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: 2) by HiThere on Thursday November 17 2016, @07:47PM
I think you are overly optimistic. After all, IBM still throws its weight around quite successfully, just not an unthinkingly as it used to. And mainframes are quite rare compared to desktops...though, of course, lots more expensive. If analogies play out, MS will still be throwing its weight around 6 decades from now, just a bit more carefully.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 17 2016, @10:44PM
I don't see how that contradicts my point. I mean, duh, of course MS is still a gorilla.
They just aren't big enough to make the extend, extinguish part work anymore.
Nor have they been big enough to make that work for well over a decade.
If you think that's wrong, name one thing they've embraced, extended and extinguished in the last decade?
And no, Nokia doesn't count, a buy-out is not the same because they didn't fill the niche left behind, they lost the market to apple and google.