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Comment by the-lazy-guy | Hacker News Reader

Millions of businesses run on Microsoft platforms and software developed on/for Microsoft platforms for decades. I think you are painting darker picture than it really is.

Or please elaborate a little what you mean by "betraying".

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I believe, sooner or later, MS will put some arbitrary restrictions on .net or some part of its toolchain, forcing users to purchase a license to make it usable. It will probably involve "cloud" to sign/notarize your binaries to distribute them and give MS complete control of the ecosystem.

Obviously, I have no idea what exactly will MS do, but after reaching some adoption target, MS will try to extract as much money as it can, because that's what they do.

The other posters in this thread mentioned the debugger is still proprietary. Anyway, I'm not touching this.

Technically the restrictions already exist, just as a part of the development experience.

- .NET Hot Reload is only implemented on Windows. It requires support in the .NET runtime, which is technically possible to implement, but the team has not gotten around to implementing it for years. This doesn't have to do with the issue around MS removing the "dotnet watch" command, it's for the "Edit and Continue" feature in IDEs.[1][2]

- MS was considering deprecating Omnisharp, the open-source language server that implements C# support for VS Code, and replacing it with a closed-source version. Since the announcement, commits to omnisharp-vscode have dropped off significantly. The lack of Omnisharp would mean there would be no real open-source C# development environment for Linux anymore, since MonoDevelop was abandoned a few years ago.[3]

[1] https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/RIDER-31366/EditContinu...

[2] https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/issues/23685

[3] https://github.com/omnisharp/omnisharp-vscode/issues/5276

> which is technically possible to implement, but the team has not gotten around to implementing it for years.

My understanding is that they did in fact implement it, but then ripped that code out before the release.

I believe that issue was about "dotnet watch", which reruns the compilation when a file change is detected. EnC/Hot Reload sends new bytecode to a running process and updates classes/methods in memory. EnC has been missing from non-Windows platforms from the start. An IDE like Rider can't implement Hot Reload without support from the runtime.

Just skimming the diff it looks like it was proper hot reloading.

https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/pull/22262/files

As a user I honestly don't care how Microsoft license their tools. If they want to start charging for them I'll pay for them if I think they are better than the alternatives.

> MS will put some arbitrary restrictions on .net or some part of its toolchain.

I doubt this. Microsoft's monetary strategy around .NET for a number is years has been "look at how easy you can deploy/run/monitor your .NET app on Azure!", I don't see that changing to anything else unless there's a massive change of priority and executive leadership at Microsoft.

They certainly COULD do some of that stuff, but so much is open at this point, that I tend to think that a consortium of large businesses with hundreds of billions on the line would get together and form the .ORG alliance or something like that to rebrand and make it fully independent from MS. The entire runtime and compiler are MIT licensed so with enough motivation provided, Microsoft's customers could easily break away, hire their top .NET engineers, and build an entirely independent ecosystem.

I just can't imagine it makes any business sense to be that hostile in today's world.

Yes, we are all so much better off because anything text gets sent in Word docs and anything graphical gets sent as PowerPoint slides. /s

Microsoft is probably the most aggressively mediocre company in history, and the poor quality of everything has extracted an enormous lost productivity cost. Those of you old enough to remember IIS and early internet Microsoft know.

Even today, it takes five full seconds for my work Outlook webmail to load. Every person in the organization waiting for each task in Outlook n times per day adds up to a lot of lost productivity. And Outlook adds nothing to email that we haven't had since forever. Microsoft just took it over and made it slow and convinced the corporate types to use it. Rinse and repeat for everything they do.

You're right. They run on Microsoft platforms. For decades. Not Linux.

> Not Linux.

That hasn't been true for the last few years.

I think you may have missed the train of thought.

Azure, "the Microsoft platform" is said to be around 60% Linux.

Source, elsewhere in these comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32483239

I think the train of thought was focused on the decades part, not that it has more recently changed.

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