Microsoft Releases First Public Preview of RTVS Under MIT and GPLv2 Licenses (microsoft.com) 57
shutdown -p now writes: Microsoft has released the first public preview of RTVS (R Tools for Visual Studio), an extension for Visual Studio that adds support for the R (GNU S) programming language. The product is open source, and while most of the code is under the MIT license, some components are GPLv2, in accordance with the R license.
That's not the first time this week (or this year) that Microsoft's open source efforts have been front-page news; with its new role in the Eclipse Foundation, too, the company's angling toward being one of the largest open source companies around, even if that's a small part of its business model.
Update: 03/09 19:03 GMT by T : Speaking of which: reader Salgak1 writes with his first submission, linking the Register's report that Microsoft has released a Debian-based Linux distro, called SONIC. "It is optimized for network switching, and apparently is a localized version of the
"Azure Cloud Switch" released into the Azure cloud hosting system. Question is, is it just another Microsoft "Embrace, Extend. Extinguish" strategy in action?"
Waiting for...... (Score:2)
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To change that, drastic changes in the corporate structure would be required, changes that i hardly believe they are willing to make.
Like changing chairmanship and corporate structure a couple times in the 20 years since?
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This is Slashdot, so it wouldn't matter if Bill Gates and Microsoft gave all of their money to Linus, open sourced Windows and rewrote the entire kernel and set of API stacks on top of Linux, and then provided a mechanism to performantly convert every binary program and application (along with source code) ever written for Windows to run natively on Linux itself... and then renamed the company to Linuxsoft and had Paul Allen personally crash a rocket ship into the company's main campus after using its plume
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He may add "Ignite" afterwards though...
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Very phallic.
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Maybe if microsoft released a nosystemd debian they'd get some adoption.
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I miss Bill Gates (Score:2)
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Maybe site owners finally graduated from middle school?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re:Embrace, Extend, Extinguish Meme (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish this meme would die.
With time and good behavior on Microsoft's part, it will - eventually. But the "meme" exists because of very real misbehavior by Microsoft over the course of many years.
It's analogous to a career criminal declaring he's gone straight - it's going to take time and repeated evidence before most people believe him.
Re: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish Meme (Score:2, Insightful)
So you think Apple, Google, or IBM who are the good guys would be any different?
Oh yeah IBM wasn't this awesome open source Linux friendly company we know today.
It is called a free market. Everyone will be evil given opportunity and everyone will be good saints as soon as competition comes in. Saying a leopard doesn't change it's spot is silly.
Companies are not your friends.
They are actors just like you in a free market. Let me ask you all something? If you had a skillset no one else had would you b
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Perhaps it is the system that is broken?
It certainly does seem inevitable that once a company gets to a certain size its practices move from human interest to business interest.
Business interest is not necessarily compatible with human interest.
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Perhaps it is the system that is broken?
It certainly does seem inevitable that once a company gets to a certain size its practices move from human interest to business interest.
Business interest is not necessarily compatible with human interest.
You wouldn't take a job for 6 figures and a golden parachute and a contract? Of course you would.
That is human nature my friend and motivates us to work hard and update your skills so when you and y our employer grab the ball you can have more pull in negotations.
My point is MS got lucky and played their card to the max. It doesn't make sense not too?
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I wish this meme would die.
With time and good behavior on Microsoft's part, it will - eventually.
Seems like Microsoft should just embrace the meme. And then extend it. After that, they should have an easier time killing it.
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Sun JAVA.
Hell you can blame Sun's eventual bankruptcy and the fact that Oracle now owns JAVA almost squarely on MS's embrace-extend-extinguish strategy. MS-JAVA only ran on windows - and had extensions developers liked, so people used them and suddenly java lost it's most important marketed feature - to be multiplatform.
By the time MS dropped JAVA - it was basically dead as an application language. Sun made a valiant effort to reinvent the language in other spaces (mobile and server-side appservers and such
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Right... because I didn't mention people using it in the VERY NEXT SENTENCE. Oh wait.... but hardly anybody writes desktop applications in it anymore. That was java's original primary purpose, to write desktop applications that would run unchanged on whatever platform you wanted. And microsoft DID kill java in that sense. As a server-side language being platform neutral is far less valuable. That it survived on mobile is a result of the fact that way back when it was first created that's what SUN had inten
Java was SUCH a failed attempt to extinguish by MS (Score:2)
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I wish this meme would die.
That's not a meme. It's a real strategy [wikipedia.org] that Microsoft was doing [justice.gov] as early as 1996 [nytimes.com].
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I doubt Microsoft is going to extinguish open source. If that were possible they would have done it long ago. They are anything but altruistic.
If they're contributing to open source now, you can be certain they have a business reason. After all, they're a business.
I cautiously welcome this. Time will tell what's really behind it, of course. Meanwhile, no one is obliged to use their stuff if you don't wish to.
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Twenty years is a long time to hold a grudge. All those people are gone, and we got work to do.
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I wish this meme would die.
What, exactly, do you think Microsoft is doing? They aren't open-sourcing this stuff because they like you.....it's guaranteed they have some plot to make money.
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What, exactly, do you think Microsoft is doing?
So what, exactly, is the evidence that you have that EEE is what they are doing? Apart from a vague claim that Microsoft wants to make money, how does making open source projects ever lead to extinguishing anything? If Microsoft did try to do something underhanded with the project in the future with an extend or extinguish phase, then everyone could just fork the project from the previous version and keep working happily.
Validation for the R language (Score:1)
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I've only been using R for a short time - about a year. But I'm excited by this - and MS' new foray towards true open-source.
I quickly found RStudio - simply because the basic R shell/gui was difficult to use. RStudio was nice and very helpful plus the team turned out new releases. My excitement is MS' wallet and pushing money into this - R should improve.
As for embrace & extend - R could use a bit of consolidation & simplification. There are many ways to do things and not all of them compatible
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(full disclosure: I am a developer on the RTVS team)
It is a bit too early to make feature-by-feature comparisons, since you'd be comparing green apples to ripe oranges. RStudio has been out for several years; RTVS is in its first public pre-release, it's not even feature complete yet.
So, for the most part, RStudio can currently do more. But there are exceptions already. Some of it stems from piggy-backing on top of VS, such as multi-language support - you can have a .cpp file in your R project, and you will
That's not the first time this week (or this year) (Score:2)
It must be a trap, right... (Score:2)
I know, everybody is waiting for the other shoe to drop, but there is none. The strategy here is obvious. Grow usage of Azure and displace Amazon. This means being pragmatic about platforms and gaining developer mindshare. There's billions of dollars to business to be had and Microsoft is ahead of the curve.
And it's a good story from a developer standpoint and it's getting better. Currently, where I'm at, they are still busy testing and doing proof of concepts, trying to set stuff up in Amazon, when they co
Could this be a move to remain relevant? (Score:2)
I understand the EEE logic, and that was the MS MO for a long time. But Linux has established itself as an enterprise mainstay, and if I were in their shoes, I would make sure that their products could work on the operating systems that their customers use. They would like to extinguish, but they can't, so they need to join them.