My 16 year old daughter took to it like a duck to water

Oh fuck no! HELLL FUCK NO!!!!!

Linux advocates have been using the argument that their their kids and grannies take to a new OS just fine. That argument was NEVER good enough for the Windows fan base. I'll be damned if a fucking Windows fan thinks he can use it on me!!! You leave me no choice but to retort with the same response you gave Linux users all these years:

Face it, Windows 8 is just not ready for the consumer market.

I'm aware of the propaganda and the non-portable code they release for only one platform. They're still not a big player in open source. Maybe if they were, they'd be able to sell a fucking phone. Even if they released the same volume of source code as one of their competitors... what difference does it make if no one uses it?

If they contributed, they contributed.

I gave blood once ~10 years ago. I'd hardly rate myself as a leader to the cause. Microsoft's contribution to open source is rather small and on par with me giving blood once. Sure, it helps, it's nice, it's better than nothing. It hardly makes them a big name in open source.

It's that I find Google's selfishness more useful than Microsoft's selfishness. I don't think I'm alone with that either. So, to answer the question in the headline, as a selfish developer, no Microsoft is not the most friendly for open source. It's fine to help yourself but when you actively look for ways to help yourself and avoid helping others... not gonna win my selfish vote. Google helps themselves and there's a lot of incidental helping to others. Microsoft seems to be making a point of making sure they don't help anyone else while helping themselves. I'll take Google's accidental over MS's intentional any fucking day. I'm a pig like that.

They only "contribute" code that requires a Microsoft license to use. Can you use their code without running their VM on their OS? No. Microsoft only releases stuff that require Microsoft products to work (save a few exceptions where it was the company that they acquired that was doing it).

Do I have to run Android to use Google's contributions to the Linux kernel? No. For that reason, I consider Google's contributions a lot more friendly to open source than Microsoft's because they're generally more useful and not limited in usefulness as an express design goal.

I suspect Google, despite having a competing product, has more commits to Firefox than Microsoft does. It's not that Google is a perfect saint, they're not, it's that it illustrates how MS's views on open source differ greatly from everyone else's. Yes, I know that all apparent altruism is a sham and Google is looking out for #1. But there are more positive (and tangible) side effects from Google's apparent altruism than there are from Microsoft's. And since I'm looking out for #1 too, I'm going to pick the products and services that fit my needs best as a developer. That generally means products and services that work well with other products that may or may not be from the same vendor.

Yeah, I hate most Linux exploit articles. They always seem to be about what happens after the machine was rooted. Binaries changed out, configurations changed, permissions set, yadi yadi yada... They never seem to be about how they got rooted in the first place.

He said "I want to get into IT work" not "I want to be a professional developer." IT work is generally support, maintenance, and management. While some programming can come in handy, it's generally not the primary focus of the field. Python and other scripting languages are well suited for IT work, IMO.

pgAdmin has Windows binaries too. gah... I guess whatever makes them silly Windows admins feel special.

Qt licensing has continuously became less restrictive over the years. That fact alone surely has to have had some impact on where KDE libraries went. As I understand it there has always been this top down limitation where Qt changes (while they may have gotten their inspiration from KDE) always came from the Trolltech/Nokia side. The inability to mingle in the upstream (which wasn't helped any by the controversy and confusion in licensing) is what brought about the duplication of effort.

One of the interesting bullet points:

Reduction of duplication with Qt by removing classes and using their Qt alternatives

A lot of classes were rewritten way back in the day when the licensing of Qt was under fire. Once those issues went away there really wasn't much point in continuing the duplication of effort. Bringing the two back together is long overdue. In the long run it could bring greater stability to KDE applications since more developers will be working on improving the same framework instead of two independent but close frameworks. This is good for both Qt and KDE.

K Desktop Environment. Servers really aren't their primary target. Also what can't you do for your server via a Bash login or other remote management protocol for a minuscule fraction of resources? What really requires a full on GUI desktop environment on your server? There might be some niche need for it, sure, but mostly I tend to think you're doing something wrong.

Because everyone cares what "drinkypoo" has to say.

Unless you are an expert programmer, with commit access to the codebase, open source is meaningless.

Thanks. I keep trying to tell everyone that open source software is written by experts. It's nice to finally get some affirmation.

You go right on running that itsy bitsy percentile of .Net applications that actually work with Mono and I'll go right on ignoring the technology that's yet to make itself worthwhile on anything but Windows.

Microsoft platform -> Microsoft platform... looks vendor locked to me. I'm not going to bother trying to understand much beyond that point because it's the reason the language is going nowhere.

You probably can't understand this, but when every vendor besides Microsoft uses the words "cross platform" or "portable" they mean something far more reaching than Microsoft's definition. For example we don't consider Firefox portable because it on Ubuntu 11 and Ubuntu 12. We consider it portable because it runs on many Linux OS's, BSDs, Macs, many flavors of Windows even if some of those OSes happen to be running on ARM instead of x86. Only in the Microsoft camp is "cross platform" used to describe a program that runs on more than one revision of the same OS.

And no, Mono doesn't really count since it can't do shit with most of that "platform independent" object code generated by Microsoft compilers. The compile once use everywhere dream often doesn't work even for the mighty Java. How can we expect a technology from a vendor bent on locking software to its OS to do any better?

Yeah I might not know much about your wonderful CLR but I know what matters: it limits you to OSes made by Microsoft which makes it not portable by most standards.