On 11/5/2013 9:14 AM, Daniel Fussell wrote:
In case anyone here wants to know, if for no other reason than a heads
up. One of my coworkers on the windows side of the force just
installed the latest version of visual studio and found that it had
git support in addition to it's own code repository. He thought it
was rather funny and a win for free software.
Myself, this looks like an attempt by Microsoft to keep from being
marginalized by new kids using a full opensource stack. But I could
also see it as an attempt at embrace, extend, extinquish. Thoughts?
Full disclosure: I don't work for Microsoft, but I have several friends
that do, and I wouldn't mind doing dev for them at all.
Microsoft has actually an entire Open Source group, and they do in fact
contribute to several open source projects. In Visual Studio, that team
is obviously interested in supporting Windows dev, and trends in Windows
dev haven't been to use git until more recent years. That's not to say
it wasn't done, it just hasn't been THE trend. Supporting other
commercial products like Borland's offering for source control hasn't
been their motif. Supporting a large portion of Windows developers is
their motif. Thus, git is now a thing. You can try it in their Express
editions too.
I have never bought that MS is anti-linux or anti-open-source. (CodePlex
anyone?) I've always seen it as not seeing a lot of open source or even
linux itself as very relevant. I think that's actually correct (MS
isn't really after the niche markets Linux fills). I don't think MS
hasn't made mistakes along the way of meeting trends (git support is a
bit late, and SATA drivers werent in the install of XP until SP3, as
examples), but their actions have always seemed to be "get business away
from competitors, support Windows dev as a platform, ignore things that
are irrelevant." This hasn't always served them well (consumer phone
markets, eh?) but it supports their core business.
tl;dr This is really just MS doing what it does.
As a related notion: full open-source stack dev on Windows sucks.
Hardcore. As in, I would rather be drawn and quartered than try to use
mingw or attempt to do anything complex even in something like Python
without support tools. Of course, I think the GNU toolchain in general
is terrible (autotools is a face only a mother could love).
-Tod Hansmann
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