How on earth is Microsoft "absolutely" behind OSS? Which of their main products is Open Source? Windows? Office? SQL Server? Azure? Exchange? What exactly makes Microsoft a company "absolutely behind OSS?"
Their stupid boot loader still ignores any other operating system for god's sake.
Kudos to people at Microsoft's Marketing and "developer relations" department who won the hearts of developers by allowing TypeScript and VSCode to be FOSS. Suddenly MS is "Absolutely behind OSS".
I work in the public sector in Denmark, and we’ve delt a lot with both IBM and Microsoft over the past 25 years.
Microsoft has been one of our best partners, including for the open source software we run, especially since Azure became their mission.
IBM has been one of the worst, so bad that I’d dread making any deals with them ever again.
I wouldn’t say MS is fully behind OSS though, they contribute a lot these years, but their main goal is still to sell you Azure. I think they won the hearts and minds with .Net core though, I mean VSC is the best ide and typescript is typescript, but the future of a lot of web programming lies within .Net core.
You are likely coloured by being in the one marked where .Net became significant and that’s mostly bacause the only accepted altilernative in Denmark’s monopoly friendly procurement systems were IBM mainframes or Oracle solutions.
Everywhere else RedHat/Jboss won the game and is being replaced by new JWM languages rather then node or .Net though node hides in strange places like the latest SAP framework.
Frontend/native .Net apps are fastly becoming extinct.
MS pretend love for Linux is more an acknowledgement that no one wants dotNET on IIS or anything windows centric in the cloud than any genuine love for Linux so they kind of have to pretend to like Linux workloads and unix tools if they want azure to be more then an niche product.
Oh we have JBOSS in our stack, it’s what handles our service bus. I’d rather we didn’t though, it’s really hard to find JBOSS developers/maintainers for public sector pay checks.
We used to see a lot more of it from our suppliers, but it seems to be rapidly going extinct. Possible because there just aren’t a lot of JBOSS developers/maintainers in general.
I am coloured by my environment of course, but I do work in software cooperatives with 97 other muniplacities, as well as a few European communities and I don’t see anything to indicate that .Net, JAVA and PHP won’t remain the dominant techs in Europe for the foreseeable future.
I like node.js, I use it for hobby projects and I genuinely think graphql is a lot better than rest APIs (and there isn’t a graphql adaptation for .Net that isn’t bad), but I just don’t see the adoption anywhere outside of what you hear from American startups.
And again, I didn’t say .Net would rule all web development , I said it would be important, and if the European public sector continues to run on .Net then it’ll continue to be a billion dollar industry.
dotNET will stay around just like the mainframes but it’s not a growth market nor the worldwide norm for enterprise web backends.
I work on legacy platforms so I know there is good money in dead technology. But that don’t make it the future.
I just don’t see any legacy codebase being rewritten as dotNET and a similar amount of new greenfield dotNET projects as new Perl project being launched due to NETs heritage as a windows component.
If I were a Perl consultant I’m sure I would say the same about Perl and my region and it’s not that long ago that IBM stopped claiming the future was still the mainframe.
The most available job in my country for any programming language is C#, followed closely by JAVA. On third place is PHP. Fourth is Sharepoint and RPA. Around half the number of the C# jobs include some kind of JS requirements but almost every JS job uses a different backend than node.
There is one fullstack JS job. Three JBOSS jobs and six DJANGO jobs.
How is it not? I mean, we’re a muniplacity, we operate around 500 IT systems, that are all moving toward becoming web apps in some form.
The core tech behind these is in 95% of the cases either .Net or JAVA.
Our in-house development has moved from .Net to JavaScript, mainly because we’re small and if our front end had to be JS then our backend might as well be, but now you have something like Blazor.net emerging, allowing for full stack C#, of course we’re going that route.
I didn’t say all, but I frankly think it’s obvious that .Net will play a big part of web development future, considering how big a part it already plays today and considering how Microsoft is moving it forward in all the right ways.
Does it JS really have that much traction on the backend? Maybe outside of Denmark, but our little department is actually one of the few places which uses Node for serious backend application in the entire country. At least that I know of.
I mean, I can go on job databases or LinkedIn right now, and there isn’t a single full stack JS job available in my entire country. There is a lot of JS including jobs of course but they all require you to also/mainly do C#, JAVA, PHP or Python because JS is almost exclusive used on the frontend.
Don’t get me wrong, I actually really like the JS environment. There’s a reason we moved to it, but it’s not like it doesn’t have its flaws either.
I think WASM will absolutely change web development, but I think it’s already made it to the is, I mean, we’re launching our first minor Blazor app this week, and it’s something we typically would’ve build with vue and graphql Apollo, but now it’s all C#.
The world of enterprise typically moves slow though. We’ve recently bought an on boarding system that’s made with web forms for instance. You may laugh at that, but the truth is, at least in my part of the world, that JS hasn’t seen that much adoption outside of hobbyists. Eventually these companies are going to upgrade their client sides, but would you pick modern JS or full stack C# if you were coming from web forms? Hell even if they go vue, react or angular chances are they’ll still use .Net on the backend, as that seems to be the trend pretty much everywhere except for us.
Does it JS really have that much traction on the backend?
I cannot speak to the whole industry as I moved to the states a year ago and my view is quite limited. But for sure Node has a lot of traction and usage in here.
However, generally, I feel developers live in their own echo chambers. For example I personally am very much connected to JS people and Linux/Open Source people. I rarely meet any ASP or Java based stacks.
I think it also depends on who you are developing for. Governments and enterprises for sure use more Microsoft or Java based solutions while startups and private companies are more "bleeding edge".
So to answer your question, I think you're right. If an organization is using WebForms, their most probable choice for upgrade is the newest offering by Microsoft. That's where they have already invested it. collectively.
But other stacks have a lot of users too. And they are not going to switch to .NET even if it becomes FullStack.
This Google Trends results [0] are interesting. Not sure if they tell us anything meaningful or not though.
I manage though, so I get to do the contracting. Mainly our software is enterprise, and it’s always either .ner or java, these days typically with an angular front.
We’re part of several muniplacity driven OSS communities though, where we buy OSS development from small startups and take ownership over project management as well as the codebase.
None of the startups are big on node.js, it’s nostly python, .net, java or php because that’s what they teach at the universities and it’s what they work with in their free time.
I think the node.js environment is great, like I said, but I don’t think it really has much adoption in Europe.
Their stupid boot loader still ignores any other operating system for god's sake.
Kudos to people at Microsoft's Marketing and "developer relations" department who won the hearts of developers by allowing TypeScript and VSCode to be FOSS. Suddenly MS is "Absolutely behind OSS".