Comment by madmax96 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by madmax96 | Hacker News Reader

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Easy: embrace, extend, and extinguish.

If Microsoft behaves as they have done in the past, this is what will happen:

1. Make Node run on top of Chakra [x]

2. Give Chakra non-standard features and sell communities on them while pointing out to dissenters that the extensions are open source []

3. Gradually allow open source work on the product to die and commercialize it []

Microsoft has lost a lot of people's trust. My grandfather used to tell me that trust is hard to earn and easy to lose. Once trust is lost, it's even tougher to earn back. It's going to take some convincing on their end if they want developers to trust them. It doesn't __matter__ if they appear to act more ethically than their competitors, that's not how trust works, and it won't convince a lot of people that have watched Microsoft for a while that they've suddenly changed their ways.

EDIT: funny this is being downvoted considering eee was an actual strategy Microsoft has historically employed according to the US Justice Department. This isn't even conspiracy theory stuff -- this is real life. Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it.

This makes no sense at all when Chakra core is open source.

If MS creates a closed source branch, then the most likely result will be for someone to fork the ChakraCore code and continue NodeJS dev based on the open source fork.

Being "open source" is meaningless if there isn't a community actively building the software and no one understands (or very few) understand the code outside the organization.

Open source is luring developers into a false sense of security -- it's possible to implement features that could not be ported easily into competitor's products and have no formal specification provided anywhere. Even if they have a specification, there is no guarantee that the specification will remain up-to-date as time progresses.

Also, I even said:

    > while pointing out to dissenters that the extensions 
    > are open source

Open source doesn't mean anything.

I simply cannot foresee a scenario where the Node community is active enough to put in the effort to make Node work with ChakraCore, anode continues to remain popular and widely used, but after adopting ChakraCore the community does down to the point where they are incapable of replacing ChakraCore if MS turns hostile.

In addition, if ChakraCore is adopted, it's almost certain there will be a major fork that continues running on V8. The most likely scenario will be that Node will continue to run both in parallel, and soon enough the JS engine bindings will be abstracted enough that it may even become a bring your own JS Engine type software.

I'm not concerned about Node on Chakra necessarily -- its developers are probably smart enough to avoid this issue; I'm concerned about applications running on Node on Chakra. Unless you avoid using __any__ non-standard behavior, Microsoft owns you.

Using Chakra is risky. There is a very real possibility that Microsoft will make developers regret trusting them. The only possible payoff is that maybe you need one less app instance. Maybe.

It's foolish to put you, your codebase, and your organization at risk for this.

Why can't you say the same for v8?

Because Google is a company of unceasing virtue and "Don't be evil?"

Or perhaps because many people have been conditioned to dislike anything Microsoft does without actually analyzing it's impact or relevance. Certainly it seems like there aren't many rational facts to thia person's argument.

I very much agree that "non-standard behavior" in an open source product exists that could be directly replicated. One of the major benefits of open source licensing is to hedge against that behavior.

So your counter-argument is this:

    > Or perhaps because many people have been conditioned to 
    > dislike anything Microsoft does without actually 
    > analyzing it's impact or relevance.


    > Certainly it seems like there aren't many rational facts 
    > to thia person's argument.

I could say the same thing about this comment.

So tell me, why is it bad for the industry? Why wasn't it bad when V8 came out and enabled node?

Why is there a different standard you apply to Microsoft's open source efforts? Please, tell me.

    > why is it bad for the industry?

I already explained how Microsoft has a history of violating people's trusts, and how an investment in Microsoft's technologies is therefore risky.

    >  Why wasn't it bad when V8 came out and enabled node?

This is off-topic: you don't know my opinion of V8 or Google. My opinion on V8, good or bad, also does not change the validity of my criticisms.

    > Why is there a different standard you apply to 
    > Microsoft's open source efforts?

You don't know me personally, so it's presumptive of you to assume I'm applying a standard unevenly.

You have done nothing to address the criticisms of Microsoft, instead you have resorted to cheap red herrings -- a tell-tale sign of a lost argument. Until you decide to actually provide an argument of substance against what I've said, rather than arrogant name-calling and presumptive assumptions regarding my standards for open source, this conversation cannot serve any constructive purpose.

Corporations are not people. Holding grudges against them as if they are people and not a social construct that changes over time makes 0 sense.

They have new management that is doing a lot of great things. The number of bad things they do is going down. Many of their products are genuinely good now. They're oing out of their way to improve their support for the broader developer ecosystem.

At this point, I "like" them a lot more than I like Apple or any of the hapless desktop Linux Distribution corporate governance bodies.

That's not related to the conversation at hand. Who said I like using v8?

Who asked what you like? That's irrelevant.

You talk about "organizational risk"as if we don't live in a post-Sun world where Oracle genuinely believes APIs are patentable and the number of successful major open source projects without corporate sponsorships is vanishingly low. It's a world where a single assinine node developer with a trivial package on npm shut down the entire damn industry for days.

A relationship with a fairly stable and increasingly developer friendly company like Microsoft seems very reasonable by comparison.

    > Who asked what you like? That's irrelevant.

Parent did, when they asked:

    > Why can't you say the same for v8?

My point was they did not know my opinion on the subject and to make an argument about my personal consistency in analysis (although this is off-topic) is impossible.

Oracle's actions do change the validity of the criticisms against Microsoft. That conversation isn't directly related to this thread and is a weak distraction from Microsoft's history, a history that many reasonable people could claim is shameful. If that's the best that can be done to defend Microsoft, then it seems that it isn't trustworthy.

That's an odd reading. It looked to me like they were asking you why Chakra doesn't represent a risk similar to V8.

And it does. But it's not a very high risk.

If you alone hold the copyright to a piece of software you can change the license at any time.

But that doesn't apply to versions that already had an open license. You can't retroactivally revoke a license, you can only add it to new versions.

That's not true, and it's happened before:

http://www.cnet.com/news/nessus-security-tool-closes-its-sou...

A project like Linux couldn't do this, since it has thousands of authors, and each author would have to agree to the change. But if the author is a single person, or a corporation, then only one person has to make the decision.

You're misreading the article, I think. They didn't release a new version under the GPL. They didn't retroactively undo licensing for older versions.

It is not at all clear that you can snap your fingers and renegotiate an existing license arbitrarily like that. You need to do it in advance of the agreement.

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