
Microsoft Is Now 'Open by Default', Says Xamarin Founder Miguel de Icaza - nedsma
http://www.forbes.com/sites/adrianbridgwater/2016/11/08/microsoft-is-now-open-by-default-says-xamarin-founder-miguel-de-icaza/#5ed2c7b520e7
======
blub
Microsoft embraces open source because they found out that there are other
methods to monetize and lock in customers. As a bonus people seem to like you
when you give them stuff for free, even with the catch of privacy invasion.

In other words, they stopped copying Apple and switched their sights on
Google.

The stuff that matters stays closed source. Infrastructure, tooling are
published because they bring massive amounts of goodwill and developer
mindshare while hindering potential competitors that now have to battle with a
free offering.

Frankly I preferred the old Microsoft which wanted your money, not the new one
that (also!) wants your data.

~~~
nixos
They're not copying Google. They're taking the worst of both worlds.

Windows isn't free. It just happens to come with the cost of your PC, but the
PC manufacturer pays for it (and passes the cost to you).

They just noticed that no one upgrades Windows (and why should they? When was
the last time you were excited about a windows release? XP? 95? 3.1? Maybe 7
if you're coming from Vista?)

~~~
baldfat
I have been using Linux for 13 years.

I fail to see the worst?

I personally was VERY excited for Windows 7 and it proved to be a very solid
edition. VERY VERY excited for Ubuntu bash in Windows 10 in the preview
edition.

> They're not copying Google. They're taking the worst of both worlds.

Google's model is advertising

Apple's is Hardware

Microsoft is selling services more.

I find it really awesome that Microsoft has really turned into a company I
have a positive view of and glad that Steve Balmer is gone.

~~~
nixos
> Microsoft is selling services more.

Maybe, but what I'm saying is that:

Apple costs, is closed-source but (somewhat) cares about privacy. Google is
free, (somewhat) open-source but actively doesn't care about privacy. Windows
costs, closed source and actively doesn't care about privacy.

In other words, with Google you're not the customer, you're the product. With
Microsoft you're the product and you have to pay for the privilege to be a
product.

~~~
baldfat
I have a strong negative bias vs Apple and everything they make.

One thing is Apple is not a closed source company. Though it is a mixed bag
they have made some good contributions to the Open Sources world. Though their
Walled Garden is YUGE

[https://developer.apple.com/opensource/](https://developer.apple.com/opensource/)

* Bonjour

* Webkit

* Swift

~~~
rubber_duck
I think they are the biggest driver behind LLVM projects (LLVM/Clang/LLDB) as
well which is a huge value to OSS too.

------
aikah
My Windows license doesn't feel "Open by Default", nor SQL Server license
audits ... I like the guy, he created Mono, Xamarin, Gtk and co. But only a
tiny subset of MS products like the .NET ecosystem are open.

~~~
wmccullough
Obviously they are talking about projects going forward. The article makes
that pretty clear.

"Microsoft is now open by default and you actually have to make a case on a
team/peer review level if you feel something needs to be closed,” said de
Icaza."

Should they stay guilty forever for the things done in the previous regime?

~~~
michaelmrose
With decades of bad behavior I don't understand why they would ever be
trusted. Its not like Gates is dead and buried and there certainly is
continuity between the old regime and new.

~~~
pm90
I don't think that's a fair assessment; I'm going to judge them on their
present actions rather than their past behavior, when the market, leadership
etc. were all different. They seem to be trying to adapt to the new market
reality where open source and dev friendly tools/software creates goodwill and
promotes adoption.

------
sigzero
“There was no story at Microsoft for other platforms back in the day. But the
world is full of heterogeneous connections now and I think Scott Guthrie [now
Microsoft’s lead on Azure cloud platform] helped drive a lot of the openness.
Microsoft is now open by default and you actually have to make a case on a
team/peer review level if you feel something needs to be closed,” said de
Icaza."

So it seems "new" projects not older ones are "open by default" with a caveat.
That's still a lot better than they used to be.

------
thr0waway1239
I have started thinking that those who now work at Microsoft are blind to its
flaws by default.

The classic example being Windows 10 - anyone who is actually not blind to the
fiasco of the automatic upgrades/issues around further updates [1] notices
that there is a certain brutality in the way the whole thing was carried out.
After installing the unwanted Windows 10 OS on probably hundreds of millions
of perfectly fine Windows 7 machines, they claimed that some 300+ million
computers were now running on Windows 10. [2] My guess is, less than half of
those were actually desired by the end users. And a few more iterations of
these botched auto-updates, and "happy Windows 10 user" is going to become an
oxymoron.

This episode went so much against the spirit of open source that these claims
seem a little comical. It is probably true that MS had to make these choices
to maximize shareholder profit, but lets just take it down a notch on the
supposed openness.

To those who wish to still make this 'open by default' claim, I welcome MS to
open source Windows 7 and Windows XP and see if they can sustain the same kind
of growth after that point [3]

[1]
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=windows%2010%20update&sort=byP...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=windows%2010%20update&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

[2] [http://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-300-million-
active-d...](http://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-300-million-active-
devices-are-now-running-windows-10)

[3] [http://www.computerworld.com/article/3054528/microsoft-
windo...](http://www.computerworld.com/article/3054528/microsoft-
windows/zombie-os-windows-xp-still-powers-181m-pcs-two-years-after-support-
ends.html)

~~~
ocdtrekkie
From what I've seen, Microsoft employees have a keen understanding of both the
issues with Microsoft as well as it's past. If you are seeing complete radio
silence on something, like we see with both telemetry and automatic updates,
that's when you know there's a corporate policy that's been laid down that
nobody's going to risk their job to speak out against. You can see this sort
of thing with a lot of companies, not just Microsoft.

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SomeHacker44
Somewhat OT: With the ad interstitial, and now an auto-play video with audio
ad on the main article, and the article split into three pages... I just can't
bring myself to read Forbes content online anymore. Even if I'm interested in
what de Icaza has to say.

~~~
megous
Forbes looks like quote of the day website that's progressively enhanced to a
online newspaper if you care about enabling JavaScript.

Progressive enhancement was nice while it lasted.

------
whoopdedo
The exFAT patent is royalty-free now?

~~~
anonbanker
I wonder what kind of sit-down peer review was done to keep it closed?

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m-p-3
And thus a new cycle of Embrace, Extend and Extinguish is happening.

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makecheck
Well, nothing like having to “log in” to a product to make it feel “open”, or
have it randomly prioritize verifying its own license for 60 seconds over
letting you launch and begin your work.

------
st3v3r
Cool. Where's the Windows and Office source? I've got some changes I'd like to
contribute.

------
executesorder66
They don't even have a closed source MS Office for Linux.

~~~
adrianlmm
Not even Google is investing in Desktop Linux, where is that official Google
Drive client?

~~~
benologist
Google builds two of the perhaps most popular desktop linux's ... Android and
Chrome OS.

~~~
adrianlmm
And MS has the Linux Subsystem in Windows to run Ubuntu Linux binaries and is
open source, so?

~~~
pritambaral
The Linux Subsystem in Windows is NOT open source. So what if they can run
Ubuntu? So can VirtualBox!

And yes, I know the difference between virtualization and syscall emulation.

~~~
adrianlmm
You are right, is not open source (yet), but you still can tun Linux binaries.

~~~
pritambaral
> (yet)

You seem hopeful of a thing few people are hopeful of.

> you still can tun[sic] Linux binaries

That does not make a platform open.

Also note that you can't run all Linux binaries. In this respect, my original
comparison with VirtualBox gets even better, since with VirtualBox I can run
whatever edition of Linux I want, with graphics and total, absolute control,
and a faster filesystem.

------
ergo14
Did MS stop suing linux users already?

------
leandrod
De Icaza is now ‘gullible by default’, says Universe.

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snippet22
Who wants to use Windows? So now they are just repackaging open free software
like npm and angular 2... Oh great... Again who wants to use Windows? Azure
you can't even have it use anything that touches other servers without costing
you. I think their focus on their base is what is hurting them. Sure they
gained a little with azure but as tech people know, thatll be out if date if
not already. Cause why learn how is all connected right?

~~~
moron4hire
_I_ want to use Windows. No other OS has put the time and effort into ensuring
stable, cutting edge support for the 3D graphics systems I need for my work.

Windows is still 90% of the PC market. If only 10% of those users are
developers, that means there are more Windows developers than all macOS
_users_ combined. There are a lot of us out here, and I think we're starting
to get fed up with being treated like we don't exist, just because of the
shame that gets lumped on us from a small cohort of other developers.

~~~
simonh
This is a fair point actually. I switched to the Mac a decade ago, but Mac
hardware free-rides off the PC hardware market all the time. If we're honest,
so does Linux. If Microsoft hadn't supported and grown the PC hardware
industry for decades the whole desktop ecosystem would be a lot poorer.

Personally I'm very happy with the hardware options available to me on the
Mac, but there's a whole world of hardware options over there in PC land I'll
never take advantage of. Conversely Linux graphics card driver support is
still woeful, but that's really not Microsoft's problem and if Linux didn't
have the PC platform to run on it's hardware costs would be much higher. What
would be the alternative, Sun-style workstations? It's not that Microsoft did
this on purpose, but it's still a fact.

~~~
pmontra
With no MicroSoft the PC industry would be as fragmented as it was in the 80s,
with many operating systems and single vendor hardware/sw platforms running on
different chipsets. We are down to Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android and iOS now,
on either ARM or x86. Everything else is very minor.

However network effects would have given to another company the position that
MicroSoft enjoyed for some 30 years. It could have been a slower growth or a
faster downfall, but somebody would have been there. Not Apple because they
are interested only in selling their own hardware. Probably some company out
of nowhere, not necessarily on a x86 chip. Then everybody would have started
building drivers for the OS of that company and Linux and MacOS would be
running on the preferred chip of that OS.

Maybe in an alternate reality Visicalc built their own OS to run their
spreasheet on a large screen (by the time standards) 8086 computer and replace
MSDOS and Microsoft as the OS and sw company of choice. We'd be talking about
VisiOffice and Vindows now :-)

~~~
rbanffy
> with many operating systems and single vendor hardware/sw platforms running
> on different chipsets.

We could have gone the slightly-less-compatible route with CP/M-86. Network
effects would make the industry gravitate towards a standard platform, but not
necessarily a company.

I remember tons of GUI software running on proprietary Unixes on vastly
different architectures, all written aiming POSIX compatibility and an X
graphics environment.

~~~
pmontra
I remember them, but they cost a little fortune (both hw and sw). They were
still popular in the 90s but the first cheap and good enough alternative
started to make a real dent into their professional market. It was Windows 3.1
and 80486 in 1992. But don't forget Autocad in the 80s.

Yes, CP/M-86 could have played to role of MSDOS but people really needed to
buy a box with a floppy disk to install from or a preinstalled OS on their new
PC. MS did that right.

~~~
rbanffy
A 386 was a reasonable Unix host at the time. I first experienced Unix on a
68020 box attached to dozens of terminals. There were a couple Unix like OSs
that were relatively inexpensive but I don't remember any that had a GUI.

All that is not very relevant. Had Microsoft never existed, it'd have been an
ecosystem too different to make any valid prediction. We'll have to eventually
restore the universe and run a different path to see.

