Why Microsoft is turning into an open-source company

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    Why Microsoft is turning into an open-source company

    Why Microsoft is turning into an open-source company


    Posted: 09 Jun 2016

    Microsoft now has its own BSD Unix operating system, supports Ubuntu as a subsystem on Windows 10, and recently open-sourced the Xamarin software development kit. This is not Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer's Microsoft.

    I know it's very, very hard for some of you to believe it, but Microsoft really and truly is well on its way to becoming an open-source company.

    Let's go through the list shall we? Microsoft just released its own version of FreeBSD for Azure. So what, you say? Who uses FreeBSD? Well, you've probably heard of a little company called Netflix. Then, there's Citrix, Array Networks, Gemalto. and Netgate, which already have virtual appliances on the Azure Marketplace.

    Earlier this year, Microsoft and Canonical partnered up to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10. Why? Because it makes it easier for developers to write programs for Ubuntu on the Azure cloud. You know, Ubuntu, the favorite Linux of Azure users.

    Before that, Microsoft bought Xamarin, the multi-platform mobile app development program. Xamarin always had a lot of open source in it, but Microsoft has pushed it even further that way by open-sourcing its Xamarin software development kit (SDK), runtime, libraries and command line tools. The Redmond crew's reason for doing this? Building apps twice is once too often. This move makes C#, Microsoft hopes, competitive with Objective-C, Swift, or Java in the mobile space.

    These are only Microsoft's most recent moves...


    Read more: Why Microsoft is turning into an open-source company | ZDNet
    Brink's Avatar Posted By: Brink
    09 Jun 2016


  1. Posts : 28
    Windows 11 22000.194
       #1

    Interesting observations, not original but of course that is hard to get these days. Microsoft is ran by engineers and people with strong engineering backgrounds. That means that a lot of what the "old stuffy" Microsoft wanted to achieve by billing the hell out of companies is now being achieved in a more modern, may I even say a different way. I have dealt with Microsoft as a company for over 20 years, as a customer, as an enthusiast and I know how the company is shifting. I frequent many of their events and I am also frequently reading many of the blogs and community news. I like how the company is shifting into providing services, let's face it, techies are not good at selling stuff. Microsoft recently gave up on Lumia, not sure where they are going with the hardware platform on the Surface lines. Hardware has never been a strong for them, although mice and keyboards were once highly recommended. The new Microsoft still has some of it's old glamour and "stuffiness" but it is slowly moving away. We all can argue that the base code of Microsoft is actually a form of Unix and that the more modern Unix operating systems are more about kernel optimizations and adjustment to the hardware layer for containers and sand boxing. Together with the BI and SQL engines it is now providing a different, better fitting to the future, platform. Don't get me wrong, running their services is still very expensive if you know we spend millions in licensing and services. It is all about allowing integration because without there is only an island and they were on this island until 2014 when things started to shift. Customers, like us, are very sceptical as we do not always understand the why and the how. I run, today, just as easy with Windows 10 as I do with Linux and all of them utilize the services offered by Microsoft. Our developers can easily integrate their code and use object based storage which runs on a specific version of RedHat Linux (EMC ATMOS). I like the "new" Microsoft although I am of the old club that keeps a close eye on my wireshark....
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  2. Posts : 5,452
    windows 10 Pro ver 21H2 build 19044.1348
       #2

    I am not techie by any stretch of imagination.

    I am interested in this sentence :
    "Microsoft now has its own BSD Unix operating system, supports Ubuntu as a subsystem on Windows 10"

    Would someone explain to me in layman terms what does that mean ?
      My Computer


  3. Posts : 11,247
    Windows / Linux : Arch Linux
       #3

    Hi there

    as an Engineer - I know I'd be hopeless at selling - I'd probably fail selling Water to people dying of thirst in the desert -- but Good Salespeople are vital to ANY organisation and it's good to see Ms improving on this front - Salespeople who LIKE what their company is producing and believe in the products they are selling.

    Of course Salespeople need a basic understanding of the products but their job especially in large organisations is to get the client / customer interested and then put more technical people together when necessary.

    Good move from Ms.

    If you look at various very decent rich corporations such as RED HAT, SUSE, CANONICAL etc - they all supply a lot of support for FREE plus copies of their enterprise OS'es as open source as well.

    I'm a big fan of CENTOS for example - it's a virtual total clone of REDHAT's Enterprise server Linux - Redhat supply and assist this OS for individual users. RED HAT servers themselves are widely used commercially. Open suse is done by SUSE and UBUNTU largely done by Canonical.

    Open source benefits everybody from individuals to large corporations.
    Of course for commercial users you need a robust scalable system, continuity and support if things break --that's what they charge for and there's a sensible market for that type of stuff.

    Ms going more open source won't diminish the value of the company - it will probably make it MORE valuable. These days the major assets in a company are PEOPLE.

    You can't run the entire planet with large companies having zero assets -- UBER (taxi firm with no taxes, AIRBNB hotels etc without a single hotel, Amazon without a single store etc etc !!! - If any of these multi-billion dollar corporations were to go belly up - there's ZERO assets any investors could get back as there aren't any !!!).

    BTW @davidhk the remark about UBUNTU on windows was that in the latest versions of the insider release you can run a BASH shell based on the UBUNTU version. This means in theory some Linux executables will run directly on windows - I haven't tried this out yet but will get round to it.


    Cheers
    jimbo
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  4. Posts : 22,740
    Windows 10 Home x64
       #4

    Given that the trend is toward open source it's no shock that MS is heading this way as well and for the better. It might make it easy to port some Linux apps/software to Windows and there's nothing but good with that.

    I can't wait to see what occurs.
      My Computer


  5. Posts : 7,254
    Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
       #5

    I've been having fun with their bash addon and am looking forward to what they do next.
      My Computers


  6. Posts : 406
    Windows 10 21H1
       #6

    As a user, I'm not sure I care whether the source is open or not. I care about having a finished, working product. That's why I don't like Windows 10 with its constant mandatory updates. One of the systems I actually use is an old laptop running XP. It has not been updated for a very long time, but it works. I don't need any updates there. My main OS is Windows 7. I do run Windows update once every couple of months, get the security patches, but there are lots of updates I reject (like all those related to Windows 10 or some strange updates related to things I've never heard of before, a manat comes to mind). The system itself is stable and it's features are unchanged for a long time. And that's what I want, I don't really want any new features.

    Sometimes there is just no comparison between the open source software and commercial products. The example everyone is tired of is the Office. But then there is Acrobat, Mathematica, Photoshop, etc.

    Now I've been using bash on Windows for more than a decade (through Cygwin). How's that news?
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  7. Posts : 22,740
    Windows 10 Home x64
       #7

    unifex said:
    As a user, I'm not sure I care whether the source is open or not. I care about having a finished, working product. That's why I don't like Windows 10 with its constant mandatory updates. One of the systems I actually use is an old laptop running XP. It has not been updated for a very long time, but it works. I don't need any updates there. My main OS is Windows 7. I do run Windows update once every couple of months, get the security patches, but there are lots of updates I reject (like all those related to Windows 10 or some strange updates related to things I've never heard of before, a manat comes to mind). The system itself is stable and it's features are unchanged for a long time. And that's what I want, I don't really want any new features.

    Sometimes there is just no comparison between the open source software and commercial products. The example everyone is tired of is the Office. But then there is Acrobat, Mathematica, Photoshop, etc.

    Now I've been using bash on Windows for more than a decade (through Cygwin). How's that news?
    Without updates you don't get bugs patched and new features. It's not like MS or any OS maker can come up with a totally bug free product. With Windows having way in excess of 50 million lines of code it's impossible.

    As for bash.. the inclusion of it from MS and not having to use Cywing is a big deal to many.
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  8. Posts : 579
    Windows 10
       #8

    From my point of view, the incorporation Linux and all that story around "Security" has to do with that in EU, a lot Local Administration are deciding to move away from Windows because of the Costs and because of the "Security", which has to do with the "Virus" vulnerabilty of Windows and not the "User Locking" Security. I think MS did miss understood what is going on and just went on making the things more dificult for themselves and for the Users too. With that "intrusion" like "Spyware" on User´s, the "Blocking" the user Activity, will make more easy the people move away from Windows. Not that Linux is something good, maybe technically, but for "normal" users is something not usable, then most of the usage you have to have good knownledge of Internals, Compilers and so on, besides the Documentation, there is a huge, but poor written, to have a quick information about how to do something, you have to look in a mountain of pages over pages of empty "How to". That move of MS, is sure wrong, they did not real understand what is going on, they did the wrong way.
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  9. Posts : 1,811
    W7 Ultimate SP1 (64 bit), LM 19.2 MATE (64 bit), W10 Home 1703 (64 bit), W10 Pro 1703 (64 bit) VM
       #9

    BunnyJ said:
    Given that the trend is toward open source it's no shock that MS is heading this way as well and for the better. It might make it easy to port some Linux apps/software to Windows and there's nothing but good with that.

    I can't wait to see what occurs.
    Windows to Linux would be more useful.

    Most of the free software I have installed was ported from Linux to Windows.
      My Computer


 

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