this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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Well at least they are slighty more open to open source software since it make them money.
They're just making face, doing what is necessary to prove they're not evil, cuz open source software is in now.
I highly doubt that. They are open-sourcing a small suite because it is economical to do so. Closed source means constantly having to re-train newcomers. Normalizing VsCode and friends will go a long ways. Same thing Google did with their IT certs.
Nah, nobody cares about their monopoly anymore. They got outmaneuvered on mobile, and they're stuck being a desktop OS while the rest of the market moves around them.
Happens a lot with monopolies. IBM was the biggest name in mainframes, but their PC division made a standard that other companies would take and run.
Microsoft wouldn't have put as much effort into WSL if it was just performative.
Did IBM really invent the OSI model on their own? I thought the IEEE standardized that with help from programmers all over the industry?
Hmm? I wasn't talking about OSI.
If you're thinking BIOS, that was originally IBM proprietary stuff.
OSI started from a lot of telecom companies, who inflicted their silly ideas of Presentation and Session layers on us all.
Actually, it's not that silly, TCP/IP is built on that model, so are many other protocols. Though yes, it can be done better.
TCP/IP does not have a concept of Presentation or Session. Everything above it is just "Application", which is more sensible. There isn't much criticism to be had of layer 4 down, but when they got to layer 5 and 6, they were telecom people sticking their nose in software architecture. You can write networked applications with those layers if you like. I've seen it done, and it's fine. There are also plenty of other ways to architect it that also work just fine.
That is true.
But, you have to understand, back when OSI was made, the only thing which could benefit from it was telecom and banking... there were no PCs as we know them today. It's no surprise that OSI caters mostly to telecom software and needs.
And you could always just use the model up until layer 4, it's pretty good up until layer 4, and just do whatever you like after that... if you're developing your own protocol for something that is.
No I'm definitely thinking of the OSI model lol
What are you talking about, then? What IBM standard did everyone else adopt?
BIOS.
They recognized that PCs were the next big thing and needed one of their own. Large companies don't move fast, and IBM is certainly no exception, but they had to move fast now. So they took a bunch of off the shelf components that anyone else could have bought and called it their PC.
Everything except the BIOS. It regulated how the OS interacts with the hardware. Almost to the point where you could argue DOS isn't an OS at all, but just a thin command line layer over the BIOS, plus a simple minded file system.
Anyway, some people at Compaq make a cleanroom implementation of the BIOS and release an "IBM PC compatible". This quickly becomes the basis of everything we call a PC today. But IBM doesn't get to profit off it in the long run. They sold off their PC division decades ago.
The show "Halt and Catch Fire" has an excellent fictional example of the reverse engineering process.
I'll go out on a limb here and assume they're talking about the IBM PC.
Still, everything enterprise related or video/audio revolves around them (and Macs of course). That is one of their biggest assets now, as well as the "a perscription OS" spin they're trying to pull on Windows. Also, their subscription services, people that do all sorts of businesses use them a lot.
Even enterprise stuff has largely moved away from Microsoft. They are still dominant in some areas like the business desktop space/office 365/active directory, but 'enterprise' apps running on Windows Server (and associated stuff like IIS) with tight Microsoft integrations are a thing of the past.
Yeah, that's what I meant by enterprise use, not IIS. And they're still dominant on the audio/video production market. Basically, every aspect that is not just your everyday browsing or small office work.
Microsoft open-sourced all of dotnet core, which is arguably the largest and most well-maintained (with exceptions) collection of tools/platforms for developers that exsists to date. So, I don't really agree that they're just "making face"
They're absolutely just "making face". For each thing Microsoft frees, how many more are proprietary shit? Visual Studio, proprietary. Windows, proprietary. Etc.