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It looks like Microsoft hasn't reformed as some would like to think, but has moved its embrace, extend, extinguish policy to the mobile platform. In this article from techrights.org , we see a company (responsible for Mono) with strong MS connections take over an open source project and close it.
LAST WEEK we wrote about Xamarin's disturbing takeover of RoboVM [1, 2], which was a threat to Microsoft's monopoly and domination of APIs (especially on the desktop). Xamarin, for the uninitiated, creates proprietary software that strives to spread Microsoft's .NET to mobile (including Android) devices.
It has only been less than a week and now we learn from Abel Avram that "RoboVM Is No Longer Open Source".
"Following RoboVM's acquisition by Xamarin," explains Avram, "the company has raised the price of their offering and has closed the source code."
Discussion of a fork is in the works:
It has gotten so bad that RoboVM might be forked. To quote Avram, "some developers consider that closing down the source code has to do with Xamarin's acquisition. And some are discussing forking the project, perhaps starting with the sources v. 1.8 which will be pushed to GitHub this week, according to Zechner. It remains to see how successful they are in their endeavor considering that RoboVM is not a trivial piece of software."
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2015, @02:47PM
For like anything?
(Score: 2) by AnonymousCowardNoMore on Tuesday November 03 2015, @05:27PM
Management invariably get convinced to mandate "industry standard" software by the guy who needs it for his resume.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2015, @09:51PM
Companies that are married to SQL Server, Visual Studio, or Excel are good candidates. Lots in the financial industry.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2015, @10:15PM
My father developed a closed-source Windows application in Delphi in about 1996 that he still continues to develop and is deployed in several commercial environments. He uses an open source database backend. There was some specialist hardware (not rocket science stuff, just not consumer mass market) that needed to be controlled. Very simple stuff with about two commands (up and down). The only interface to this hardware was through 400MB of .NET libraries. Yes, that's right, 400MB, to make something go up and down. He had to spend a long time researching how to speak to the .NET garbage from his native-code Delphi. It works, but this library is about 100 times the size of his application. I got off the Windows treadmill in 1996 and never looked back.