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Comment by JoelMcCracken | Hacker News Reader

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?

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"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.

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