Some good points here, I think:
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/mi ... -reaction/
Just few things from the top of my slightly drunk head:
How there are still small pockets of deep mistrust of Microsoft in the open source community. I will own responsibility for some of that as I spent a good part of my career at the Linux Foundation poking fun at Microsoft (which, at times, prior management made way too easy). But times have changed and it’s time to recognize that we have all grown up – the industry, the open source community, even me.
Well, times at Microsoft will change as the board of directors strategy changes. OSS has become something very important in the industry today. Think about how none of the respected Machine Learning toolboxes are closed sourced. So, for now it makes sense for MS to be all supportive of Open Source. For now.
How folks seem to conflate “buying GitHub” the company and development platform with somehow buying “open source”: Two of the fastest growing projects in The Linux Foundation family, Kubernetes and Node.js, are developed on GitHub. However (and I triple checked this with our lawyers), Microsoft does not own Kubernetes or Node.js as a result of this transaction. Project copyright owners retain their ownership of their code.
100% true, but if at some arbitrary point in future MS wants to litigate something in court then it will either win or drive the legit owners bankrupt, even if losing, as it has infinite money to sustain any legal expenses for any prolonged period of time, even when it is blatant that they are in the wrong. Now: I cannot imagine this to happen on a large scale (not even MS has so infinite resources to do this on every project on GitHub) neither I am so naive to imagine other companies, even much smaller (like, well, GitHub itself), not to be able to do the same (this is how patents are used). But... (and here we go into the final point)
Final point:
After all these decades of MS actively trying to get rid of OSS, or limit it, or in any way attempting to crate a monopoly, it takes more than just a few "last years of good behaviour" to earn trust. Maybe the way they handle GitHub will be a good test.
Let's just see what happens: I will look at how MS does with GitHub with the sceptic mind of a scientist that has seen tons of contrary evidence, but, being a good scientist, still has an open mind about it.
I don't actually have any project on GitHub. So, as long as things keep on being normal, I will just keep on using it the way I do.
