I dont know if I agree with Kevin's post or not, but I think his unstated criticism is Microsoft purposely "buying up" these developers to shut down the projects

I hate people like this idiot... Obviously someone without the talent who is upset that people with talent are being picked up by MS to produce projects that help the community (MVC, Dynamic Data etc) and MS do appear to encourage community involvement from their employees.

Not sure where the hell he got the 50% pay cut figure from, sounds like a pure concoction!

So what if MS buying up these developer? Doesn't that give incentive for people to go opensource? Secondly I am sure MS don't just buy up the dev to shut down the project(not that they do anyway) they pick up the dev because they are good :). But anyway there are always idiot like that around to keep us entertained...

He is just trying to get more page views with claims with no proofs

How does he prove that people are going for MSFT jobs with 50% paycuts?

What kind of idiot would go for another job with 50% paycut anyways? unless it's <sarcasm>Apple<sarcasm>?

I left a comment on the original post. I realize that it's attention he probably doesn't need but I see no point calling him up on it if he doesn't see people's reactions.

d2d - It was from an earlier post he had made where I think Haack or someone else posted talking about their motivations, and that they had taken a 50% pay cut. It wouldn't surprise me - although MSFT does pay 100% benefits which is a nice touch.

Idiots like him are those that moderate blog comments, so it doesn't matter what you say, if he doesn't like it, it won't show. No need to bother with people like that.

I've read the paycut thing somewhere as well, in a comment from Rob Conery on a blog post I belief. Tried finding it back but I can't :(

I know Rob reads your blog, so maybe he remembers it and will comment :)

I remember the blog post talked about MS and community and buying up the really good devs to improve it. And in the comments, those devs replied that they were ok with taking a paycut if they could change the world from inside, instead of yelling in the wind.

It was a positive post, with good comments :)

Oh, and in that particular post, 5 names were mentioned as examples, 4 MS guys and 1 jQuery guy. Scott Guthrie, Rob Conery where mentioned. Maybe someone else remembers it too :)

Lutz already works for years for Microsoft research, and I'm pretty sure reflector was just a toy project from the beginning which turned out to be a major hit.

Of course MS buys small companies to get major talent on their payroll or hires the best talent out there away from big corps, why wouldn't they? Every large company does that. Oren, I'm pretty sure they've asked you too to join them directly or indirectly. Because you don't work for them now shows you chose not to join them, similar to me.

Though I understand why others take the oppertunity and dont refuse and join MS, especially if the job offered is at a position where you can actually do something fundamental (i.e. not a dev with no control over what's being done). That's not to say because those rock-stars join MS it means that .NET is dying. Of course it's not. They just make room for new talent to show what they can do, and I think that's only healthy.

Bloody hell, like Microsoft wouldn't want to hire guys who are leaders in open source .NET development, who have openly proven skills, ship products and have good relationships with other .NET devs.

And like they wouldn't jump at a chance to be involved in working ON .NET instead of IN .NET - being able to mold the future based on their experiences and skills.

Bravo for the guys giving back even more by working with Microsoft.

I think it's funny that his post only has one comment, I think people quickly dismissed his post as whining and unfounded.

Guys like that frustrate me because they piss off guys like you.

Oren, don't pay attention to this guy...there are many of us out here who appreciate the work you do (If we do only donate a dollar :-)).

Seriously there are way more people out there that are thankful/appreciative than this schmuck (טיפש).

We love you man! Although sometime you piss us off with your one-sentence replies :)

RE: "Mike" Are they really "abandoned"? If the projects are worthwhile, are they forkable? This dude really wants to live the 4 hour workweek and have everything outsourced for him. And the who the f&*k does he think he is to question why someone would go to work for a company? Jealous and lazy, poshlost (if anyone knows Russian, technically not translatable).

I don't think anything in the original post talks about receiving for free? On an equal footing as original author I'd be somewhat annoyed if MS purchased LLBLGen, TestDriven, ActiPro, JetBrains, etc..

But not because I expect anything, just that I prefer more competition and innovation outside of the MS monopoly, we've invest years in .Net as a technology and I like to see companies and people, clever than me, continue to drive it forward, i'll pay if required. The post directs anger at MS, not you or whoever else who freely choose to devote time to open source projects. You can't deny that .Net as an ecosystem is very much where it is today I believe due to external libraries and frameworks that sit on that of, from free NHibernate to all the component vendors. I think its fair to hazard a guess if it was all under MS's roof it might not be a good future. True, it's an exagerration that they'll all be abandoned, I'll grant that but .. yikes.. I've wasted five minutes commenting on a post that doesnt even bother me...

Funny thing is a lot of the people going to MS are continuing work on their projects anyway. Maybe Microsoft should be more like Sun. Instead of inviting the best talent in the industry to drive the framework forward, they can just take the efforts and form a committee to adopt a de-facto standard.

@Matt

Seriously? Can't you slashdot trolls sling your poo elsewhere? I'm so tired of hearing about the "horrible MS Monopoly". That's so last decade, can't you come up with something new? Let's look at Teamplain, one of Microsoft's more recent acquisitions. Before the acquisition, Teamplain was a paid third party add-on to TFS. After, Teamplain is a standard element of TFS.

How dare Microsoft use their Monopoly in the ALM space (because there aren't other companies like IBM or Borland who have the primary market share) to provide a free solution that we had to pay for before!

I think you misunderstood the meaning of the sentence.

Maybe the author is not so pissed of about NOT getting something for FREE.

The point is Microsoft lures people from OSS projects to develop similar products that prove to be lesser valuable that the original projects...

Let's take ASP.NET MVC: with all the shiny micro$oft brand who thinks today of monorail? look how many people blog of Monorail and how many are kicked in front just writing that ASP.NET MVC preview 4 "is out".

But Monorail has FAR MORE features than ASP.NET MVC.

It is a PR movement from Microsoft. They want that the name Microsoft appears everywhere on top, not some FREE OSS project.

Let get a few thing clear here, I believe in OSS and I believe in MS. They both have given me many opportunity that otherwise wouldn't be possible. It's true that some PR movement from MS can overshadow the OSS project, whether it really happen or not depend on us developers. Are we continue to challenge and contribute to the eco system or are we just sit and whine? I believe that there is enough talent in the world that technology will continue to be pushed forward. MS can't snatch them all :)

So I see no reason why it has to be one or the other if the OSS die out it's because we don't support it not because of MS or some other company.

Check this out...if Monorail, nHibernate, and the other OSS projects are so important to the community, Microsoft hiring one person away from the project should not be the death knell of that project.

I agree fully with Oren here. If it's so important to you, why the hell aren't you contributing? And why would I pass on an opportunity be compensated for bringing my contributions directly to the .NET framework? What sacred pact did I sign that says I must continue to work on this product and solve your problems for free?

No on complains about Novell buying the Mono project, or the fact that JBoss, MySQL, or for that matter the vast majority of open source projects are thinly veiled consultancies. "Here's the product for free, if you want to learn how to use it, Pay me." But let Microsoft take notice of the talent out there and suddenly it's "Oh no, M$ is trying to stifle creativity."

Guess what, the project is still there and open source...if you care so much about it, make some contributions. Otherwise STFU!

Microsoft sucks. They are an anti-competitive monopoly. They have long history of taking complete control of their software communities. Get over it.

I think it would be great if Microsoft would hire open source project leaders and contributors to work on the open source projects rather than to work on often-poorly conceived and poorly executed copies of other open source software. One day, hopefully Microsoft will be as open to open source in some of the ways that IBM and Sun are.

The essential issue here is whether Microsoft is succeeding in destabilizing open source projects by recruiting energetic people from the open source projects. Ultimately, I think that if someone is ready and willing to go to work for Microsoft, that they might be ready for a personal change anyway, and maybe they may even be burned out on the open source project work.

I find the "why aren't you contributing" point to be a little overly-opportunistic and not entirely sincere. The quality of open source code has to improve dramatically before a larger part of the population will become interested and compelled to work on even the open source software that they depend on day-to-day.

Scott,

I think it would be great if Microsoft would hire open source project leaders and contributors to work on the open source projects

While this would certainly be nice to have. Why? Where is the financial incentive to do so?

(and yes I can think of at least three good reasons to do so, but they aren't must haves)

The quality of open source code has to improve dramatically before a larger part of the population

Their problem.

Until you put money or time in an OSS project, you don't get to criticize the project, or make demands, or anything.

This is a very simple equation.

there's an air of pure delusion here ... Kevin's post was simply expressing what anyone who actually programs in multiple platforms inately knows ... Microsoft will do what Microsoft needs to, and if OSS is a material threat, they have $20 billion in their coffers to mitigate the threat ... if you bother to look at this graph, www.ohloh.net/.../compare C# represents less than 5% of the OSS java codebase ... buying up the key developers is a good strategy to kill of the potential for C# to become as successful as Java, period.