Embracing the New Microsoft

I'm writing this blog post in LibreOffice Writer running on Linux; open source software (OSS) running on an open source operating system. A lot of the software that I use is open source, not entirely because of some philosophical position of mine, I have plenty of games on steam after all, but usually for practical reasons. Despite this, I still find myself interested in the OSS community's reaction to things. The most predictable reaction is always to Microsoft (or M$ as some of the more childish members of the community like to call it).

“Embrace, extend, and extinguish” is usually what they're accused of doing whenever they open source a piece of software. “Embrace, Extend and Extinguish” was an actual technique that Microsoft used in the 90's. The gist of the idea is to take a preexisting standard, add a little bit of Microsoft exclusive functionality to it, then wait for the competition to falter from lack of support of the new Microsoft features.

With all the complaining that I've seen about Microsoft doing releasing their software as open sources, I've never once seen a well thought out explanation of the actual harm this could cause. It's always just parroting those same 3 words that came from a Microsoft whose current operating system had just added a newfangled thing they called a start menu.

As time has gone on, I've seen reactions from the programming community go from the beyond skeptical view that the current OSS community seems to have to a much more reasonable reaction. So why does the OSS community still feel reluctant to accept “The New Microsoft”?

If we go by Microsoft's Github page we can see that they have almost 400 projects available for various open source licenses. Some of these are undoubtedly just code dumps, as some of them haven't been updated in over a year, but there are several actively developed projects that are currently taking pull requests (contributions from regular people) that are used by many people. It's hard to say that these contributions are completely disingenuous.

Microsoft is a publicly held company. They exist to make money, so I would be naive to suggest that they are going on these spree of releasing software as open source without them seeing a benefit in it. By my assessment they get two major benefits from this strategy.

The first is that people, developers specifically, will like them more. When you're a company that makes dozens of tools and services targeted at developers it helps for them to like you instead of them replacing the S's in your name with dollar signs whenever they mention you.

The second is that when someone uses your software, they are more likely to use other things that you've created. The most obvious example of this is purchasing a tool that helps use the open source product. Recently the .NET framework was open sourced and efforts began to get the fullstack working on Linux. If developers find that the open source tooling is insufficient for their needs, then they may choose to pay for Microsoft's proprietary tools. This is hardly anti competitive or evil, if a better product exists to work with their own software, it can still win out.

 The climate in the industry is changing, and Microsoft is trying to adapt. Why not give them a little bit of credit instead of pretending it's still 1997?