Microsoft's Complicated Dance With Open Source
hubie writes:
Miguel de Icaza's barrage of criticism against Microsoft comes with a lot of credibility. This is the developer who has spent much of his career building open source projects within the Microsoft ecosystem and spent years working for Microsoft on Xamarin and other projects. His primary complaint? "That Microsoft would subvert an active open source project by ramming in a proprietary extension to continue to lock down .NET." This comes after last year's Hot Reload open source dumpster fire.
For those who choose to see this as a resurrection of Microsoft's old "Linux is a cancer" trope, not so fast. On balance, Microsoft has been a consistent contributor to open source communities, at least since its public declaration of open source devotion back in 2014. It's doubtful that the company is suddenly reverting to type, closing off one of its most visible open source successes. Instead, I suspect this is one division's decision to satisfy corporate revenue targets with a well understood, if out-of-favor, licensing model.
Still think it's just Microsoft being evil? Have you ever worked at a big company?
[...] It's possible to accept de Icaza's view of the situation and still think that, on balance, Microsoft gets more decisions on open source 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. It's a big sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation, plus it contributes cash and other resources to Python, Java (!!), Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, and more.
[...] One thing I've learned: A company is never as bad as it seems on the surface because ultimately it's made up of individual people making decisions. [...] It was money that influenced Microsoft's love for open source, just as with every other company, and Microsoft will follow the money in this case, too.
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