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Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

What's surprising to me about all the negative reactions Microsoft receives, especially on here, is that from my point of view, they are currently the most open out of all the big companies (Google, Facebook, Apple, etc). I cannot remember a time Apple has admitted to anything or made any effort to have anything that could be considered open, but they do no wrong in most people's eyes, where even a simple mistake by Microsoft gets turned into some nefarious narrative.

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Please, Google contributes far more to open source than both. Between Chromium (which seemingly most other browsers are based on now as well as things like VSCode) to Android, GSoC, Golang, Dart/Flutter, the Linux kernel and a bunch of other random stuff, Google has probably done as much or more for the open source ecosystem than pretty much anyone.

Pretty much MS' only useful contributions to open source are from MS Research, everything else feels like a Trojan horse, designed to make you like them and then lock you in to something proprietary later.

Lots of plugins don't work on open-source VSCode, they tried a bait and switch with .NET features, Windows 11 has a bunch of anti-patterns, GitHub is being dodgy about how they train Copilot, etc...

Google also contributes substantially to coreboot, I would not be surprised if Microsoft started working in open source because of google.

Perhaps I'm the one misinterpreting your comment, and the others have it right.

I'm assuming you mean open as in communication. Apple basically is a stone wall, facebook just spouts empty platitudes, google processes are opaque and unyielding (unless you know a someone or raise a massive community response on social media), but Microsoft continues to be staffed by humans.

They aren't a shining pillar of FOSS, but they've taken some good steps in the right direction in the past few years. And of all of them, user feedback, support, and escalation seems to still be handled by people instead of algorithms

You didn't misinterpret and nailed it spot on. I didn't say anything specifically about open source. While that is a significant part and I personally think Microsoft is doing well, I find that Microsoft are the only ones even mildly open about their communication, documentation, and processes and actually seem to respond to negative feedback, at least more than zero like the other companies. Apple is opaque by design, Google is opaque in a sort of emergent way, and Facebook is opaque in a deceptive way, all three on purpose and working as intended. Microsoft is not perfect by any means, but people get riled up at them all the time for the simplest things and often the exact same things that Apple does, for example.

In the particular case of this post, I just can't imagine an Apple employee posting the exact link (on Christmas!) to a bug that they were responsible for to an issue that was posted on a forum. If someone would have simply made an issue on the GitHub repo instead of posting on Hacker News, it probably would have been fixed without fanfare.

Releases of all open source things Apple uses, by OS: https://opensource.apple.com/releases/

These mostly link to repositories under one of their GitHub organizations: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/

Apple's open source projects: https://opensource.apple.com/projects/

Which mostly link to repositories under their main GitHub organization: https://github.com/orgs/apple/repositories

Note these are thrown-over-the-wall source dumps, with no valuable VCS history, nothing more recent than at least 2 releases ago, and sending a PR will likely only receive crickets (said as someone who recently found an easily patchable bug in dyld, contemplated the idea of opening a PR and was told by an ex-colleague who now works at Apple that my best shot would be through feedbackassistant.apple.com).

BTW, those repos don't take issues.

I just got a security bug fixed last month in dyld in one release cycle. Didn't strike me as difficult. I emailed them, and they fixed it. Not much more to add then that. Have you actually tried?

Also dyld isn't just some thrown-over the wall code. It's completely designed and built by Apple and is the cornerstone to making the user-space runtime functional.

All the code designed and built by Apple is thrown-over-the-wall. That's old-version-of-source-available, barely open source.

I tried emailing ld64's author about a bug in the past without success. I don't remember how I found their name/address back then, but I sure can't find any names or contact information for dyld right now...

What on earth are you talking about? ld64 is a completely different beast than dyld in today's world.

Also, I'm not sure looking for individual points of contact in a large org is the best idea. I emailed security@apple.com. Even if it's not a security bug they will help direct you to the right team.

Again, have you even tried?

> What on earth are you talking about?

I'm talking about trying to contact people at Apple about bugs in their "open source" code.

Why would I send an email to security@apple.com for something that is not a security issue?

> Again, have you even tried?

Yes, I tried for ld64 in the past, and I tried through what I was told had the best chances to work by an Apple employee this time for dyld. I'm not holding my breath, though.

> ...from my point of view, they are currently the most open out of all the big companies (Google, Facebook, Apple, etc)

I'm curious to know how you're measuring openness. I agree Apple is the least open of the group, but Facebook and Google owe their existence to FLOSS, and were always in harmony with it from their origins.

But is Facebook the product or it’s social/recommendation algorithms open source? Is Google’s search engine or ad platform open source?

Companies are open source where it’s of value to them, but they don’t give away the family jewels if they can help it.

You may have read something in my comment I didn't (mean to) express - none of thr companies open source their crown jewels (e.g. Windows). I subjectively don't see how Microsoft can be seen as the most open, and I was curious to know how parent came to that conclusion. Microsoft (and perhaps Apple too) are the ones with a history of antagonism with open-source/GPL.

> I cannot remember a time Apple has admitted to anything or made any effort to have anything that could be considered open…

This was a while back, but Tim Cook apologized[0] after a poorly received rollout of Apple Maps. That said, I applaud this response and agree that more like it is needed across the industry.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/28/tim-cook-apologizes-for-ap...

Google contributed the enormous k8s to the community, which has thankfully made Microsoft's proprietary Service Fabric mostly go away.

Apple have caught huge flak recently e.g. for the phone-local image scanning software.

Although Google was the one which prepared it for production before its releasing, k8s originated from academia (more precisely, University of Massachusetts Amherst).

Ps.: check follow up comments. My comment in here is wrong.

Do you have a source for that claim?

My mistake. One of its founders has a PhD from there (thus my mistake), but k8s was actually created while he was working at Google, after his PhD (which has nothing to do with k8s..).

[1] https://kubernetes.io/blog/2018/07/20/the-history-of-kuberne...

what surprises me the most about Microsoft related hate is that, despite the fact that they had (still have pretty much) control over the OS market they never locked their system down or charged people in any capacity.

People take it for granted that you can just run what you want on your windows machine but they could have turned it into smartphone style locked down system. Imagine if every app developer in history had to fork 15-30% of their sales over to Microsoft just for building on Windows, they could have made a trillion bucks or something.

They didn't do it because regulators were already on them, hard. They literally funded Apple to try have a competitor so they wouldn't be broken up. A judge did, at one point, rule that they should be broken up anyway.

Well we're all just lucky nobody had thought of that yet.

While it's not locked, they're certainly pushing you that way. For example the only built-in installer for VS projects right now essentially gives you a choice of either a plain directory of files, or a nice process to release to the windows store. Want a simple MSI/installer - deal with the pain yourself.

Once you do try to distribute your own app, you need to shell out >$200/yr for code signing certificates which pass the smartscreen filter, otherwise your app will be randomly prevented from running.

And other issues... With every version things get just a tiny bit more inconvenient for out-of-store software releases.

Literally half the operating system is open source macOS, they have an entire site dedicated to it. opensource.apple.com.

Oh and don't forget googles ridiculous amount of effort poured into Android open-source source tree, just to name one of many.

I honestly can't tell if you are trolling here or not.

Apple is active in their OSS work although, if you go look at their OSS project forms and such. Look at webkit, swift, etc.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29685852.

Why was that done? I specifically responded to a comment.

I listed 5 reasons why we do that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27132402. In this case I think it was a combination of (2) it was a step into more generic discussion and (5) the thread was top-heavy and we were trying to prune it.

Yes they are still working on world domination and needs to act kind and responsible, unlike Google and Apple that is ahead of them.

If Microsoft had the most popular search engine and the most popular mobile operating system, they would be gathering all our data and putting ai robots to answer our questions.

These big tech companies do not have the best interest of us in mind. They are a force for centralization of power into the hands of billionaires.

It doesn't have to be this way but it requires users to smell the coffee and want another Internet and another big tech industry.

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