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Comment by grawprog | Hacker News Reader

So become an unpaid Microsoft employee to re-add features that used to exist and that do exist in nearly every alternative? Don't they make enough money off of os sales, subscriptions, forced ads and telemetry? They need free labour to fix their broken software too?

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Many people love to be FAANG unpaid employees, why should it be any different for Microsoft?

Why not put those efforts towards an actual open source calculator project that could really use the volunteer efforts and doesn't already have an army of paid employees?

https://qalculate.github.io/ https://bitbucket.org/heldercorreia/speedcrunch/

Is that a rhetorical question, or do I really get to argue the benefits of contributing to one of the most installed calculators on the planet? Contributing to small projects is good, but it's not for everyone and you're definitely kidding yourself if an MIT licensed software on Github doesn't qualify as "actual open source".

Yeah I tend to consider moral and ethical implications of my decisions also, I forget not everyone does.

I feel time spent working on projects for a company that hasn't spent the better part of 3 decades trying to dominate and control the entirety of the computer market using strategies that destroy competition and supress innovation, that tracks and monitors its users, that has such a small amount of respect that it will inject ads into a product most customers are forced to purchase should they wish to own a computer, is more valuable in that it makes the world just a slightly better place, rather than a slightly shittier one.

For a moment I thought you were talking about Google.

Because you want to reach >800M users and want everyone to have access to it?

It's an option.

Though I didn't just mean patches from "contribute", it could also mean voice/ideas/discussion: instead of pseudonymously complain on HN, there's Feedback Hub and GitHub Issues. As an option that's available.

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