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from the temperature-in-Hell-plummets dept.
NEW YORK—At its first Connect event in 2013, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2013. In 2014, it announced the open sourcing of .NET, and in 2015, the open sourcing of the Visual Studio Code editor. The big news this year? Microsoft, the company that has built an empire on proprietary, closed-source software, has joined the Linux Foundation as a platinum member.
Microsoft has been a big contributor to Linux over the past several years, primarily focusing on improving support for its Hyper-V hypervisor. Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, said that in becoming a member, "Microsoft is better able to collaborate with the open source community to deliver transformative mobile and cloud experiences to more people."
Microsoft's increasing commitment to open source has been met with some cynicism (and please, beloved commenters—try to refrain from "embrace, extend, extinguish" posts, as the very concept is preposterous when it comes to Linux), but with projects such as Visual Studio Code and .NET, is starting to win hearts and minds. The company does appear to be a reasonably good open source citizen, not merely publishing source code repositories that are occasionally updated from an internal development branch, but actually performing development in the open, accepting community contributions, and seeking community consensus when it comes to new features.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by meustrus on Thursday November 17 2016, @03:30PM
As somebody who hasn't managed a Linux system since before systemd, I was naturally skeptical of all the anti-hype around it. If more people had taken the time to explain it as you have, perhaps I would have learned sooner what is the big problem. But I had to ask directly and have it explained to me, because none of the naysayers were interested in explaining their position.
Now systemd is law, and its opponents live on the fringes. It has taken over Linux mainly because its opponents were too silent, too inarticulate, too ineffective. Its supporters, meanwhile, were vocal, articulate, and offering real benefits.
Microsoft will do the same. .NET is a great system; C# is superior to Java as a language in nearly every way. GUI-focused programs are more discoverable and intuitive than the CLI. And their full stack is comprehensive and relatively well integrated. Microsoft has real benefits, and they are vocal and articulate about it. Its opponents, meanwhile, come across as whiny, entitled, basement-dwelling neckbeards.
Don't make the same mistake that allowed systemd to take over. Be vocal and articulate. Explain the benefits of redundancy, of non-standard working environments, of the wide range of technologies that form the different Linux distros. It will always be imperfect. We must fight for our freedom to be imperfect.
Without opposition, we are vulnerable. They will centralize and standardize Linus to benefit their non-free tools. We must oppose them vigorously. Or we have already lost.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Thursday November 17 2016, @08:11PM
I didn't even *hear* about systemd until it was rushed through the approval process in Debian, in a manner which some have said violated the canons. (Others have said the approval process was correct.) So I didn't hear about it until it was a done deal.
OTOH, while I'm a programmer, I'm not a systems programmer. Probably if I'd been paying attention I'd have heard about it. But clearly many Debian developers were surprised at the speed of the approval process, whether it followed the guidelines or not. By the time anyone outside the system developer heard of it the decision had been made and approved. A few developers were upset enough to fork the distribution, (see Devuan), but they don't have much support, and a few months after that decision I heard that KDE had decided that a future version would depend on systemd for operation...which I also didn't hear about ahead of time.
So the developers maintaining the systemd free distributions will need to maintain not only their forked system, but their own window manager. (Gnome went to systemd even before Debian did, and xfce depends on Gnome libraries. I'm not sure about LXDE or LXQt. Cinnamon depends on gtk3 libs, but Mate uses, I believe, gtk2 libs. At least it used to.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.