Originally posted by uid313
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That's a nice bit of irony right there -- "whatever you choose, we're tier1 or even main sponsor of its development. <3 Microsoft."
As an aside it seems to me that Microsoft is outdoing Google when it comes to becoming the backbone of the important internet infrastructure projects with a development focus, thus dogfooding their cloud tech and ensuring that their own development tools and deployment products will have 1st class support for whatever tech they sponsor/own.
Clever strategy which is essentially embrace, extend and ... prosper?
The thing about Open Source is that, since it is generally a meritocracy where whoever puts in the work gets to make the decisions, it also means that -- on a larger scale -- whoever pours in more engineering resource will be the de facto leader of any given project (if you want a high profile example, look at Linux and what RH has done with systemd). Turns out you don't need to have to resort to dead-end proprietary software development methodologies to remain in control of the overall development direction of any given code base.
It would seem that Microsoft (like RH did years ago) has finally woken up to that reality and is now flexing its financial and research division muscle to the benefit of its own bottom line while still miraculously managing to be a good steward and citizen in the Open Source landscape, just like RH has mostly proven to be. Seems to me that Oracle completely missed the point in this regard with its DB and Java acquisitions and Alphabet is busy doing ... whatever it is Alphabet and its subsidiary Google does (to be fair, Google popularised Android, Go, Kubernetes and YouTube and is driving the adoption of Open, non-encumbered video codecs, so there's that).
This is the clash of the titans all over again and this is merely the beginning. At this rate, you would expect IBM to also begin investing strategically in Open Source bedrock technologies that developers rely on in their $DAYJOB in order to remain relevant in the evolving tech sector.
As a corollary to all this, one could easily speculate that it's only a question of time before Rust becomes an acquisition target (or is subjected to a sudden engineering resource influx from your friendly neighbourhood tech giant), given the inroads Rust is making into safety-oriented system-level programming across various code bases...
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