Microsoft Open Technologies, a Microsoft subsidiary, posted about its open source contributions, including TypeScript editor support, Vagrant, Docker, and web standards work.
HN commenters cite it as evidence of Microsoft's open source push, especially TypeScript support in Sublime Text, Vim, and Emacs, and discuss how Microsoft channels contributions.
Their Surface tablets don't appear to have sold very well, but to claim they are "dead" seems more than a little batty? Microsoft appears to be alive and well in the enterprise.
As an example, Microsoft (with Azure) is doing the same as Amazon in the cloud space. Now with Azure VMs and Azure websites, even more so. Websites on PHP or node.js? Hadoop? Go for it.
Want to run your own VM image.. fine, just upload it, Microsoft don't give a crap what OS you run. They offer pages and pages of VM flavors built by the community: http://vmdepot.msopentech.com/List/Index
I think that Microsoft are starting to get it. In my opinion they are entering the next phase of their lifecycle. Microsoft are starting to realise that they need to be open to survive. Google on the other hand, appear to be delving into their 'dark years' of wall-building and blocking, which Microsoft went through and (I believe) are starting to emerge out of the other side of (just sprouting seedlings, but still).
Several years ago people like Scott Hanselmann evangelized the open sourcing ASP.NET stack. It was hard to do and a huge fight in Microsoft, but it is now out there and this has started a conceptual change within Microsoft. http://www.msopentech.com is the next big step. The first job for the OpenTech team was officially supporting a port of Redis to Windows. I expect we will will see more of the same. Want to keep track? Want to make some pull requests (they will be accepted)? Pop on over to…
I work on the team doing Visual Studio's Tools for Apache Cordova. While I don't work on the open-source side of the fence, we have engineers focused on contributing to Cordova.
Search the mailing list for "microsoft" (which picks up e-mail addresses) compared to "windows" to see where MS involvement picked up.[1]
A lot of Microsoft's involvements in open source are via MS Open Tech. See their website for more information about their contributions.[2] While this doesn't show checkins, here are their blog posts about Cordova.[3]
[1] http://callback.markmail.org/search/?q=list%3Aorg.apache.incubator.callback-dev+microsoft
[2] https://msopentech.com/what-we-do/
[3] https://msopentech.com/blog/tag/cordova/
It's pretty obvious that's their goal.
"...you can develop TypeScript code using the online playground tool or Visual Studio 2012. But this is not it! You can also use Sublime Text, Vim or eMacs as the team has kicked off work on syntax files for these popular editors JavaScript developers love to use. And as the specification is public, anyone can create their own syntax files for other editors as well."
http://msopentech.com/blog/2012/10/01/sublime-text-vi-emacs-typescript-enabled/
> but I want my development tools to be cross platform (which is why I like Sublime Text, Eclipse, and similar tools).
Still not sure why you're complaining. There's great support for TypeScript for Sublime, Vim, Emacs, Intellij IDEA and Eclipse.
http://msopentech.com/blog/2012/10/01/sublime-text-vi-emacs-typescript-enabled/
http://blog.jetbrains.com/webide/2013/02/typescript-support-in-webstorm-6/
http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/typescript
I don't think it has to go through MS legal yet. Nokia has to legally act as if the merge does not go through. If/when Microsoft will sell this phone, it will probably be through a subsidiary, just like it does currently all open source contributions through https://msopentech.com , to avoid respecting the patent licenses.
Yep, we're listening, and it's actively being worked on. See this: http://msopentech.com/blog/2014/02/25/vagrant-and-hyper-v-provides-managed-devops-work-environments/, and there's more like it still to come.