After Microsoft’s blitzkrieg take-over, the Open-Source JavaScript community, as we know it, is coming to an end.

All things said and done, you must stand in awe, at how Microsoft, executed this takeover, with very little to no resistance from a community of hundreds of thousands of active JavaScript developers, even introducing the use of TypeScript in React, Angular, and Node, while cornering both source-control and distribution of code. It’s strategically perfect in all dimensions. Kudos to Nadella and his team.

When I started coding, I really loved the Open Source JavaScript community. It did always feel weird, that people would write code, and share it for free. But people did, and still do, and it felt amazing and crazy at the same time.

There was Github to manage our sources and npm, which indexed the open-source libraries and made it super-easy to search, find, and import functionalities, and to create, update and share libraries ourselves. And on Stackoverflow, you could even get free support and advice. JavaScript was improving year after year with every ECMAScript release. It wasn’t perfect, but it all worked. The future seemed bright.

Although Open Source grew inside capitalism, it’s values weirdly weren’t part of that capitalistic worldview. That’s why, from day one, it was bound for destruction at some point or another.

Then one day Microsoft came in and took control of the two core tools, which were the gateways to the whole Open Source community; npm and Github. I don’t think people saw this coming, and it’s clear that the majority of developers, even today, don’t realize what happened and how it will affect them very shortly.

Once the take-over was complete, a massive propaganda onslaught began to fully convert the idealistic open source community towards the capitalistic Microsoft mantra. It’s a ‘secret’ war, with high-tech propaganda, which over time will silently destroy and remove independence, kill-off non-Microsoft-owned editors, tools, libraries, even JavaScript itself. All of this is inevitable because Microsoft is a for-profit corporation. It’s in its DNA to take over whole industries and turn them into profit-generating monopolies for its shareholders.

Microsoft’s mission is to turn every JavaScript developer into a Microsoft TypeScript money-generating drone, one way or another.

#javascript #typescript #microsoft #software-developer