
​Why Microsoft is turning into an open-source company - cia48621793
http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-microsoft-is-turning-into-an-open-source-company/
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trengrj
Microsoft using open source components is very much in line with other large
tech companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. It isn't really
something to applaud, and just normal business strategy for any tech company
in 2016.

For Microsoft to become a true open-source company they would need to open
source Windows, which goes against their advertising, telemetry, and tracking
goals.

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faraggi
Couldn't they theoretically open source most of the OS? But keep some stuff
under key?

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88e282102ae2e5b
What would be the point? Either the open source could be built, in which case
you could have ad- and tracking-free windows, or you couldn't build it, making
it impossible to develop.

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ankurdhama
Open sourcing only the developer tools doesn't make you an open source
company.

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ld00d
And they haven't even done that. Visual Studio 2015 isn't open source. SQL
Server isn't open source. WPF? WinForms? And, I might be off here because the
naming is very confusing, but is the .Net Framework actually open source? It
seems like only .Net "Core" is.

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dano
It is difficult to believe that a 40 year old company is going to change its
spots and not execute on some kind of embrace, extend, extinguish strategy. To
me it appears more likely that MS wants to tamper down the distinctiveness
between its products and open source alternatives. Then, when management makes
decisions on solutions, they'll choose the MS solution because it is no longer
sufficiently differentiated and thus move development focus to the MS
platforms.

As sort of an example, MS SQL server is moving to Linux and while not open
source, the playbook of eliminating differentiation is at work.

1\. It is directly aimed at Oracle and DB2 who traditionally run on Unix
environments. It isn't clear that Oracle and DB2 can be as effective in the
Windows environment as MSSQL can be in a Unix environment.

2\. SQL Server in the bizspark program is nearly free for the first 3 years
(so I recall) and then you're locked in and the price jumps substantially.

3\. Traditional IT managers tend to want to buy from MS for the possibility of
support - support for Postgres via IRC is excellent btw.

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kas0
Because the windows phone failure

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kyriakos
i think they open sourced a lot of things unrelated to windows mobile.

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kas0
Yes. All is done to attract more developers to the universal windows platform

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guyprovost
Those comments really doesn't surprise me.... Armchair CIO

