Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

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> Didn't realize how much Canonical was helping with WSL, though it of course makes sense that they're doing so, unfortunately.

Eh, they have a dedicated team for enabling WSL/Ubuntu desktop in Canonical. They're fueling the effort.

> Eh, I think interoperability is good, and reverse-engineering Windows frameworks/technology has a long history in the open-source world (WINE & Samba being two prominent examples).

IIRC, De Icaza left GNOME, joined Microsoft, developed Mono on open specs, founded Xamarin and sold it back to Microsoft.

His joint venture with MS what turned everything sour for many people, incl. me. However, we all love Wine, esp. when they implement things bug-by-bug without knowing it (and without help from Microsoft). The cursor (or Icon or WMF) exploit was a great laugh. We all love SMB too, because it's done despite Microsoft.

The language on this page is loaded (in a way I don't like), but it keeps a good roster of the events: http://techrights.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Icaza

> His joint venture with MS what turned everything sour for many people, incl. me.

Why did it turn things sour for you? I mean, ever since the Xamarin acquisition, MS .NET has become open + cross plattform and Xamarin which was a commercial/paid-for product is open too. VSCode is a first class citizen for free C#/.NET development on macOS and Linux. Not saying all of this is related to de Icaza getting bought by MS, but just saying ever since the ecosystem has become completely open.

If you're a .NET developer who uses Linux, yes that sounds nice.

On the other hand. Consider a prominent member one of the biggest open source projects leaves the project, joins Microsoft, and praises Microsoft and pushes semi-closed Microsoft technologies on every project, claiming Linux is dead without Microsoft, and we need to compromise by allowing these non-free technologies and porting almost everything to it.

All is done when Microsoft tried to copy LibreOffice (then OpenOffice) formats, created OOXML family of semi-open formats, and push them as ISO standards to bolster their file formats to kill other office applications for good.

DeIcaza (knowingly or unknowingly) was a part of an concentrated and coordinated effort to EEE Linux, and the open frameworks around it.

I never used and won't use any Mono based application in my personal systems and servers I solely install and manage.

On the other hand, VSCode is not free or open source. This makes it null and void in my radar, because I want my whole toolchain to be open and free, because when I left a project alone, someone should be able to get the whole toolchain and continue development. I don't like the idea of source code being locked in a proprietary development environment and hence suffocated on a whim with a choice of an external party.

> DeIcaza (knowingly or unknowingly) was a part of an concentrated and coordinated effort to EEE Linux, and the open frameworks around it.

The only person who does not know this is Icaza itself.

I can't talk about a person definitively who I don't know personally.

VSCode is free software, and also used a lot outside .NET development (TypeScript). It is extension based, and not all extensions every written for it are free software. And VSCode is not essential in any way for .NET development, and I am saying this as someone who learned C# with MonoDevelop on Linux around 2010. There are commercial IDEs like Rider, and you don't need an IDE to compile code - the build toolchain of .NET is free software.

I don't buy into this "All tools associated with an ecosystem must be free software". That is not even true in Java/C++/Python land, where there is a plentheora of commercial and succesful developer tools (i.e. IntelliJ, CodeWarrior etc.)

> VSCode is free software...

As in beer only [0]. This license [1] states otherwise for free as in speech perspective.

> and also used a lot outside .NET development (TypeScript). It is extension based, and not all extensions every written for it are free software.

I know, and some of the non-free extensions are just the essentials, so they're what make VSCode, VSCode. So it's open-core, and it's not completely open source, and definitely not free.

> And VSCode is not essential in any way for .NET development,

I don't develop C#, but I know there are other tools and IDEs.

> I don't buy into this "All tools associated with an ecosystem must be free software". That is not even true in Java/C++/Python land, where there is a plentheora of commercial and succesful developer tools (i.e. IntelliJ, CodeWarrior etc.)

It may not be a necessity for you, and it's definitely not a necessity for closed source software or tools. However, I license all my code with GPLv3, and want my project to be buildable by anyone, regardless of anything. So I prefer a free and open toolchain (GCC/Eclipse/GNU libc) and libraries in my codebases.

If I was writing a commercial application, I may make different choices IDE/Library wise, but I'll still continue to use GCC family.

You don't have to buy into this. I'm not selling anything. This is my stance and a recommendation, but not an insistence.

[0]: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/supporting/faq#_is-vs-cod...

[1]: https://code.visualstudio.com/license

The .NET debugging tools in VS code are proprietary. If you get the OSS build from your distro and try to debug a .NET program it'll fail with an error. (Telling you it's only available with proprietary VS code from MS) For other languages this might be a minor pain. For C# it kills one of its best features, it's debugging support.

This is also an ecosystem thing. Rust has pervasive support for printf debugging (#[derive(Debug)] and you're done), while .NET's default .ToString() method is completely useless (which I'm sure has nothing to do with Microsoft wanting people to rely more on their debugger...).

Yeah you don’t remember correctly at all.

This is why I added Techrights reference here, which fixes what I've been wrong about and supports me what I was right about.

The most important thing is, De Icaza is with Microsoft for much longer than people remember (or want to accept), and the events I remember (albeit a bit blurry), when I was a grad student were actually happened.

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