Comment by lectrick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lectrick | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad that Microsoft is absorbing enough young guys who went through college realizing open-source is cool to actually influence their future direction, but based on the entire self-interested history of Microsoft (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish or http://www.pcworld.com/article/2901262/microsoft-tightens-wi... or http://techrights.org/2010/09/17/microsoft-management-mocks-...) and especially its deep insecurity around, AND open hostility towards, open source, they can truly go fuck themselves.

I know the latter is a downvotable attitude, and I apologize because it's very unlike me, but it is one of my few sore points, and this comes from years of web developer hell dealing with IE, years of working at places which only considered solutions that Microsoft invented, years of dealing with Microsoft BS left and right.

Before you downvote- If you honestly consider yourself a developer who cares about their craft and career, I want you to read these 2 books- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar and http://www.paulgraham.com/hackpaint.html (yes, I just plugged a pg book on HN... It's part of why I'm here, actually!). And THEN come back and try to downvote me.

Lots of downvotes, but I can relate to what you are saying. 10 years of working in a pro Microsoft organization trying to do PHP and Ruby development showed me that developers and managers alike bought into Microsoft's ideas at the time. Microsoft was good, Microsoft offered support, and open-source was just for hobbyists. 10 years of working with servers that were hostile towards openness, and 10 years of watching Microsoft blatantly steal from open-source and not give back.

Now they're giving back. And that's great. But I was involved with IronRuby. And I will never trust MS and open-source after that all went down. I'm a big fan of Chocolatey.org, and I'm hearing that MS wants to do their own version of that too.

The more things change...

I knew I'd get downvotes, but we are real people in a real community and feelings DO matter and have consequences which cannot simply be brushed aside, and those are my honest feelings on it, and I lived through it and saw it all (been a web dev, first frontend now backend, since '97). The last straw was when Microsoft was SO guilty that the judge couldn't help but be biased, which of course caused the antitrust case to get thrown out: http://www.politechbot.com/p-02198.html (note: I'm kind of against antitrust, but I am in favor of SOME punishment when a corporation is provably just being a dick, period).

I also love Ruby (I'm now trying to get into Elixir) so the IronRuby stuff resonates, I salute you.

> and 10 years of watching Microsoft blatantly steal from open-source and not give back

Oh you mean LDAP? ;) And whatever harm Outlook did to MIME or SMTP or... and not even going to mention IE

Just so you know, when I went through college 15 years ago or so and we used open source technologies too. Nobody I went to school with was dying to use whatever vb/asp/iis or jboss server was out there or use windows anything at all.

But, if you get hired at MS and they want you to work on the mssql team, you're not going to recommend they scrap it for mysql.

But there are many places out there that will swap out MySQL or PG for MSQL because it's Microsoft and they all know C#. I had, and have, a really hard time with people who only know the MS way of doing things. I have always taken issue with software developers who only know one language, because I think they're missing out on seeing different ways to look at problems. But the .Net people take it a step further and only look at things from MS. Even if Nancy is a great framework, they wait till WebAPI is available.

And when I've gone to speak at conferences, I'd show things like Sass and livereload, only to have them scoff at me and say "if it isn't in Visual Studio, it's not worth learning." And when VS included live reloading, it was the Greatest Thing Ever.

Just like how ASP.Net MVC came along. People actually argued with me that Microsoft invented that concept. Despite the fact that the very first version looked a lot like a C# version of Rails and Spring.

So that's a chip on my shoulder that I have to get over. Hopefully since the people I know followed MS before, they'll follow them in this new direction.

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