Disclaimer : This post may come off as a rant. I'll do my best to prevent that. However, I do not hate Microsoft. They have a lot of great products. The purpose of this post is merely to point out the quite cultural differences between the open source world and the Microsoft world.
Today I attended an MSDN event at a local movie theatre. I must say that it was indeed a different culture than my local LUG, and the Hacking Society branch here. I haven't used Windows exclusively since I was 17, so I've definitely found myself out of my element, and in an "community" that I had never experienced. I did not stay for the whole presentation (all four hours of it, with no wifi available in the theatre), mostly because I was bored, but for a few other reasons as well.
If It's Not Broke...
Ian Bicking recently wrote a post about why he doesn't buy into Microsoft's Silverlight. The basic idea is that Microsoft's (as well as Adobe's) current attitude toward the web is that they are trying to "fix" the web. I was confused by this post, until I attended the MSDN conference. While I'll admit that Microsoft had quite the number of tools that they had built for their developers (including a cross .Net Framework compiling infrastructure in Visual Studio 2008), but their attitude was that they were fixing something that was broken.
There's a large difference between improving something, and fixing something that is broken. When something is broken, it means that nothing works, and it's worthless. If the internet is broken, why are we using it on a normal basis? Sure, we could use improvements. That's what the whole "Web 2.0" thing was about: improving the internet.
Integration != Assimilation
My initial interest in attending the MSDN event was their talk of integration. Recently, the boys in Redmond have been making an albeit mixed effort to become "not evil." I commend them for. They've been trying to find open source "rockstars" who are willing to use their tools and promote their tools. They've published the source to .Net (even though their license is a freakin' joke). So I was naturally interested in how they want to "integrate."
Instead of hearing about their efforts to help out the Mono project or something like that, I hear them talking about making Javascript more like a .Net language. WTF!? Then it hit me. Instead of integrating, conforming to standards, Microsoft's idea of integration is assimilation. That means that everything that is worth anything in this world should be molded to conform to Microsoft's standard. Having worked almost entirely in web development for the last few years, I understand how well Redmond's finest adhere to standards. I suppose this isn't news, but when the presenter said "We wanted to make JavaScript more like a .Net language" I turned off mentally. Provide me with a library, give me an API for interfacing JavaScript with your services, but don't change Javascript, and don't change the Javascript language because YOU don't like it.
If You Can Compile It...
At the MSDN event, it was stressed that "If you can compile it, we [i.e. Microsoft] care about it." It was also very apparent that they didn't much care for an language that wasn't compiled. Scripting was unneccessary in their eyes. Granted, there are benefits to compiled languages. Bugs that are usually hard to track down can be caught at compile time. However, discounting scripting languages jsut because it doesn't have anything to do with the Common Language Runtime doesn't help your "integration" cause. Scripting languages have their place in the world just as compiled languages do. That "compiled only" fanboyism just makes me roll my eyes.
Now, I'm not gonna say that these attitudes are wrong. In fact, like I said, it was more of a change of culture to me. I'm used to the LUGs, and reading blog posts about Richard Stallman and the crazy things Eric Raymond has to say. The differing opinions, as much as it annoys me, is what I'm used to. What I'm not used to is people cheering when a new ORM (Orcas) is introduced to the .Net framework. So I'll stay in my open source world, with all the turmoil of GPL vs BSD, Vim vs. Emacs, and Gnome vs. KDE, because the "hive mind" culture is just not for me.