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Comment by NeedMoreTea | Hacker News Reader

In threads about github etc, many were claiming Microsoft are a completely different, and better company, with a fine open approach to business these days.

Seems nothing much has changed in their approach in 30 years.

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They've learned how to appeal to the easily-convinced crowd with all their "openness" and "modernity" (for lack of a better word.) They're opening up stuff that wasn't likely to be a source of revenue, and I bet they make even more from the non-obvious telemetry embedded in them. I see it as nothing more than another marketing attempt.

They've really done a number on these people, because not only are they using MS stuff again, but they've been turned into "New Microsoft" cheerleaders in many a comment thread, for a couple of years now.

In retrospect, I'm pretty sure that was astroturf.

The story of a how new, enlightened CEO was going to embrace open source, etc. was tailor-made for folks who want to believe they finally won over the last fight's great satan. The buzz seemed to be everywhere for a while, and then stopped. And it was timed conveniently around several open source releases that also made a splash - classic reenforcement advertising.

And it seems to have worked.

I was one of the cheerleaders ever since I learned about Scott Hanselman and others. The meta is that there are at least two camps about this at Microsoft.

This changed slowly over the last two years for me as I watch the dot net special interest group at Fedora struggle. Microsoft has not released enough of dot net core as free and open source software. It looks free and open source but it isn't. The programmers at red hat (almost all the dot net sig folks are red hat people) are too nice to raisea fuss over it.

I don't think Scott Guttrie's team is lying. I want to believe in their sincerety. However, I also understand likely nobody at Microsoft: from the bottom engineer to Satya Nadella or the board is nearly at all enthusiastic about free software. They may approve of "open source" but only as far as it helps business. I can't blame them for being practical. However, I can yell at their hypocrisy.

Microsoft, give the fedora people what they need. Release the sources please.

> Microsoft has not released enough of dot net core as free and open source software. It looks free and open source but it isn't.

Could you expand or do you have a link to the discussion? First I'm reading of this (but also haven't really looked into it).

Nice.

What open source releases were these, and what tim{e,ing} was this?

Microsoft is a huge company. You’re going to see different reactions to Azure, VSCode, .NET, and their voice assistant/spyware program.

That's why pervasive "Does anyone else love the New Microsoft?!" style comments have seemed odd. People talking about how they like specific products is perfectly normal.

These days I assume by default the intentions of companies are not good (especially the big ones) but when I was younger, I used to think these companies play nice with others (generally speaking). I hate that I feel this way, but pretty much everything they do is towards one goal only - money and market share, everything and everyone else be damned :(

you know, there's a theory of this and I personally find it much more useful at explaining things than most other political/economic theories... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism

And with that system, you trade the owner (capitalist) with a different owner (government). The proletariat are still in pretty much the same position.

And there's also the issue of communism the economic system, and communism the social control system. Economically speaking, does have some justifications. But the social control is more than willing to kill and imprison people for disagreeing with the economic system.

Capitalism also has similar types of flaws, and its own directly related deaths it causes. The difference is that capitalism the social control system blames individuals for systemic issues, including death and injury.

Yes, the ownership merely changes hands.

The problem is not mere ownership though. Who owns it matters, because different owners have different incentives.

The incentive of a private business owner is profit. Especially for a company that is publicly traded, where investors have the power to sue management for malfeasance if they don't get a return and the company has been particularly charitable. If it can be done, you must fuck over the customer to make profit for shareholders, or be replaced by someone who will.

The incentive of a nationalized industry is the good of the state and its voters. Management is incentivized to provide a good product at a fair price to everyone, or else they get voted out of their job.

ownership by "government" is not the same as ownership by the working class (which includes you unless you are very wealthy). part of the point of socialism is much more democratic control of government anyway.

>And with that system, you trade the owner (capitalist) with a different owner (government).

you're mistaking the economic law "Marxism" explaining why and how that stuff is happening for the actual political forces who advocate and force such a change. It like Newton's laws and the actual people shooting the guns which are working based on the Newton's laws.

Ah yes, this comment was bound to appear. As it always does when we find out that the people running Windows do something that's not a good idea.

They are more open with their development division, as they have to be. Windows is a completely different division, and more often than not, the notable members of the development division will call out their company.

Except they are not separate divisions. There are no subsidiary companies for Windows or Development, yet there are for Xbox, Mobile, Games and others.

Windows and development are subject to the same executive team, and same orders from the top setting corporate direction.

It was precisely that break-up that was ordered by the US court during the anti-trust case, and stopped with the arrival of the Bush administration.

Eventually all divisions roll up to the same executive team. The level at which Windows and the people responsible for this decision meet is far above where the decision is or was made.

Mobile and XBOX aren't subsidiary companies. Mobile rolls up closer to Windows than the browser team does which led to the mess that is UWP and the Windows 8 (and on) start menu.

Sorry, your comment is inaccurate.

I find I don't really care how Microsoft likes to divide up its stuff internally. Either this kind of nonsense is supported by the company or it isn't.

Good for you if this stance helps you. But ultimately the world is more complex.

Do you judge a given country population by the act of their leader? Because you have no reason to care how a given country divide its stuff. If a country does something that must mean that everyone in this country support this thing right?

You've got the analogy backwards:

If people act malevolently, encouraged by the leader of the country, then that leader is bad, and the country is bad because of that leader (and their associates who could stop the malevolence).

It doesn't matter that in some small corner of the country there's a grandad baking cupcakes for orphans, the country isn't saved from the malevolence (or ignorance) of their leaders by that.

You can give countries aid to convince them you're nice; but if your leadership is countenancing selling armaments to the Saudis -- knowing they're using them against civilians -- then they're corrupt.

All companies who want to do some evil for profit also take part in window dressing, it salves their own consciences and acts as PR.

Countries do not get to choose who their citizens are (and the ones we do are generally considered hellholes). But companies have the power to set policy, and the power to hire and fire. So yeah, I get to judge the company by what its parts repeatedly do.

Maybe we should stop evaluating companies like we evaluate people.

Companies are just people though - the guys in charge of decisions are the ones we're ultimately evaluating. That the left hand of the company doesn't know what the right hand of the company is doing isn't much of an excuse, as ultimately the buck stops at the executive and board positions.

There's no way a decision like this one didn't get approval from the top layers of the company as it no doubt had to go through different levels of legal, product and everything in between.

On the side, I've owned some chain restaurants for 32 years. Mine have always been noted as friendlier, cleaner, fresher and all that. I like to say that it's cause it runs downhill and I care about the customer experience.

Three years ago, I sold one of those restaurants inside a mall while still owning one just two blocks away. People from the mall come into this restaurant. Just yesterday someone told me that they hated the mall one. "They're just so mean to everyone!"

They did not know I was the owner.

> Companies are just people though

Eh, this is like saying that people are just collections of cells. It doesn't tell you much about the high-level behavior observed.

I don't think that's necessarily true. The binary line at which we judge objects begins with the concept of sentience/self-awareness. If our cells work to do something bad, we can't blame them - they aren't sentient. If people work to do something bad, we can and have always judged the group - they are sentient and are capable of making decisions within a moral framework.

There are group effects for groups of people, just as there are effects that organised groups of cells have that collections of cells do not.

If someone hands you a cupcake and punches you in the face with the other hand then you don't think that the two actions are from separate "organisations" of cells (maybe, in cases of schizophrenia, or similar).

People in an organisation often lack agency to fully control actions based on their personal ethics. This is often exploited by controlling influences.

if the cells are sick, the person is sick. you don't just say you have a little cancer but on the whole you're chilling and are ready to goto the beach

They are legally people under the broken legal system of America. I will treat their crimes, their lack of morality, their low ethics, and their sociopathy the same as a human as long as they are "people".

It’s not much better in the EU today. Do you argue that users were pushing for this: https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/12/17849868/eu-internet-copy...

They have less rights e.g. no freedom to be represented in parliament, no imprisonment; hence a legal entity is still different than a natural person.

Big companies employ a lot of people who can do both good things and bad things. Many teams and projects have nothing to do with each other. Treating a large organization as a single person for moral purposes is a category mistake.

It's entirely possible for Microsoft to do bad things like this while GitHub keeps doing its thing and Typescript and VSCode developers keep doing their thing.

With a company the size of Microsoft, I am certain that there are different factions/divisions/groups within the company that might have very different values, views, priorities, to the degree that they might as well be different companies.

A better point of view might be this: Microsoft is a huge company, not all the people that work there are (what we might consider) ethical engineers, and some of the adherents to the sleazy business practices of their past are still around.

It’s not a good reason, but it’s possibly the reason. Ultimately it’s not really useful to attempt to paint an entity as large as Microsoft as all good or all bad.

They are as open as Intel, AMD, ARM, Google, Apple and IBM, the beloved ones from FOSS.

> the beloved ones from FOSS.

I don't recall these being "beloved". This sounds like a troll to me.

Sure Intel do FOSS graphics driver development, but I doubt they've ever been beloved due to their constant scandals (ME and Meltdown recently, and further back there's ClassMate, Itanium/Itanic, etc.)

AMD promised open drivers. We're still waiting.

ARM systems are usually locked down and full of blobs (e.g. for graphics, etc.). Plus ARM don't make chips, they just sell licenses to their designs to third parties, which is completely anti-FOSS.

Google do support a lot of FOSS development, but their online monopolies and spying infrastructure have always kept people suspicious.

Apple has a habit of turning liberally licensed FOSS into proprietary software (e.g. OSX is based on Mach and BSD, Safari is based on KHTML, etc.). Their mobile OS also requires programs to be signed, and they charge a $99 fee for developers to get a certificate.

As far as I'm aware IBM have historically been the enemy. They certainly pushed Linux forward around the millenium, but since then I've not come across them outside bloated "enterprise solutions" that I doubt many in the FOSS world would consider relevant.

> AMD promised open drivers. We're still waiting.

No, we aren't. AMD's promise was fulfilled quite a while ago. They officially contributed, and work on, a FOSS driver for the Linux kernel, and also for Mesa. One of their devs is one of the most active Mesa committers this year alone.

AMD are more committed than Intel is, it would seem, given that AMD's drivers are far better quality than Intel's.

I'm happy to be corrected; for the record I searched for this before posting, and found things like https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-the-latest-amd-radeon... which are very recent and talk about installing AMD proprietary drivers.

(I haven't been tracking this closely since I've avoid NVidia and ATI (hence AMD) graphics for about 15 years, due to their driver blobs)

> AMD promised open drivers. We're still waiting.

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/drivers/gpu/dr...

There you go.

Exactly, however everyone jumps of joy in a "us vs Microsoft" when they release something for FOSS.

ARM is an open company? When did that happen? They still don't provide architecture reference manuals for download (unless you are customer), unlike AMD or Intel.

I can download a 6000 page PDF that seems to be what you want for the low low price of registering my email address

Their GPUs are much more closed though.

So are everyone's (not that it makes things much better)

Intel and AMD GPUs are nicely documented nowadays.

Oh, it's just an email address now? Good to know, thanks.

Nice username.

"A man is not dead while his name is still spoken."

GNU Terry Pratchett

The funny thing is IBM might be the most open in this list.

They are doing very well about being open in the developers space.

Open sourcing libraries and tools that make the lives of programmers much easier and even porting them to run on linux.

This may be a selfish approach approach from Microsoft (win the hearts of developers and the regular users will follow), or it might be signs of actual positive change.

The one thing that is clear is this openness does not extend to regular users of windows.

I'm mentally making notes that I should really be switching back to linux for my core desktop computing, even if I continue to use Microsoft technology like vscode, typescript and dotnet core.

The world around Microsoft has changed though. Yea, they are still the same company even with their strategic realignment around open-source, but now they face healthy competition from arguably worse (at least just as bad) tech giants that makes Microsoft seem more benign.

Every now and then I hear some PR spiel or read some comment on HN about how great Windows is now and I try to run it, but I always run into some dumb thing like this that turns me off.

I think what has changed is that Microsoft is no longer the massively dominant force it was pre-Internet. In those days, it really was the 1,000lb gorilla. It is still a big company, but Google at least can certainly compete with it as an equal.

> Seems nothing much has changed in their approach in 30 years.

Well, their PR department changed a lot, so they can keep the same old tactics while having people think they're the good guys now.

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