Miguel de Icaza on his journey from open source to Microsoft: 'It's a different company'

Re: open source people DON'T universally hate Miguel.

You do recall correctly. People may want to rewrite the history but Qt around the time Gnome and Gtk started was quite hostile to open source. It was that typical "we'll call it open source but you play by our rules" attitude.

The competition of Gtk definitely put some pressure (but would not be the only reason) to open up Qt; it's all ancient history now but doesn't mean it didn't happen.

Re: open source people universally hate Miguel.

Can you provide some evidence of the Xamarin sponsored collective attack on KDE? Google can't seem to find anything of the magnitude you're describing. Xamarin has somewhere between 300 and 400 ish employees, if there were a collective attack on KDE surely it'd have made the news somewhere?

https://www.google.com/search?q=xamarin+attack+kde

Re: open source people universally hate Miguel.

Icaza's endorsement for Microsoft's Office Open XML did the rest for me.

I look at people, products and services in context of what they do.

From that perspective I don't like both Microsoft and Mono, as they are presently very busy marketing themselves as something they are not, which is on the side of their customer. MS is as morally bankrupt as Wall Street, but still try to cosy up to the developers they so *desperately* need to pretend it's all for your benefit. Icaza fits right into that context - pretending to eat cake from both sides, but occasionally the mask slips and shows his true paymaster.

MSOOXML was the moment Microsoft showed the world that it was quite prepared to use a human zero-day to almost destroy a mechanism that had been keeping us safe for literally decades: the ISO structure - you know, the thing that establishes standards from anything from child seats to engineering.

MSOOXML was bought, bullied and bribed into being named a standard (it is anything but in reality because it never had a full consensus driven development cycle behind it), and exactly because of that we eventually switched to full ODF only for our business. We don't even have an MS Office license anymore to "translate" documents, most of our suppliers are now switching as well as we no longer accept anything but Libre/OpenOffice ODF from them (some tried pretending, but the Microsoft ODF export is *terrible* - I have no idea how anyone can even consider claiming that "supporting ODF" unless they're not worried about their credibility).

In that context I would advise you not to fall for Microsoft's recent *cough* charm *cough* offensive on Open Source. No, Microsoft has not changed. It just uses a new marketing approach. I'm not quite sure what its current aim is (nor do I care much - we're now MS free), but if you really think that *anything* Microsoft does is for the benefit of a user or a community (other than its management and shareholders) you're dangerously delusional and should be kept away from any procurement of IT decision making process.

No, Microsoft hasn't gone nice. It's only attempting to market itself as such, and plenty of suckers are desperate to believe it.

You have a good three decades of track record. Study it and also note just how accurate Google is following their playbook and methodologies - no wonder they joined forces.

Re: open source people universally hate Miguel.

Forgetting Digital Research and DR-DOS are we. That and Apple's attack on GEM rather sadly did them in.

Re: open source people universally hate Miguel.

>different from the company it were in the 1990-ties, an open, enthusiastic group of youngsters that brought computing to literally every home on the planet - but TODAY it is an ugly world-wide monopoly,

That's funny.

Their actual monopoly case was in the (late) 90s. And it only came about because they did accumulate a whole long string of abusive behavior towards their competition throughout the 90s.

You may or may not like MS. But their monopoly days are behind them. And if there was truly a nice, open, MS, then it would have been in the 80s.

I am still not an MS fan, but I appreciate the direction they've been going a whole lot more since the Ballmer has left. There are many pointless exceptions, such as their religious zeal on Windows 10 telemetry and their carryover of Windows 8 design fails. But they do seem to be opening up a bit and they've lost whole swathes of their monopoly rents.

</pedant>

Re: "People flocked to gnome because it was better for them."

Ridiculous almost religious zeal in open source community.

Open source is a great thing, but fundamentalism will hold it all back.

Re: open source people universally hate Miguel.

And the schism happened in the mid 90s.

"the problem of Microsoft has transmogrified in multicolored ponys"

Oracle is a problem but it's not a bigger problem than Microsoft, which, in spite of de Icaza's implied subtext and outrageous hyping has not gone away in any way. (Unless this article does selective quoting ... formerly he was "cloud agnostic" and now he does Azure only. That's not "being a problem" why exactly?)

(Yes, Oracle is losing steam right now and is doing the idiotic thing trying to affirm copyright status over the API of the Java standard libraries. They should be held to account for risking to have the Computing Industry go up in flames just to extract money from Google.)

Now, for "Java". It is a lot of things, in order of decreasing importance as I see it:

-- Java the standard libraries: A sometimes infuriating, sometimes well-thought out very large swiss army knife. Quite a lot of the value buried in the "Java" keyword lies here.

-- Java the FLOSS bass: A really large set of libraries and tools for which the code can be had under various FLOSS licenses. Absolutely essential.

-- Java the FLOSS ecosystem: People who know about Java and are doing FLOSS. Absolutely essential.

-- Java the enterprisey ecosystem: All of JEE specification and implementations and people able to write code for that.

-- Java the connectors and bindings for Java the language and Java the JVM for all sorts for stuff from databases to XML tools, open or not.

-- The specification of the Oracle JVM and the corresponding implementations: Implementations of the JVM from "not-Oracle" exist, although the Oracle JVM is very tuned, reliable and comes with a nice toolset.

-- Java the language: The Java language is widely known but getting on a bit. Better languages exist now that can interop with existing Java code, and that can be compiled to JVM bytecode or be interpreted on the JVM. Some of these languages have non-JVM runtimes or even .Net runtimes. Time to change.

-- Java the installed base: JREs and JDKs already on servers on clients, hopefully at the latest versions.

Re: Java

Not even Oracle (though Oracle is clearly pretty bad, as it is)

but rather, the CAFC (Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit) and it's demonstrated willingness to screw with both facts and law, in it's ideological quest for the ever expanded scope and the ever greater glory of "Intellectual Property Rights".

Re: He's right about one thing...

LOL! Google reaped the whole Java ecosystem to make it data slurping OS with the little investment it could. Harmony was Java. Dalvik was Java. Google used them just to attempt to avoid to license Java, while still being able to use Java tools and libraries to make Android work. Nobody says Android development is not made in Java. MS licensed Java but tried to add Windows-only extensions. Google stole the whole Java design without even getting a license, sure it would have got support by fanboys who still believe Google is not evil as much as Microsoft...