Interesting. I was part of the original "Team Explorer Everywhere" team that built their Eclipse plug-in for TFS and had originally championed this as a good idea. But really, I'm not sure that I'm enthused about this news. Certainly this is good community building, but I've found the Eclipse Foundation to be so ineffective that I'm not sure what purpose this <i>actually</i> serves except to send out a press release.<p>My team was initially acquired; we were originally a small company in a cornfield in Illinois called Teamprise, where we built the original TFS plug-in for Eclipse. At the time, we were Eclipse Foundation members and reasonably happy about it. Certainly it was nice to give back (in terms of membership fees) to a project that we were a part of and took advantage of. And the Foundation has a few really solid employees and it was nice to talk to them about tech stuff.<p>But our larger goal in joining the Eclipse Foundation was largely unmet, which was to actually <i>partner</i>. For example: we hoped to bring in a contractor who could occasionally tackle some bugs in Eclipse on AIX which ultimately affected our customers. We were a tiny company and going deep on some weird problem that only affected the Motif AIX build was not particularly rewarding. So we hoped to engage the Foundation to help us out here: we would pay this contractor if they could help us find them. But we were rebuffed in a manner that I found rather off-putting.<p>Despite this, after we became part of Microsoft I still pushed for us to join the Eclipse Foundation. I stopped pushing when Microsoft had a booth at Eclipse Con one year and a member of the Foundation (apropos nothing) went on a nice, long rant about Microsoft. I don't think it's particularly classy to make fun of your competitors, nor do I really appreciate inculcating an "us vs them" mentality. But to do that after we had paid a big hunk of money to sponsor that conference seemed particularly poor form, and if the Foundation is going to make fun of the people who are paying to sponsor their Conference, what does membership buy you? A steaming pile on your doorstep once a year?<p>In any case, that was when I stopped advocating for Microsoft to join the Eclipse Foundation and instead advocated for us to ignore them wholesale. I hope that my old team has better luck working with them than I did.
I feel like I'm not seeing the forest for the trees.<p>I swear Microsoft's business model was to bring people in to their ecosystem and then charge them for what is hopefully a superior development experience.<p>Is there a new business model? How do they lock people in and squeeze them for money? Is their cloud solution radically different from the competition that they can put all their eggs in that basket? What's the big picture plan?
Or is the new CEO just going rambo and pandering to DIY geeks who want everything for free ? (myself included!)<p>I feel like there has to be some parallel universe blog where these press releases explain what they're doing to investors beyond "we're going to take your money, and we're going to make things with it. And then give it away for free! Please give us more money"<p>Like awesome dude... but what the hell is going on?
I must be missing something.<p>All of the comments here are all about "Microsoft is advancing OSS" and "Microsoft grew a heart" and "Mind blown", but all I see in the article is "We'll be providing some tools to help you use our paid cloud services".<p>What am I missing here?
Microsoft is just a 'Solutions member', which is among the lowest form of membership for Corporate entities. They are only required to pay $20K a year. Not required to contribute any engineers to Eclipse Foundation. The 'membership' portion of this announcement is pure PR. If they were setting aside real cash, they would join as 'Strategic Member' where they would be required to contribute real cash and minimum amount of engineers to Eclipse.
Say what you want about Microsoft, but they really take their words into action nowadays. Seems like there is at least one news item per week. They have been really active in the open source space recently.<p>Personally, I love this. Have recently been learning ASP.NET and started using Azure simply because I find it to be one of the easiest frameworks and platforms to iterate quickly on.<p>I love the new Microsoft, I hope this continues. It feels like they have had a lot of brilliant people previously held back by rules and constraints which are now removed.
I swear I just saw a pig flying across the sky.<p>What is going on in Microsoft? Have they finally seen the light? First today comes SQL Server on Linux and now this.<p>It makes a refreshing change. Long may it continue.
Visual Studio runs on Linux, now MS joins Eclipse...the changes at Microsoft is too fast and dramatic, considering a while ago they're so hostile to the open source and Linux world at large. This indeed explains the saying: "if you can't beat them, you join them".<p>I hope it's not too late for them, for me there is no way to get back to Windows environment for any kind of development.<p>I suddenly realized that, Linux has won already, from Smart phones to the cloud servers, all the way.
Microsoft is finally realizing that Open Source is not an opposing ideology but an alternative kind of business contract (which happens to lend itself to services).
It seems MS is thinking money is to be made from order of magnitudes more users paying order of magnitude less money on cloud tools / infrastructure. It is opposite of traditional MS where fewer users were paying lots of money for MS tools.
Well, this is certainly an interesting development, although not entirely unexpected, given that JetBrains is developing Project Rider. It would definitely be interesting to develop a Java application in Visual Studio.
This seems like an Embrace, Extend, Extinguish type deal [1].<p>Can someone explain exactly what Microsoft would get out of this (and what they would theoretically give back in the process)?<p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish</a>
Is there a reason Microsoft doesn't make their VS Studio IDE work with Java? Yes, I'm aware of the 3rd party plugins available, but it would be nice to see official support for what is the world's most popular language according to the TIOBE index.
Do you remember the times MS tried to kill Java by adding new features to Java?
Every time they "contribute to open-source" I trust them less and less.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish#Examples" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish...</a>