A very good show. I enjoyed having Steve as a presenter. It was nice to have someone who has a historical perspective as one who was there. Thanks.
It’s probably not true. Germans refer to the numbered versions of Windows by the German word for that number, e.g. Windows Sieben rather than Seven, Acht, Acht Punkt Eins and Zehn. Windows 9 would have been Windows Neun, not Windows No 
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I will be very negative on Azure here, I think Steve was let off. Azure is pathetic in uptime compared to any competitor you can possibly name. I use AWS, Azure, Wonka Compute and I Cant Believe it’s not a Cloud Ocean every day.
Azure’s reliability is pathetic, but more importantly there is no openness. As they patched for Meltdown they communicated NOTHING to their customers about reboots. They just rebooted machines with zero notification.
Microsoft, in my general and recent experience are incapable of openness.
There is no real business case for buying Azure beyond the executive trust in MS.
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I recommend that everyone be just as cynical about MS in the cloud as they ever were on the desktop.
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You may want to put that question to Walli himself on the Stephen Walli, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft - Ask Him Anything thread – he’s an Azure guy, as you note, so I think he’d be interested in talking about that!
Isn’t that why they say “niner” in radio comms? 
Where to even begin. Can say, after this Episode my Trust in Microsoft is even smaller. As was pointed out, Microsoft has only Open sourced in areas where they are losing. As a Developer I will continue to happily avoid all things Microsoft
Disclaimer: if the criticism of microsoft only open sourcing “in areas where they are losing” had nothing to do with a moral evaluation, you can safely ignore this comment of mine.
Hi @TheEndIsNear,
my first thought when i read
As was pointed out, Microsoft has only Open sourced in areas where they are losing.
was: so why the f*** should they change their ways in areas where they are winning?
I’m not sure I understand why you trust them even less, now they seem to be moving into the general direction of open source.
I guess it might come down to morality vs pragmatism (with microsoft being on the pragmatic side ofc).
From there, the whole open vs. free software dichotomy comes to mind.
(Btw, here is nice read that helped me a lot getting the difference: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation .)
Personally I’m happy that I’m able to work in a field where i can be free and open and pay the bills, but I think that’s not a common situation and I’m certainly not morally superior to any closed-source developer, closed-source engineer etc…I think I’m just luckier.
The next might seem sortof OT, random and unfair to write, but:
I don’t think that RMS just by chance chose software as his area to make the world a better place. I don’t think he might just as well have spend his carrer as a development helper in a 3rd world country.
Instead, I think, just like say Bill Gates, he did the things he loved to do, and did them the way he saw fit.
Having that said, I absolutely respect anybody’s distrust in microsoft and avoiding using it (the same goes a lot of other corporations).
It more comes down to the Claim by Microsoft that they care about Developers, so they are going Open source. No they are going Open source because in the Server space they were getting their teeth kicked in. Microsoft cares about one thing, and one thing only, platform lockin.
But, But, What about…Me! 
Around 5:00, plan 9 is mentioned.
In that context I’d like to mention this podcast which I happened to listen to the other day:
https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2017/12/28/language-design-with-brian-kernighan-holiday-repeat/
If you are as interested in plan 9 and why it didn’t take off:
Brian Kernighan talks about it from 43:40.
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to @sil’s question of what major GPL Open Source project has external contributors and is less than 20 years old… MariaDB. I don’t have the stats to hand but I believe the foundation gets more source contributions from external companies (such as Alibaba and Facebook) and external people than from the MariaDB Corporation. We are also way less than 20 years old.
Ahem. I’m not sure I count MariaDB as new. It’s MySQL 
I’m sure lots of stuff has changed, but unless the claim is that there’s no came-from-MySQL code in it at all, I don’t think it counts…
I think Stephen did a fantastic job representing Microsoft’s open-source side of things to the best of his ability, but he doesn’t represent all of Microsoft or their business practices.
To that end, I still think there are valid reasons to be skeptical of Microsoft and FOSS, and to view the company with skepticism as a ‘fair-weather friend’. It’s like being contacted by an acquaintance (or enemy) who’s been a–hole to you for years and now they want to take you out and buy dinner and drinks. You reluctantly agree after many pleasant interactions at conferences, but the whole time you’re viewing them with complete suspicion and trying to figure out what their angle is. The acquaintance is certainly different now, pleasant even, but you find it hard to shake off that feeling that something is up. Time will tell.
During the episode, what really stood out to me was the question of whether or not Microsoft believes in open-source or not, and I don’t think there was really a good answer for it. They have open-sourced several projects, but we have to wait and see it if they really believe in it. What they have open-sourced seems very calculated to me, from a business perspective.
That said, every Microsoft engineer I have ever worked with or contacted on an individual-level has been awesome and quite pleasant. It’s the company that makes me skeptical, and their sales people…ick.
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That then begs the question: “When is a fork no longer a fork?”. MySQL 8.0 and MariaDB 10.3 are both heading in very different directions and there is not much code in common and I think it highly unlikely you will be able to drop-in replace one for the other any more without re-inserting your data. It becomes a Theseus’s paradox.
I think a more relevant debate to have is CLA (like OpenStack) vs DCO (like the Linux kernel). I’ve had many hours (and a trip to Moscow which turned really bad) debating this already. Almost the next evolution of license debates.
If you’re asking, is MariaDB under different management, or does it have different goals, or is it run a different way, or is it striking for new ground, then I’m happy to answer yes to all those questions! But putting it up as a project with an active community which is less than 20 years old, when it’s a fork of a project older than that, is a bit disingenuous I mean, Ubuntu’s kernel is technically a “fork”, right? and it’s less than 20 years old. But if I were to say “haha that’s an example” then you’d hit me in the face, and rightly so.
…also (please correct me if i’m wrong), AFAIU, the MariaDB-Team did not really have the option to choose any other not-GPL-license, right?
For the server and ColumnStore, we didn’t have an option, no (actually I think we could have done some legal contract thing to change the ColumnStore license but that was before my time).
For clients, tooling, some of the plugins and other things we created we did have options. They are typically GPL for plugins, LGPL for libraries or BSL licensed for tools MariaDB Business Source License (BSL) | MariaDB (turning into GPL after the change date).
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