Is there any evidence in the Nadella years of MS doing this in the way they used to do this in the 90s?
He's been there since 1992. That means that if he was so ethically challenged that he could sit through that without piping up that I have very little hope that there is a real and sincere change happening. Most of what I see is just very clever PR whilst under the hood not much has changed.
They just got a lot smarter about keeping their nastiness out of the public light. The reason why the 'trope' gets trotted out is because this could very well be the part where Microsoft finally gets to 'embrace' the open source world where they can hurt it for real. Keep in mind that nothing comes close to threatening Microsoft at its core business as open source software does.
Open source (LibreOffice) has never seriously threatened office for professionals so much as maybe google docs, and even then not so much. And they’ve made great moves towards subscriptions so that’s going strong.
Windows isn’t threatened so much by open source unless you talk about either Apple or chromebooks. Again, less about open source and more about the web.
They’ve already lost developer mindshare to open source culture. So they responded apppropriately by open sourcing their entire .NET platform, and actually using a useful license like Apache, not some murky custom commercial nonsense.
How do you suppose they’re going to start hurting the open source world? I’m all ears, especially given they’d have to sue companies like FB and Google.
Just because Nadella was there, it doesn’t mean he ran that operation that sued SCO. Otherwise that would’ve come out.
Plus with personalities like Bill Gates, they would clearly override any dissent.
It’s not just that MSFT did what they did, but they established a culture that was cool with it and even came up with the ideas. How do we know they are no longer doing that? It’s not like they openly admitted to what they did in the 1990s...
The burden of proof is in the accusers that claim they haven’t changed a bit. Where’s the proof that they’re the same Microsoft?
I don't think that concept is relevant to this format of discussion.
They're trying, they see the writing on the wall, it's foolish to not see that they're trying. I think it would be equally foolish to just whitewash away the sins of the past.
There isa definite change of tone in the modern Microsoft, but remember that they're still doing a lot of sketchy things. The ongoing patent trolling, or mandatory telemetry in Windows are examples.