Microsoft Buys Teamprise, Will Ship Linux Tools

spongman writes "Microsoft's Senior Vice President, Developer Division, S. Somasegar has announced that Microsoft has acquired Teamprise from Sourcegear, LLC, and will be shipping it as part of the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 release. Teamprise is an Eclipse plugin (and related tools) for connecting to Team Foundation Server, Microsoft's source-control/project-management system. What's most interesting about this is not only that Microsoft has realized that heterogeneous development platforms are important to their developer customers, but the fact that Microsoft themselves will now be developing and shipping products based on those heterogeneous platforms, including 5 versions of Unix."

Re:Fully integrated Mono on Linux with Eclipse?

[WarJolt]

I haven't tried it, but it exists.Have fun [ibm.com]

Re:silly

[carld]

If I recall correctly that was Sybase, not Ingres.

Re:Well ...

[h4rm0ny]

How does the language matter?

Mono isn't a language per se. Mono is an import of the .Net framework. The trouble is that this framework is controlled by Microsoft. Firstly, the Windows version will always be ahead of other platforms relegating other platforms to inferior, buggy or feature incomplete versions. This could result in security vulnerabilities and lagging behind in version availability. More dangerous however, is that Microsoft can withdraw approval for Mono at any time, if they wish. If Mono became a popular basis for running software on Linux, then Microsoft could bring it all crashing down whenever they felt Linux had grown to be enough of a threat. Or they can start charging licence fees. Once a software base is installed, it can be very hard to move away from it *cough*Office*cough*.

Basically, rather than true cross-platform compatability, what you get is Microsoft controlling a framework that Linux apps would become dependent on. A bad, vulnerable situation, imo. That's why I dislike proprietary systems such as Moonlight that are built on it. If we overhauled software patent law then it would be less of a threat, but it remains a technical advantage to Windows.

Re:Microsoft have done this before...

[Locutus]

IIRC, XENIX was in the 80s and UNIX and mainframe OS's were what businesses used. Small businesses used UNIX based PCs because DOS was not even in the same ball park as UNIX as far as an OS is concerned. It wasn't until the late 80s and early 90s that Microsoft gold plated their monopoly on the desktop OS market so Xenix was hedging their bet.

I hadn't heard that they ported it to x86 only that it was x86 based.

Once Microsoft had their monopoly and knew it, they've used it to protect their position. They do not hedge their bets and instead, they outright purchase companies and products and eliminate the cross platform nature of that product or they terminate the product. There's nothing in Microsoft's long history which shows that this will be any different. Like other things, it'll just take a few years for them to destroy the *nix customer base and products so that the Windows-only product is the only option left. It is how they do business.

LoB

Re:The more things change...

[Locutus]

I don't know if Source Safe was originally DOS based, UNIX based, or both but I do recall seeing the UNIX version of Visual Source Safe variant and it really sucked. The UNIX box GUI was CDE and Motif based but the Visual Source Save GUI was based on Windows 3.x. They made no effort to integrate it into the UNIX desktop as if they were saying, "We are Microsoft, Windows is our product, this is a Windows based product so be happy you have it at all."

FYI, Microsoft produced Visual Source Safe after purchasing One Tree Software. From the wikipedia page, it was a 16 bit commandline app when they purchased the company. It was not client server based but could be used like MS Access with shared network disks. Microsoft bought them in 94 but it wasn't until 2005 that the product became client server based.

LoB