
Microsoft joins the MariaDB Foundation as a Platinum level sponsor - doppp
https://mariadb.org/microsoft-joins-mariadb-foundation/
======
jgowdy
In this thread: Microsoft aligns their business interests with open source
projects and extends financial support to those projects, therefore they must
be trying to destroy open source, force everyone to run Windows, and have
Linus Torvalds assassinated.

Have you ever met people who work at Microsoft? The Microsoft engineers are
just engineers like you and I. Some of them are some of the best and brightest
in the industry. Microsoft has made major contributions to technology that
some people just aren’t aware of or don’t seem to care about. The “evil” that
existed at Microsoft was largely an upper management issue. There has been
significant change in upper management.

But here’s what’s important. Ask yourself where Microsoft’s interests lie
today. Their goal is to get people on Azure. They don’t give a damn if you run
Linux or Windows Server. They aren’t stupid enough to fail to realize that
ship has already sailed. They’ll keep developing and selling Windows Server to
the people who depend on it and collect that revenue, but the future for them
is Azure. And that doesn’t require that they extinguish or destroy anything.

I would also like to say that members of the open source community have taken
jobs at Microsoft, obviously convinced that Microsoft’s private plans match
their ideals and principles moving forward.

TL;DR If Microsoft’s profit motive in Azure aligns with open source, why do so
many people continue to need to infer sinister motives?

~~~
whatshisface
Because history repeats itself - especially when the same groups are
approaching the same situation with the same motives.

> _The “evil” that existed at Microsoft was largely an upper management issue.
> There has been significant change in upper management._

Recent anti-consumer actions indicate that this may not be the case. Come on,
ads on the start menu? Today's MS has done things even Gates' MS didn't.

> _They aren’t stupid enough to fail to realize that ship has already sailed._

That doesn't stop them from wanting to go out and turn that ship around.

> _They’ll keep developing and selling Windows Server to the people who depend
> on it and collect that revenue, but the future for them is Azure._

Cloud compute is a commodity, even one of the major things sold by internet
Wal-Mart. Is that _really_ where Microsoft wants to go? It's almost implicit
that they're going to want to "differentiate" their service, which means
developing lock-in but only once you've got people into the fold.

> _TL;DR If Microsoft’s profit motive in Azure aligns with open source, why do
> so many people continue to need to infer sinister motives?_

This isn't the first time Microsoft's profit motives have appeared to allign
with an open technology. This wouldn't be the first time they moved to capture
it, ruining it for everybody, either.

Microsoft has realized that nobody is going to _sign up_ for an unhealthy,
rent-based ecosystem. So, out comes the carrot, with absolutely no contract
with you that they won't replace it with a stick. We're entering an era were
large businesses can treat small businesses like large businesses treat
consumers - that is, no negotiation, no contract garuntees, just take-it-or-
leave-it on slowly worsening terms.

~~~
steego
> Cloud compute is a commodity, even one of the major things sold by internet
> Wal-Mart. Is that really where Microsoft wants to go?

If you think the direction of cloud computing is heading towards
commodification, then it's very clear you don't understand Microsoft's
strategy _or_ Amazon's strategy.

Selling VMs and containers are commodity services that every large cloud
provider must sell so they don't disqualify themselves, but the margins suck
and the lock-in is minimal.

Look at the AWS and Azure catalog. There's a tremendous amount of value added
services that go beyond selling commodity systems and they _are_ selling.

They're selling for one simple reason: Most people don't want to build their
own cloud scalable architectures, they want to solve their problems. If AWS
and Azure can make it easy for an intern to set up auto-scaling databases and
Kafka messaging system, then their manager is more likely to will be willing
to pay a premium of the company's money so they can meet their deadlines.

------
josteink
Translation: They are using it internally and/or are planning to offer it as a
service in Azure.

Which is absolutely fair enough.

~~~
tpxl
Well yeah, it says so in the post[0].

0\. "...developers can use their favorite database as a fully managed service
on Microsoft Azure that will soon include MariaDB"

~~~
pc86
I don't think you need a footnote on a two-sentence post, where one of those
sentences is the footnote.

------
squarefoot
We already know what is going to happen in the long term: the foundation
becomes highly dependent on MS funding and all decisions will be taken with
the sole goal of keeping that money flowing. Should things get worse, someone
eventually will fork the project, rinse repeat.

~~~
onion2k
There were already three platinum sponsors before this (booking.com, Alibaba
and Tencent), so adding a fourth diversifies their funding and makes MariaDB
_less_ reliant on any single source of money. If you're concerned about the
way they're funded then the more sponsors they have the better.

~~~
squarefoot
Thanks, I didn't think about that, it makes sense.

------
owaislone
Could this be seen as an indirect strategic move against Oracle/MySQL?
Conspiracy theories are fun but the truth is much simpler. They are just using
it themselves and giving back. Often providing financial support for an open
source project is cheaper/simpler for companies compared to providing
engineering resources.

------
sctb
Related:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15704269](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15704269)

------
yulapshun
Call me paranoid but I don't trust Microsoft at all.

~~~
sjwright
You're paranoid. The Microsoft of today is hugely different to itself ten
years ago; it has suffered painful lessons in its own arrogance and has
demonstrated its humility with deeds.

I'm not saying you should trust Microsoft implicitly, but I'd put them well
above Oracle (MySQL), Google, Facebook, Samsung or most commodity device OEMs.

~~~
jenscow
> The Microsoft of _today_

What about tomorrow? Their history needs to be remembered.

They play very nicely in areas where they're the underdog, but not when
they're on top where lock-in is rife.

Make use of them, by all means.. but never depend on them - ever. Always have
an exit strategy.

(same goes for most other companies, but Microsoft especially)

~~~
jrs95
Are there any specific examples you could give about where they currently have
a lot of lock-in? As far as I can tell, the worst they get is just as bad as
any other company with a proprietary SaaS product.

~~~
sekh60
Maybe Microsoft Office. I know there is LibreOffice and personally I use it
(or LaTeX), but it seems to have a real stranglehold on a lot of people.

------
qazpot
Currently, they are in Embrace and Extend stage of the plan. Soon, they will
move into the Extinguish stage of the plan.

~~~
Touche
All that would do is extinguish their user base for Azure.

------
cjsuk
Tentacles everywhere.

~~~
christogreeff
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

~~~
cjsuk
They’d damned themselves permanently for a lot of us.

~~~
adventured
How many engineers and executives from 1990-1998 do you suppose are still
working full-time at Microsoft today? I'd place my money on it being a single
digit percentage.

Pre early 1990s, Microsoft had a modest amount of market power and wasn't
infamous for abusive tactics. Post anti-trust years, Microsoft's competitive
abuses contracted to negligible levels by necessity.

So out of ~42 years of existence, they abused their temporary monopoly
position for about ten of those. And you can't let any of that go, even after
two decades. That doesn't seem overly dramatic to you?

~~~
cjsuk
Microsoft were terrible in the 1980s too (I have a Gates signed copy of MS DOS
encyclopaedia here to give you an idea of how far I go back). They abused
enterprise customers all through the 2000's. They screwed people on audits,
certs, all sorts. This is a consistent negative all along.

This isn't a 10 year stretch, it's persistent bad behaviour AND it hasn't
actually got any better. Enterprises are still getting screwed and they're
pretty much steamrolling everything.

You have to be stupid to trust them at this point.

------
joseluisq
MS should pay tribute to Open Source community for the rest of its days. Amen.

------
partycoder
The new Microsoft

* Microsoft and node.js

1\. Microsoft embraces node.js (embrace)

2\. Microsoft forks node (extend) [https://github.com/nodejs/node-
chakracore](https://github.com/nodejs/node-chakracore)

3\. Soon! (extinguish)

\---

* Microsoft and R

1\. Microsoft embraces R

2\. Microsoft forks R. Fully compatible, but interoperability is one-way only.
[https://mran.microsoft.com/open](https://mran.microsoft.com/open)

3\. Soon! (extinguish)

\---

The old Microsoft:

\- Microsoft <3 Apple -> Let's work on Macintosh -> Windows

\- Microsoft <3 IBM -> Let's work on OS/2! -> Windows NT

\- Microsoft <3 Sun -> Let's work on Java -> .NET

\- Microsoft <3 Sybase -> Let's work on Sybase ASE -> SQL Server

~~~
was_boring
Isn't the current CEO against that strategy? I listened to an interview with
him not long ago in which he said the biggest mistake they made was thinking
that the market is winner take all. He instead proposed that they should be
working with other companies because many times they share customers and that
by working together they increase the total market size.

~~~
beavis2
Then why did they drop Mobile?

~~~
mathw
Because it was no longer worth throwing money after. Instead they're working
to make sure Microsoft technologies - their accounts, their email, their
Office products etc. - work well on iOS and Android devices. They're also
working to enable cross-platform mobile development using Microsoft
technologies (i.e. they bought Xamarin), which helps with getting app
developers using (and paying for) Azure backend services because of course
Microsoft provide solid .NET SDKs for Azure services.

I suspect they'll make another effort to break into the mobile device space in
the future, but it probably won't be for a while. Where's the marketplace
opportunity at the moment? At least until they can distance themselves from
the current perception of their mobile experience.

~~~
was_boring
Exactly. It was Ballmer who started the mobile strategy and it was up to
Nadella to salvage it.

Making sure Office, etc., work well on Android and iOS is perfectly in line
with his idea that you can work with competitors to increase revenue for
everyone involved.

Contrast this with Amazon, who believes that it is a winner takes all market,
and they do not have support for their competitor's products and even refuse
to list them in their store.

