
Open source has won. Microsoft surrendered - ohjeez
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3144063/open-source-tools/open-source-has-won-and-microsoft-has-surrendered.html
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smhenderson
While I appreciate the things MS has done recently with OSS I think this
article is overly optimistic.

I agree they have changed and in a lot of ways for the better. But MS is a
huge company and it seems to me that one hand doesn't always realize what the
other is doing.

I will remain cautiously optimistic about "winning" over MS for now.

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pasbesoin
Microsoft is adept in the art of embrace, extend, extinguish. And they still
have enormous resources compared to most open source projects (as opposed to
open source deployments).

Open source still has what may be critical, focused points of failure. Low bus
number (as in, taken out by) focii and junctions.

I'm not up to speed on the latest changes. But if actions speak louder than
words, there's a lot of past -- and contemporary -- action to counter-balance,
before I and I think many others will put trust in MS initiatives.

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contras1970
I _hope_ Microsoft turns out to be a spineless, inmediate profit-seeking
corporation it's always been so far. It has just been turning its sails
towards the wind in the past few years. Their hegemony was gone, bundling
wouldn't work anymore. If they want me to use SQL Server it must come without
the baggage of Windows.

MS is getting off their ass after 25 years! It's the year everybody
congratulated GNU/Linux for their achievements!

edit: s:ggg:gg:g

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fwn
Maybe because I'm not very knowledgeable about this topic, but I do not get
the argument here.

Microsoft isn't a threat to Linux because they say so? Or did the market
really change that fundamentally? I'm a bit lost here..

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ewzimm
Microsoft used to only lose money from people choosing Linux instead of
Windows. Now the fastest growing part of their business is Azure servers. 40%
of them and growing are Linux. Their CEO is from the Azure branch of the
company, the platform-agnostic part. More and more, Microsoft is going to rely
on Linux servers and Android phones as their profit centers. Instead of
hurting their business, it's helping them.

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cestith
It almost sounds as if Microsoft is the next IBM. Rather than crush everyone
else, they're finding out it's very profitable to service everyone else's
hardware and software.

At the same time, though, Microsoft is selling Surface bundled with its OS
despite overall market declines in new laptops. I'd bet the likes of Dell,
Lenovo, Samsung, Sony, HP, and Toshiba aren't very happy about that sort of
encroachment from a vendor upon whom they've come to depend. They advertise it
against the Macbook using largely features a tablet or phone has, but many of
their customers' laptops are also touchscreen and lightweight.

They've set themselves up as a game publisher alongside the people to whom
they used to just sell OSes and developers' tools. Don't they even have a
couple in-house development studios for games? So now you buy your X-Box, your
Windows, your Visual Studio, and your X-Box SDK then write your game and give
Microsoft a cut to sit on a shelf next to content of theirs.

SQL Server on Linux might interfere some with Oracle and IBM's DB/2\. It's
also likely to try to take share away from Postgres, MySQL, and SQLite. There
are lots of extensions to SQL Server already. Don't be surprised if they after
a few years they make it really easy to come from other DBMSes but hard to
leave.

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TrevorJ
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

They haven't changed their philosophy one bit.

~~~
astrodust
That's the Ballmer Doctrine and he's toast. His scorched Earth policies lead
to things like the Zune, products like Bing getting almost zero traction, and
the endless, futile struggle for Windows Phone to register at all on world-
wide usage metrics.

Nadella has a different approach. He built Azure, a platform that could have
been Windows exclusive but wasn't. I think he understands what open-source can
do for Microsoft, and what Microsoft can do for open-source.

Gates wasn't an extinguisher, he was a hard charger that would try to make
best-of-breed products. Where others slowed down or got distracted, Microsoft
would stay focused. That's how Visual Studio beat out Borland C++, how Word
prevailed over WordPerfect, how Excel trounced Lotus 1-2-3.

Once Microsoft had taken a commanding lead in those markets the influence of
Ballmer started to be more severe. He was blood-thirsty, he wanted to crush
anyone left. This became clear in the anti-trust trials where it was Ballmer
that wanted to crush, kill, and destroy anyone in the way of Windows achieving
100% market share.

Remember, Gates was a programmer who happened to be CEO. He was driven to make
products that people _wanted_ , to win by simply being technically better:
More features, more modest system requirements, more backwards compatibility.

Then Ballmer took over and that all went out the window.

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samfisher83
Gates was quite a cut throat business man. He might be the warm philanthropist
gates now, but he was quite the cut throat business man back in the day. How
do you think Netscape market share went from like 90% to pretty much 0?

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socmag
I think the point of having an Internet browser preinstalled when you bought a
computer had some merits. I can't think of many consumer computing devices
that don't come with a pre installed browser these days.

In retrospect the whole DoJ trial seems rather quaint to be honest.

Plus it wasn't as if you couldn't install Netscape and decide through personal
choice to use that over IE.

Compare that with iOS where not only does it come with Safari pre installed,
but if you install any other browser it HAS to run WebKit and cannot provide
functionality Apple doesn't allow.

Objectively that seems to be a lot more protectionist and subject to anti-
trust laws than anything Microsoft ever did.

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walter_bishop
"Microsoft & Linux & Patents & Tweets"

[https://meshedinsights.com/2016/11/22/microsoft-linux-
patent...](https://meshedinsights.com/2016/11/22/microsoft-linux-patents-
tweets/)

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type0
Sincerely asking, how long would it take for Microsoft to release their own
distro or would they rather buy SUSE or Canonical?

