Hacker News Reader

Comment by arca_vorago | Hacker News Reader

Embrace, extend, extinguish. I'm constantly surprised at how quickly people forget the lessons of the 90s...

Dude, it's 2016 - that was twenty years ago.

Seriously old memes. At least we don't still have to deal with the cringe worthy "M$".

I still see it here and there, and it's great sign about author's bias. usually saves me from reading the rest of the comment.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/22

if $ was a legal domain character slashdot would change to M$.org

Some things never change, it's in Microsoft's DNA. They are just luring people back in with their open source initiatives because they saw that their stack was becoming obsolete.

As soon as they're back on the horse, we'll see the same behavior we used to see from them. That's my opinion of course. Fool me once...

Dude, I heard the One Floppy is buried in the oak forests behind the Celtic Bayou and can be used to resurrect the Old Ones, who shall bring about a new era of M$$$$$$$....

Unless they initiate extend step, it is just a Fool's cry. EEE works for open standards, I do not see them trying to fork WebGL/HTML.

Microsoft still acts unethically today. NT still has backdoors, almost their entire stack is proprietary. Just because they have made some parts of what they do free software doesn't turn them into the technological equivalent of Jesus. Yes, I am happy that they are freeing some of the stuff they do, but it's clear that they're doing it as a marketing move not because they care about user freedom. So I don't see them ever making the whole stack free software.

They're not Jesus, but they are not Satan either. I've seen EEE called on every single good gesture Satya's Microsoft did, and it's getting old. Is Microsoft the savior of OSS? No. Is the company doing something nice by open sourcing components? Yes.

> NT still has backdoors

For someone speaking of ethics you really can't just leave this here without any support...

http://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-microsoft.en.html

They seem exaggerated for "back doors", because it's possible to avoid them. Yes some defaults might be malicious but the bar for calling something a backdoor is higher than just malicious.

Have you seen the backdoors on Mac OS X, customized Android versions and every other commercial OSes out there?

Which backdoors on [current] Mac OS X versions are you referring to?

The ones that no one knows that exist or not, Microsoft isn't the only company selling closed source OSes.

Darwin doesn't count, because it isn't the full stack, nor can we be 100% sure that even that part of the code is shipped like that.

Done a lot of code-review of Linux lately?

If you bother to read the whole thread, my point is why HNers single out Microsoft, when the same cannot be proven for other companies as well.

> backdoors on Mac OS X

That's proprietary too, so sure. But why are you mentioning Apple in a thread about Windows? I never said Apple was good either...

> customized Android versions

Android is mostly proprietary as well. Replicant is as close as you can get to a free fork of Android.

> every other commercial OSes

s/commercial/proprietary/g

Because many HNers like to bash Microsoft, while at the same time give a white pass the SV beloved companies, which happen to have similar practices.

How does that apply to this, exactly?

This is a GLSL (open standard) to HLSL (microsoft standard) transpiler, open-sourced on the premise to make it "as reference for engineers who are creating web browsers and related applications".

One could see it as a move to make HLSL incorporated in to other web-browsers.

I don't necessarily agree with that, and I do think that MS today is very different from the MS of yore, but I can see how some people might be concerned.

As far as I'm aware, every browser on Windows already converts GLSL to HLSL. Angle does this for Chrome, Firefox, and others.

Does eee still work when you release your software under a free license?

Well I was late to respond to this party, as is obvious, but yes, it still applies. As a matter of fact, even more so.

We all understand ms is a proprietary software producing company, and many in the tech community have been veering away from them in increasing numbers. They have sought to regain this leaking market share by doing some open source initiatives, with the intended purpose of getting people locked in in other areas! This is exactly what we mean in the modern context when we say eee. Embrace (the pro open source community), extend (the oss into other platforms, pulling devs back into the proprietary platform), and extinguish (pull back the open source to reveal the proprietary base it's founded on).

Half the problem is people see open source and think it's automatically good. What we need is FOSS (free open source software) and people need to learn the difference and why the F in front of FOSS is so important.

HN is in the pockets of Microsoft. They could eat children and any post mentioning it would still be downvoted.

> HN is in the pockets of Microsoft.

Please don't post drive-by smears to Hacker News, including of HN itself.

If you or anyone has a genuine concern about this, I addressed a similar comment in great detail a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11844253.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com