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Pretty remarkable given Microsoft's approach to open source in the 1990s that they're now using a service built around Linus's bespoke open source version control system to allow people to suggest changes to their documentation.
Edit: the downvoters clearly weren't in the industry in the 80's and 90's and haven't dealt with them in the enterprise / volume licensing department recently. Comparing the two, they're even more ruthless, unfair and incompetent than ever and will screw you as hard as they can once you're locked in.
This stuff gets you through the door, as does BizSpark etc, then you're not a friend but a cow for the milking via VL, audits and licensing changes.
I speak from experience working for 4 paid up gold partners over the last decade and then dealing with them in a corporate capacity back to '95. Every game ends the same.
Edit 2: appears you can't tell the truth about Microsoft these days in the same fashion you couldn't tell the truth about Apple about 3-4 years ago...
Either that or the downvoters are willing to consider the possibility that 25 years -- not to mention a radically different market position -- makes a difference. The Microsoft of 2014 is not the Microsoft of 1989.
...in the same fashion you couldn't tell the truth about Apple about 3-4 years ago...
Yeah, if only there had been lots of people highly critical of Apple in 2011. Whatever happened to that Android thing, anyway?
Having been there, as I stated in '95 and '14 (19 years difference), the story is exactly the same.
Only the marketing and front end has changed. The cogs that drive the machine and the revenue mill have the same components and structure.
The market position is pretty much the same. Bar some new consumer markets, they have almost total domination of the business and enterprise sector. They even made a big dent in the entertainment sector with XBox with the piles of cash and losses they incurred and came out on top.
If you were around here back then, you'd know that it was pretty common for anti-Apple things to get down-voted quickly on HN. I think the pro-Apple / pro-Android voting has pretty much gone away since the comment scores have been hidden.
>If you were around here back then, you'd know that it was pretty common for anti-Apple things to get down-voted quickly on HN.
Because most were trite-BS? Like the same advice market pundits used to give Apple that in hindsight was always wrong, like that "Zune will crash them", or they "need to make a netbook NOW" (in 2010), "stuff is overpriced" etc etc. Heck, people were even championing the Dell Ditty in forums...
Now, if you have something serious to say about Apple, e.g regarding their technology, or the consequences of having a walled garden approach (and say it without assuming that everybody in a discussion "ought" to be against a walled garden approach), then I don't think there would be a problem. We have had serious discussions critisizing Apple in HN for ages.
You don't celebrate a major tech company catching up 5 years late. You kick in the CEO's office, light his desk on fire and make pointed enquiries into how much money they wasted farting around on Windows 8 and other failed ventures.
Releasing proprietary software behind a walled garden is not exactly a celebratory-worthy achievement, even Oracle and Apple can obtain this kind of achievement.
So the only celebratory-worthy achievements are about releases of "libre" stuff?
Because, I'd say, if the software is good, and fits its users needs, then "releasing proprietary software behind a walled garden" is totally celebratory-worthy too.
Sometimes I'd rather buy and use something costing money, from a vendor that only sells it himself, than some free stuff offered that I think its crap.
A turd of a software, even if libre, is still a turd. I won't celebrate it just because someone offers it for free.
I'm not talking in general: there's excellent libre software, and excellent proprietary software too.
But there's specific libre software that's just plain crap for most use cases compared to its proprietary alternative (e.g consider a high-end DAW and the libre DAWs. Or a high-end NLE and the libre NLEs).
And some other libre software is mighty fine in itself, but lacks other characteristics that some proprietary software has (from 24/7 paid on the phone support, to quality documentation, to working with your preffered OS or your other infrastructure, etc). So some people can make good use of it, while for others it's not suitable.
yah sure. If free market was a zero sum game it would be pointless. However, I see absolutely NO reason I should applaud them for it, not when then are people making real sacrifices for open source software.
I was there in past decades. We're better off than ever, both with regard to accessibility and pricing of proprietary software and with regard to abundance of libre software.
Yep, you could also say Apple's CloudKit is another proprietary NoSQL solution for the purpose of providing more value and lock-in into the iOS ecosystem. But at least CloudKit has generous free usage up to:
Nothing remotely like it, in terms of power, range, degree of market control, or willingness to be commercially evil. IBM used to be more than twice as big as every other IT company put together, and in some years, made more than 100% of the industry's profit.
Even today, after disposing of numerous divisions, it's still a $100bn company, ie still larger than Microsoft. (So you pay IBM more than you pay MS every year, and you always have done.)
However, it is true that Microsoft is the IBM of PC software, just as Google is the IBM of the web, Intel is the IBM of processors, Facebook is the IBM of social networking, Cisco is the IBM of routers, Oracle is trying to be the IBM of server software, Apple is the IBM of hipster status symbols... Well, you get the idea.
IBM used to be the IBM of everything in IT, and started getting into other areas (telephone switches, copiers, cash machines etc) before the wheels started to come off.
Today, Google is a lot more powerful than Microsoft, much scarier, and much more ambitious in IBM-like ways (self-driving cars, robots, superbrains etc).
IBM still does cool things that are completely beyond Microsoft's grasp. The breadth of their research is still very impressive - from basic physics all the way to some of the most functional AI around. When was last time Microsoft did a product that could beat a human on Jeopardy?
If they want to be the next IBM, they have a lot of work ahead of them.
Actually, there is one way that Microsoft did become the new IBM. Long ago, I went to a talk by a senior IBMer and he said "We used to be the Evil Empire. Somebody else has that job now."
A comment from someone on the team further up the page mentions that ElasticSearch is 'leveraged' inside the service, so I'd say there should be some mention of the Apache 2 license to represent the use of ElasticSearch.
This topic and the parents linked article is about MS's new DocumentDB as some example of how "remarkable"
> Microsoft's approach to open source
has become... when they're only using GitHub as a free-hosting CMS provider for docs.
I can't see how releasing a proprietary "DocumentDB" on a Microsoft-only Azure cloud is a glowing endorsement or valued contribution to OSS. Despite what their marketing messaging says about how "Open and approachable" it is: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/documentdb/archive/2014/08/22/introd...
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Pretty remarkable given Microsoft's approach to open source in the 1990s that they're now using a service built around Linus's bespoke open source version control system to allow people to suggest changes to their documentation.