Yeah, but Microsoft also did a two steps forward and three steps back there. Things like shoving product ads onto the lock screen and preinstalling Candy Crush Soda Saga cost them more goodwill than any developer-facing effort earned them.
This one especially hurt only people who are inside Windows ecosystem. For people like me Microsoft is nice author of one product. I'm talking about VS Code.
Increasingly more of VSCode isn't open source. First-party Microsoft language extensions have been locking features up for quite some time now, and whenever that happens the license also prohibits running it on any VSCode fork.
Microsoft’s “core DNA” is still there firmly, though.
They successfully weaponized open source by giving something for free and clawing back step by step (i.e. closing open source VSCode plugins), and leaving parts which does drowns competitors most effectively open.
Also they act like their open source code is “Free”. They firmly control it, yet act like they don’t.
Microsoft’s image didn’t improve a bit in my eyes.
> Also they act like their open source code is “Free”. They firmly control it, yet act like they don’t.
They are responsive to the community and merge community PRs. That's already more "open" than, say, SQLite.
Sure, they don't give away merge rights and keep exclusive control over the upstream copy. But how many "open" projects have a second maintainer at all? I mean, more than one person (the original author) with merge access.
The code is free. You can always fork it and use it however you like. That's always been the deal you get with open source.
Sure, it's nice when the upstream maintainers always do only the things you like, and you never need to fork. But that's a separate quality, unrelated to the code itself being "free" or "open".
> They successfully weaponized open source by giving something for free and clawing back step by step (i.e. closing open source VSCode plugins), and leaving parts which does drowns competitors most effectively open.
And that's why people should be pushing for Free Software, rather than Open Source.
20 years in the game, and I ended up agreeing with steve ballmer: open source is cancer.
Look at how bad it went for ElasticSearch and Redis, and then look how well it's going for Grafana (whose software is Free Software - besides being just great).
This is so true that Redis did not go back to being "open source", it became Free Software (AGPL).
Pylance started as open source and moved to a closed source model. Relevant discussion is at [0].
Then, they closed the .NET ecosystem [1]. This is a bit more complex and convoluted. Closed source debuggers, changing plug-in licenses, removing nice features from open source .NET runtime, etc.
