<story><title>Microsoft Joins the Eclipse Foundation</title><url>https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2016/03/08/microsoft-joins-the-eclipse-foundation/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ethomson</author><text>Interesting.  I was part of the original &amp;quot;Team Explorer Everywhere&amp;quot; team that built their Eclipse plug-in for TFS and had originally championed this as a good idea.  But really, I&amp;#x27;m not sure that I&amp;#x27;m enthused about this news.  Certainly this is good community building, but I&amp;#x27;ve found the Eclipse Foundation to be so ineffective that I&amp;#x27;m not sure what purpose this &lt;i&gt;actually&lt;/i&gt; serves except to send out a press release.&lt;p&gt;My team was initially acquired; we were originally a small company in a cornfield in Illinois called Teamprise, where we built the original TFS plug-in for Eclipse.  At the time, we were Eclipse Foundation members and reasonably happy about it.  Certainly it was nice to give back (in terms of membership fees) to a project that we were a part of and took advantage of.  And the Foundation has a few really solid employees and it was nice to talk to them about tech stuff.&lt;p&gt;But our larger goal in joining the Eclipse Foundation was largely unmet, which was to actually &lt;i&gt;partner&lt;/i&gt;.  For example:  we hoped to bring in a contractor who could occasionally tackle some bugs in Eclipse on AIX which ultimately affected our customers.  We were a tiny company and going deep on some weird problem that only affected the Motif AIX build was not particularly rewarding.  So we hoped to engage the Foundation to help us out here: we would pay this contractor if they could help us find them.  But we were rebuffed in a manner that I found rather off-putting.&lt;p&gt;Despite this, after we became part of Microsoft I still pushed for us to join the Eclipse Foundation.  I stopped pushing when Microsoft had a booth at Eclipse Con one year and a member of the Foundation (apropos nothing) went on a nice, long rant about Microsoft.  I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s particularly classy to make fun of your competitors, nor do I really appreciate inculcating an &amp;quot;us vs them&amp;quot; mentality.  But to do that after we had paid a big hunk of money to sponsor that conference seemed particularly poor form, and if the Foundation is going to make fun of the people who are paying to sponsor their Conference, what does membership buy you?  A steaming pile on your doorstep once a year?&lt;p&gt;In any case, that was when I stopped advocating for Microsoft to join the Eclipse Foundation and instead advocated for us to ignore them wholesale.  I hope that my old team has better luck working with them than I did.</text></comment>
<story><title>Microsoft Joins the Eclipse Foundation</title><url>https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2016/03/08/microsoft-joins-the-eclipse-foundation/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>optforfon</author><text>I feel like I&amp;#x27;m not seeing the forest for the trees.&lt;p&gt;I swear Microsoft&amp;#x27;s business model was to bring people in to their ecosystem and then charge them for what is hopefully a superior development experience.&lt;p&gt;Is there a new business model? How do they lock people in and squeeze them for money? Is their cloud solution radically different from the competition that they can put all their eggs in that basket? What&amp;#x27;s the big picture plan?
Or is the new CEO just going rambo and pandering to DIY geeks who want everything for free ? (myself included!)&lt;p&gt;I feel like there has to be some parallel universe blog where these press releases explain what they&amp;#x27;re doing to investors beyond &amp;quot;we&amp;#x27;re going to take your money, and we&amp;#x27;re going to make things with it. And then give it away for free! Please give us more money&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Like awesome dude... but what the hell is going on?</text></comment>