Hacker News Reader

Comment by mu_killnine | Hacker News Reader

Man, people are salty about this.

I've been a long-time .net developer and the changes in the last few years have felt really refreshing, even as someone deeply in the microsoft ecosystem.

.Net announcements seemed to feel like monolithic messages coming down from on high. Now, I see folks like Scott Hanselman and the asp.net team (Damian Edwards and David Fowler, mostly) being so open about their design decisions as core moves forward. VS Code seems to have been a smash hit from all indicators I can find.

Sure, Windows isn't OSS, and there's a lot of skeletons in the closet. But the amount of dismissal I read here is frustrating given the amount of earnest effort I see engineers putting into getting things right.

View on HN

I was a teenager when MS was at its worst. In the late 90's and early 2000's. I still remember the Halloween papers. Embrace, extend, extinguish. I know rationally that MS is not that bad anymore. But emotionally its really hard to let it go. At maximum I manage to be "Meh" about whatever MS does, never excited.

I do try to avoid the influence it has on my decision making. But its hard. And its something that likely will never go out of my mind.

On the other hand for the companies that's the price one pays for that behaviour. Humans are not perfectly rational. If you behave like crap there will be people that will harbor grudge until they die, regardless of how you try to make up for past behaviour.

I just wanted to say I really appreciate the honesty in this comment. I find it truly irritating when people talk about EEE like it was yesterday, and obviously still totally company policy just in secret or something.

There are also companies I admit I will probably never want to deal with or get excited about, even if it's not for a particularly rational or currently relevant reason, but it sticks with me too.

How many companies had a policy like EEE that we know of? How many has presented an existential threat to open source and free software as a whole?

I have dislike for MS because of these actions. I recognize that this may have changed. But, how do I know that extinguish isn't coming?

But how to you deal with the fundamental disconnect of worrying about a twenty year gone policy when Google has successfully already completed the extinguish phase? How many truly open source mobile operating systems have died under the foot of Android, an open source Trojan horse?

I mean, heck, look at the hijinks Google has engaged in with Edge after Microsoft agreed to switch to their open source browser engine! Suddenly it would stop working with modern YouTube, and then Google's like "Oops", and undoes it. But ex-Mozilla devs have pointed out that this is a recurring strategy for Google: https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

Or the impending death of ad blocking in Chrome with Manifest V3 shortly after Google introduced their own ad blocker that doesn't impede their own ads?

Why obsess about the possibility that a company which hasn't extinguished in a while, when their competitors are actively doing it right now? I'd say if your focus is on Microsoft, you're worrying about the wrong target, at least for the moment. The return of evil Microsoft is certainly possible and given enough time, even likely, but evil Google and evil Facebook and evil Amazon are here today.

Oh I am with you 100% about Google, trust me there. But, they aren't the topic of this article. I stopped caring for Google when they dropped the moniker "do no evil" and went into censored search in China at about the same time. I think this was like 2006/7?

What I more dislike is how people seem to think that corporations are inherently moral, just, good, or "on our side". I mean, come on with a title like '"Great Satan" no more', this is clearly a moral conversation.

Corporations will generally act in the most profitable way, sometimes it seems altruistic because there's value in winning customer loyalty or developer respect. But they are fundamentally amoral and should never be trusted to act in your best interests.

For this reason, holding a twenty year grudge against a company is just as illogical as standing by one for twenty years because you think they're the good guys. In twenty years, any given business' strategy has probably shifted five times.

> shifted five times.

If not more! My main concern is it shifting back. MS made a TON of money, and was at the height of its glory in the old ways. That kind of thing leaves a mark that fades very slowly.

I've always been worried about how centralized the FLOSS community has become w/ Github. Now its even more of a problem!

I'll be the first to admit that I have a emotional dislike for MS. However, I still have reasons for why I think its a bad idea to for the industry to trust them, aside from my personal feelings. For a long time I had generally positive feelings toward Google. I still generally like Github (though they have their share of problems) while acknowledging it is problematic for the larger community.

In the end, MS is a profit-seeking entity, as is Google, Apple, etc. It's best to take anything that any tech company does with healthy dose of skepticism, but at the same time it's OK to give them a nod when they do something beneficial. I agree that it can be hard to do this with MS when you are used to Ballmer's more predatory vision for the company.

For the record, I'm very happy with what MS is doing in the development space. I'm less happy with the "cloudification" of Windows and the infiltration of ads there, and I'm not at all happy with how MS continues to fund entities that aggressively pursue patent lawsuits in a sort of protection racket [0]. I'm on the fence (and somewhat nervous) about their embrace of Linux and their growing influence there.

Most people seem to treat technology companies as sports teams. This is foolish to say the least. Every company does bad things, and you shouldn't look past those things, even if you are generally happy with the company's behavior. Ignoring the negatives just ensures that there will be no pushback, and the companies will increase their bad behavior if there is an incentive to do so. At the same time, it's OK to like a good thing that a "bad" company does, and encouraging more of these things may help to shape incentives and behavior over the long term.

[0] http://techrights.org/2018/10/26/texas-intellectual-ventures...

I know you know this, but their motto was "embrace, extend, extinguish".

How do we know they have given that up? Many still aren't convinced that non-free software is absolutely a good idea (though it hasn't bitten us yet that much).

Just because they are in the "embrace, extend" phase, doesn't mean they isn't an extinguish coming.

Understand though that "extinguish" may have changed over the years. Only time will tell.

Honestly, I have yet to see something come out of MS' open source work that I actually care about! I'm happy in my non-windows world. What have they even done that applies? TypeScript and VS Code? These are essentially irrelevant to me. So what reason do I have to extend my trust to them?

"How do we know they have given that up? Many still aren't convinced that non-free software is absolutely a good idea (though it hasn't bitten us yet that much)"

Companies are not people. Companies are composed of people and the people working there now on important positions are not the same as were back in the days of old. Most importantly CEO has changed. That's the crucial difference.

On an emotional level I cannot get myself to understand this. Thus I still feel like they are the same as they have always been, basically as if they were human being.

Do you know anyone who works at MS? If so, you would probably know that they have plenty of employees who have been there 20+ years. There are many arms of their business that are steeped in the culture of the 90s: windows, office, etc.

Now, corporate culture can and does change. But, we generally want evidence of change to be proportionate to the original problem/wrong committed. What has MS done that is more remarkable than any other major tech corporation, at this point?

Additionally, what reason do I have to trust them? If I were looking to host my website on a cloud provider, I may look at azure. But people act like MS making a change means we should all start using Windows, writing in office, etc. Why? These are still, for me, substandard tools.

At the end of the day, I am looking for a real, substantial change. Release Office as GPL, then I will really be surprised. So far, they have just done a MS version of what the other players have done:

Typescript: Dart

Edge: Literally a clone of Chrome, which was literally a clone of WebKit, which was literally a clone of KHTML

VS Code: Atom

Citizens United decided that companies are in fact people, as dumb as it may be.

Still, a company is made up of people and people make the decisions behind it.

Don't deflect. It's not helpful.

> Citizens United decided that companies are in fact people

No, it really didn't.

The "people" status of corporations is the same as it has been for longer than you and I have been alive: legally speaking, corporations are not people but do have a small set of rights that are normally afforded people. This isn't a bad thing -- for instance, the right to enter into a contract seems perfectly reasonable.

I meant that unlike in humans that are relatively static Companies can have their constitutients changed.

This is comparable to human having their brain changed.

Magnitude of correction needs to be proportionate to magnitude of wrong. I don't think anyone would disagree that MS is more friendly towards FLOSS. But, does that mean they are suddenly "the good guys", as many seem to say?

MS is the only company I know of that actively tried to kill FLOSS and had a motto similar to "embrace, extend, extinguish". This makes me seriously worried about trusting the company in any serious way while they seem to be "embracing" by purchasing one of the most important companies in FLOSS and "extending" by making VS Code/Edge.

The world doesn't just end up good. We make choices that influence others and influence outcomes.

What seems more bizarre to me is why are there so many people eager to ignore MS stated historic policies and give them a free pass for the damage they done just because they've done the minimum viable amount to appear friendly to open source?

VScode is not open-source. Even when Microsoft do open source, it's not open source... It's bundled with closed source proprietary telemetry/spyware. If anyone care, there is VSCodium which is open source

Captives might appreciate better conditions of captivity. From outside the fence, it still looks like captivity.

> But the amount of dismissal I read here is frustrating given the amount of earnest effort I see engineers putting into getting things right.

The problem with Microsoft is not, and never has been, due to the engineers, and the engineers aren't the ones who can fix them.

This is about the corporation itself, and I really haven't seen a great deal change in corporate behavior aside from the rhetoric.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com