everyone, a lot of people still use native Office. Some very famous (native) games out there don't run well on Wine, or require more time to setup. Most computers come preinstalled with a jailed garden like MS Windows. If all the user cares about is getting his/her apps to run as quickly as possible, then that's what they will get with Windows.
It takes some wisdom to understand why an OS like Windows is not good in the long run. Most people don't understand, so they go for what is convenient at the moment, until they feel the consequences later on. It's our job as people who work with tech to make sure that folks around us don't learn the hard way, by advising them.

I'd argue that the problem is awareness. If enough people are aware, then platforms like Windows will lose.