+972 52-548-6969
Whose time & effort?
Phil Haack has managed to convey my thoughts about MS duplicating existing work better than I could.
Specifically, this is important:
Duplication Is Not The Problem. Competition is healthy. If anything, the problem is, to stick with the evolution analogy, is that Microsoft because of its sheer might gives its creations quite the head start, to survive when the same product would die had it been released by a smaller company.
I wrote Rhino Mocks for myself. It seems to be useful for other people, which is a happy coincidence, but I wrote it for myself.
One thing that I think that Phil has missed is what exactly I am objecting to. Up to and until I am held accountable to Microsoft deliverables, I do not care about Microsoft's wasted time and effort. If such a thing happens, it is Microsoft's problem.
What I do care about is my wasted time & effort. I talked about it extensively in the past.
Comments
I wonder if its more about attitudes. Oren, when you wrote RhinoMocks, (I'm guessing) your attitude was something along the lines of "I need a tool to help me to solve problem X. That tool and its functionality doesnt exist, therefore I must write it myself"
Whereas Microsofts attitude doesnt seem to be like that. Its more like "How can we write something similar, and make it better?"
or
"If we implement this technique, we can capture the community"
They should definitely provide integration with existing solutions including open source.
Or,
"Our larger community can benefit from this set of technologies. There are OSS implementations but they dont integrate with our tools at a level where we can stand behind them. We don't want to invest in a specific OSS project and build such integration because that will get us too deeply tied to that project and its politics. We don't want to take over a project because everyone will look to us to fail. So, its safer and simpler to duplicate effort, build good integration with Visual Studio, publish guidance, and push this technology out to the mainstream."
In other words, Microsoft is too big a target and has too much influence to get involved in an OSS project. Its safer and most likely cheaper to build their own.
Not arguing with your assertions, just providing a likely answer to your "why?"
Comment preview