[HN Gopher] Julia Liuson promoted to President of the MSFT DevDi...
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       Julia Liuson promoted to President of the MSFT DevDiv, which now
       includes GitHub
        
       Author : ghuntley
       Score  : 53 points
       Date   : 2021-11-03 18:37 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (pastebin.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (pastebin.com)
        
       | ghuntley wrote:
       | That email was sent by Scott Gu of Azure.
       | 
       | GitHub now reports to the same person that did this to the .NET
       | community. Is anyone paying attention or just me?
       | http://theverge.com/2021/10/22/22740701/microsoft-dotnet-hot...
       | (and https://isdotnetopen.com/)
       | 
       | See also
       | https://twitter.com/geoffreyhuntley/status/14559364800234823...
       | 
       | Other items under this persons remit:
       | 
       | - Visual Studio
       | 
       | - .NET
       | 
       | - Python
       | 
       | - TypeScript
       | 
       | - OpenJDK
       | 
       | - GitHub (+NPM)
       | 
       | - (hint hint) Azure SDKs (hint hint)
       | 
       | - (hint hint) Azure PaaS / Azure Serverless (hint hint)
        
         | fwip wrote:
         | https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/pull/22262 - Just as a heads up,
         | the PR to add this functionality back in was merged half an
         | hour ago.
         | 
         | Maybe it was an evil scheme to sell more VS licenses, but
         | they've at least backtracked and the functionality has been
         | restored for other clients.
        
         | ksec wrote:
         | Ok, the timing of this and Nat Friedman stepping down from CEO.
         | Coincidence?
        
           | ghuntley wrote:
           | The capture of open source programming languages via binary
           | blobs [1][2] and hiring influencers + open-source maintainers
           | so "ecosystem works best on azure" (go look at careers page)
           | is "an absolute a coincidence".
           | 
           | [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/k0s8qw/vs_code_de
           | vel...
           | 
           | [2] https://twitter.com/geoffreyhuntley/status/14559660287441
           | 223...
        
             | geofft wrote:
             | What you call "capture of open source programming languages
             | via binary blobs" is in fact someone trying to run a
             | _closed-source_ application and then being disappointed it
             | doesn 't work the way they want.
             | 
             | It's a closed-source application. Stop expecting that. Yes
             | we all want everyone to write nothing but free software all
             | the time, and yes we all specifically want pylance to be
             | open source, but saying that the existence of closed-source
             | code is an attack on open source is both silly and wrong.
             | Would you be happier if the entire .NET ecosystem were
             | closed-source?
        
               | ghuntley wrote:
               | There was once an old saying "ye, who pays the
               | maintainers of open source, controls the roadmap of the
               | open source project".
               | 
               | Add a dash of people not caring about FOSS tooling (ie
               | mass adoption of visual studio) and the future could be
               | grim.
               | 
               | There is currently a very large amount of infinity stones
               | (core developer tools across all ecosystems) under the
               | control of a single company (!) and reporting to a single
               | person (!)
               | 
               | I hope the cynic within is wrong about this one.
        
               | geofft wrote:
               | So this is just the old "open source sustainability"
               | problem.
               | 
               | Open source has _always_ been largely the work of people
               | funded by hostile corporate interests. The very words
               | "open source" came from hostile corporate interests
               | because "free software" scared their finance people.
               | 
               | And people never cared about FOSS tooling in the past. A
               | whole lot of open source developers use Windows and
               | macOS. There was a time when Sublime Text was as popular
               | as Visual Studio Code. .NET gained its popularity while
               | it was closed source, while Miguel de Icaza was
               | reimplementing it as Mono.
               | 
               | (Frankly, there was a time - which only ended a couple
               | years ago - when Visual Studio proper, not Code, was not
               | even freely available, never mind open-source-ness.)
        
         | flavayoda wrote:
         | Disclaimer: I work at MSFT on Julia's team
         | 
         | While the recent hot reload was super disappointing and a
         | larger organization failure, I can't say enough good things
         | about Julia as a leader. She is incredibly developer-focused,
         | smart, and approachable. She is everything I would want to see
         | in a CVP / President, and a fantastic track record of both
         | people and product.
        
           | hitekker wrote:
           | You should comment with your real account, if you have one.
           | Otherwise some folks might interpret this comment to be
           | artificial, damage control.
        
           | cnxs wrote:
           | We frequently hear amazing testimonies in MSFT threads here.
           | Who does _she_ report to? We don 't know the grand plan
           | (perhaps neither does she) and that org looks a little too
           | crowded for my taste.
        
             | Bognar wrote:
             | She reports to Scott Guthrie. Is this supposed to be
             | relevant to something?
        
         | Bognar wrote:
         | Julia is pretty well regarded by people under her.
         | Additionally, she has some big OSS names reporting directly to
         | her like Miguel de Icaza and Guido van Rossum. Perhaps if she
         | was hellbent on destroying open source then we might hear more
         | about it or see some high profile exits?
         | 
         | Have you considered that this could be just a bog standard
         | corporate promotion + re-org and that you're reading too much
         | into things?
        
           | vxclax wrote:
           | Van Rossum always goes to the corporation that is a)
           | currently interested in Python and b) has many core
           | developers that he can exert influence over.
           | 
           | First Google: When Google started to favor Go, he quit.
           | 
           | Then Dropbox: Quit after the walrus operator drama.
           | 
           | Both OSS names seem quite corporate-oriented to me. How would
           | they _prevent_ OSS destruction?
        
           | ghuntley wrote:
           | Previous leak related to decisions made by Julia from
           | engineers in the .NET team at http://pastebin.com/RF6015kv
           | 
           | Now, to be clear, the focus should not be on the person.
           | Instead the many corporate strategies in play here. GitHub
           | just got slotted into the person who overlooks Azure SDK
           | development.
        
             | Bognar wrote:
             | It's incredibly reductive to refer to DevDiv as Azure SDK
             | development.
             | 
             | Also, Nat reported directly to ScottGu whose purview is
             | literally all of Azure and then some. Don't you think
             | that's a closer relationship to Azure than someone who
             | "overlooks Azure SDK development"?
        
             | supthere wrote:
             | > Now, to be clear, the focus should not be on the person.
             | 
             | He said after spending several hours drawing focus to the
             | person, including by name in the very previous breath.
        
       | aaomidi wrote:
       | Hahaha
       | 
       | She was one of the major reasons I left Microsoft. Good memes.
        
       | steego wrote:
       | I'm not going to pretend I am an OSS champion.
       | 
       | I am not.
       | 
       | I want to use tools built by people who are paid and supported. I
       | don't care if it's commercial or OSS.
       | 
       | I want to pay for my lunch.
       | 
       | I want my interests and the person making my lunch to have an
       | aligned interest in making me a good lunch.
       | 
       | With that, I actually like that Julia focuses on revenue, but I
       | _hated_ the sudden decision to remove dotnet watch.
       | 
       | I thought it was a stupid and pointless distraction to a bigger
       | cloud strategy.
       | 
       | I'm not saying Microsoft needs to kill Visual Studio, but they
       | should start talking about a DNR at some point in the future.
       | 
       | I hope this promotion will make it easier for her to focus on the
       | right revenue streams so she'll feel less compelled to save
       | legacy revenue streams.
       | 
       | She needs to focus on making it easy to make and deploy OSS
       | software. Everything will fall into place and the revenue
       | opportunities will be there.
       | 
       | Microsoft has incredible people in their R&D. Cloud based tools
       | will make it a lot easier to take the fruit of their research and
       | bring it to market so much faster.
       | 
       | There's so much opportunity for amazing new products that can and
       | should be billed monthly (or by usage) on my employer's
       | Azure/GitHub account.
       | 
       | Just stop hanging to the old software licensing model. IT
       | organizations _loathe_ software licensing game Microsoft insists
       | on playing, but we will piss money away on cloud services and
       | SaaS solutions.
        
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       (page generated 2021-11-03 23:02 UTC)