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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: 5, Insightful) by RedGreen on Tuesday November 03 2015, @03:51PM
Apparently you missed the embrace and extend part in there while they may give back the changes for now so no extinguish there yet... That is what a lot of people are uncomfortable with that and the outright killing of the *nix method of doing one thing and doing it well not everything and the God damn kitchen sink thrown in for what is supposed to be an init system.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2015, @04:20PM
"Apparently you missed the embrace and extend part"
There is no embrace and extend. The projects that you are angry about were created by RedHat in the first place, and are maintained by RedHat developers. That's a fact. As is the fact that one out of every six lines in the Linux kernel was written by a RedHat employee.
RedHat *is* Linux.
I'm sorry you use a shitty distribution whose developers piggyback off RedHat's contributions. That's nothing to be ashamed of in itself as the list includes profitable organizations, such as Oracle and VMWare. But the decision to include systemd was made by your distribution maintainers, not by RedHat. If systemd is so offensive to you, there's always one of the *BSD's, which by the way, have all of this software in ports, and have managed to work around the systemd requirement.
The list of companies that are FOSS friendly is very, very short. RedHat is on that list, along with iXSystems, Thinkpenguin, and m:tier.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2015, @10:20PM
RedHat *is* Linux.
Oh you poor thing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2015, @11:21PM
By your own admission, RedHat is only 1/6th Linux. Red Hat, like everyone else, is freeloading off the contributions of others. Don't pretend that Red Hat develops all, or even most of the code.