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Comment by enitihas | Hacker News Reader

>We expect them to open source things once good_will_value > expected_sales_volume for a given title/piece of software. The thing is right now Microsoft is getting into the habit of open sourcing things that hit that criteria,

Which of their former good selling products has microsoft open sourced? Which of the microsoft open source projects were formerly for sale. I am very sure it would be very very few, and only in those areas where open source competitors are already strong.

EA does tons of stuff open source. Have a look at their GitHub. I am not even sure microsoft has made a similar amount of their internal libraries a available.

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From GitHub:

Electronic Arts: 27 repos

Azure: 1.8k repos

n.b., I work in Azure, make your own conclusions.

It's mostly templates, SDKs, etc.

MS is open-sourcing the pieces of cheese that lead to their proprietary cloud-shaped trap. I don't think they've open-sourced anything related to Azure itself (i.e. if I wanted to run my own Azure-like cloud).

I'm not saying it's a bad or even unethical strategy. I'm just saying that MS is not, remotely, an open-source company.

https://github.com/Microsoft/service-fabric

How about VSCode and .Net Core?

I work with asp.net web api and angular (typescript) but I think the point stands.

> Which of their former good selling products has microsoft open sourced?

Neither Visual Studio Code nor .NET core fits this criteria. Visual Studio IDE is not free and open source and neither is the older version of .NET framework.

Launch a .NET core application inside visual studio code. Even that comes with a warning saying you can only use the debugger within certain limited situations.

Service Fabric is open source. SF is basically what powers Azure and tons of other MS cloud based software like sql azure https://github.com/Azure/service-fabric

I would actually go so far as to say it is an unethical strategy. It's just a popular one. And a very successful one.

The difference is that Electronic arts publishes things that I might actually use, unlike Azure.

there are plenty of use cases for the azure stuff, even if you personally don't see a use for it.

Are we on Reddit?

So it's quantity v. quality. As others said, don't pretend to make people believe you have 1.800 repos worth of useful software. EA may have only 27, but at least it's something you may benefit from even if you're not a customer of theirs.

I don’t pretend that 1.8k are super useful, but I’m still measuring apples to apples. I looked at the EA repos before posting. There’s a few C++ libs, some forks of Kubernetes components that don’t seem active, and some other misc stuff. It’s meaningful, sure, but I think MS does provide plenty of high quality code to close the difference.

Honest question, approximately what percentage of those repositories are original works and what percentage are forks?

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