The decision to make the C# extension in Visual Studio Code proprietary is causing annoyance, but Microsoft remains a staunch supporter of open source
Miguel de Icaza’s barrage of criticism against Microsoft comes with a lot of credibility. This is the developer who spent much of his career building open source projects within the Microsoft ecosystem and spent years working for Microsoft on Xamarin and other projects. Your main complaint about him? “That Microsoft would subvert an active open source project by introducing a proprietary extension to continue to block .NET.” This comes after last year’s Hot Reload open source dumpster fire.
For those who choose to see this as a resurrection of the old Microsoft “Linux is a cancer” trope, not so fast. In general, Microsoft has consistently contributed to open source communities, at least since its public declaration of devotion to open source in 2014. It’s doubtful that the company is suddenly going back to writing, shutting down one of its most visible open source successes. . Instead, I suspect this is one division’s decision to meet corporate revenue goals with a well-understood, if unfavorable, licensing model.
Still think it’s just Microsoft being evil? Have you ever worked in a big company?
Right hand, left hand meet
The reality of a great company’s existence is that “the CEO said to do it” is more persuasive than “my cubicle mate thinks it’s a good idea.” Furthermore, even executive edicts take time and persistence to enforce. Think of it this way: the CEO says, “Everyone should sell our new monkey glasses.” Sounds good, right? Well, he does until the general manager of the zebra glasses division reminds the CEO that he has a billion dollars depending on the sale of zebra glasses, not mono glasses. Oh, and then the partner leader reminds the CEO that they have $500 million in commitments to the partners related to hippo goggles. The sales people will need to be trained, the marketing department will need to update all warranties, etc, etc, etc. A year (or five) later, that edict will still be largely unfulfilled.
Back to Microsoft
In 2014, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella declared that “Microsoft loves Linux.” Hell didn’t freeze over because, at that point, what else could Microsoft do? Linux was a fact of life, as was open source. I will not repeat the story that Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has already captured exceptionally well. The TL;DR? Cloud computing (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) was racing toward open source, and if Microsoft was going to have a future, it would have to learn to minimize its obsession with Windows. (Remember when Azure was called Windows Azure?)
Microsoft had a compelling financial reason to go open source, and to a large extent it has. But, as mentioned, executive edicts are slow to be enforced.
This was particularly true in 2014. At the same time that Nadella was rejoicing in Microsoft’s newfound love of open source, other parts of the company were actively fighting it and the principles behind it, as Simon Phipps wrote at the time. . Things got better. By 2016, he could reasonably write that Microsoft had become the largest open source contributor in the world, measured by the number of employees actively contributing to open source projects on GitHub. It’s not a perfect measurement, of course, but it’s directionally accurate. For 2018, I recalculated the numbers using an open source project, and again, Microsoft came out ahead, as measured by employees who actively contributed to GitHub’s open source projects. (You can use this same project to get updated numbers.)
Let’s get back to the specific issue that irked de Icaza and other open source advocates. Microsoft disclosed some changes it was making to the Visual Studio Code C# extension, so it’s proprietary. That communication was a bit difficult to follow, leading de Icaza to summarize: “Over time, the .NET platform is being closed down, to ensure that it’s only useful if you’re a customer.” For those hoping that open source .NET would pave the way for C# and other key Microsoft technologies, this seems like a tough investment.
A commenter on de Icaza’s post suggested that despite the corporate slogan “we love open source”, “a lot of the veterans who were there in the nasty era are still there now. There are a lot of them, and very veterans, and some certainly still have those unpleasant ideas.” To this, De Icaza replied, “Yes.”
It is possible to accept Icaza’s view of the situation and still think that, in general, Microsoft makes more open source decisions that are right than wrong. This is the same Microsoft that recently funded the GNOME project, a direct (if not particularly threatening) challenge to the Windows desktop. He is a big supporter of the Apache Software Foundation, as well as contributing cash and other resources to Python, Java (!!), Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, and more.
Of course, a rejoinder to all of this is that of course Microsoft does that! It’s in their own interest, and they may see shutting down .NET as in their interest as well. To which I reply, of course. I can’t think of a single case of a company contributing to open source projects out of altruism. Open source is inherently self-serving, and this is why it continues to sustain itself and thrive. There is no shortage of self-interest in the developers who contribute and the companies that pay them to do so.
On Microsoft and .NET, I don’t have any particular complaints. I have followed Microsoft for over two decades and have spent my fair share of time raging against that machine. One thing I’ve learned: A company is never as bad as it appears on the surface because, ultimately, it’s made up of individual people who make decisions. Some of those decisions I like and others I don’t. However, my opinion (and probably yours) doesn’t really matter, because the litmus test will be what developers and customers do. If Microsoft’s .NET developer community fights back and takes their employers’ money, Microsoft will blink and back down. It was money that influenced Microsoft’s love of open source, just like with any other company, and Microsoft will go the way of money on this one too.
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[Fuente]: infoworld.com
efes.(June 20, 2022).1973 images. Modified by Carlos Zambrado Recoveredan pixabay.com
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