Microsoft Donated Money to Gnome: Remember How They Attacked Open Source Before

Microsoft will gladly ditch open-source in the future, if it becomes the best option for survival.

And it's important to note that big companies are full of individuals trying to make their own careers.

For a less contentious example, I imagine top-level leadership recognizes that the immediate financial gains that come from bloating their flagship operating system with ads to the point where it feels like a mid-2000s filesharing app is short-sighted, but there are thousands of VPs who get promotions if they can point to a number and say "look at that revenue, I created it"

Why speak about it in terms of something cleaning its name? There's no reason to consider any corporation as "on your side", just something you can use the inputs from today and probably not tomorrow.

I have no special hate for microsoft, but it's like praising the wind for blowing - it's going to change direction again, trust me.

Microsoft Office for Linux would be a nice start. Contributions to the WINE project would be even nicer.

Corporations make changes that suit them first, users second. Microsoft "loves" open source now, as they own one of the biggest dev-centric social media platforms.

> What will it take for you to actually believe that they may genuinely be changing?

They are changing into what makes more money in the long run.

Open sourcing windows would be a good start!

I would settle for them not polluting their flagship open source project VSCode with proprietary extensions, though.

IMO the right way to deal with that is to reject the instinct of considering a corporation to be a person, just rationally look at whether their recent actions, look for potential conflicts of interest, and make sure any deals are guaranteed to be in in your interest.

For instance, Microsoft has been known in the past for screwing people over in creative ways. Famously they screwed over Spyglass by buying the code that became IE with a royalty deal, and then giving it out for free, ensuring that Spyglass got percentages of $0, which it seems they definitely didn't expect. So there it would make perfect sense to take a look at any deals that could be subverted creatively with a very critical eye.

On the other hand if they just give you a donation because they want PR or some such with no strings attached, then there's unlikely to be a problem.

Why should we think they have turned over a new leaf? They have gotten worse, not better

At best they get praised for doing things in a way where they benefit or are forced to face a worse alternative without control or a hook. Whenever they seem to do something selfless the control, hook or incentive to taking in some patent comes along with it.

I don't expect to put .net stuff and the like in the same category as GNU tools anytime soon.

Is it something of CEO's past? I remember the ODF debacle, the MAUI naming , the numerous anticompetitive business practices, etc all not being far off. Hell even OEM bundling court cases are not a thing of the past

Aligned incentives.

They can't change, as nearly every other (successful) company can't. They're built for profit, but human related values such as morals, honesty, sincerity, and generally being good to others etc. have no place in business: those are obstacles that soon or later must be removed to maximize profits. I expect pretty much every company to act in a benevolent way when they're young and still in need to establish a good public image, but as soon as their business allows them, they become evil, I mean not in a superhero comic baddie way ("muhaha! I'll conquer the world"), but rather in a very cold "we don't need to be nice anymore" way. It's just how they're created, and the environment they "live" in that shapes them: if you dwell in a sea full of sharks, you better learn to behave as a shark, especially if being a shark guarantees more rights and less obligations than most humans.

well, them not not doing stuff like this for instance: https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/35

First of all, for-profit companies optimize for profit, not truthfulness.

> Or you will always prefer to remember the dark times of CEOs past and a workforce that is probably half gone from those days?

Second, Microsoft has a 45-years long history of making false promises, paying large bribes and attacking open source.

And endless use of EEE. And palladium / trusted computing / secure boot.

And adversarial interoperability. And forced obsolescence.

It hasn't changed.

> You want them to change their name, open source Windows?

Nobody expects Microsoft to be consistent with their own claims.

Open sourcing Windows would be a good start.

1) They immediately turned of all telemetry and made it opt-in, clearly explaining what they are gathering, when, and politely asked people to turn it on.

2) They immediately stopped forcing people to create online accounts and misleading them in all possible ways so that they have to disconnect their network etc. in order to use their system without this bs.

3) Instead of boasting on their Hyper-V-related work in the Linux kernel, they would work on interoperability with Ext4, and develop an equivalent to bootcamp so that other OS-es could gracefully coexist with Windows (last time I checked Windows installer completely ignores Linux and makes the existing system unbootable).

4) They would collaborate with the Wine project in order to make the newest version of Office work smoothly on Wine.

I could go on forever. They won't make any of these, because it is against their best interests. Linux and macOS are still competing products. MS is making tons of money off Linux running on Azure, but they need to be careful about the desktop aspect. That's why you see what can be perceived as inconsistency: they want to attract people to them, but at the same time they want to exploit their customers as much as possible.

What distro are you using

>Microsoft offered to pay more in taxes to fund STEM education in the state if Right to Repair never went to a floor vote.

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/microsoft-and-apple-wage-war-on-...

>Microsoft’s top lawyer advocated against a repair bill in its home state.

>February, Microsoft held a meeting for state lawmakers to go over the company’s priorities. It was a snow day, so executives convened over a conference call. Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, ran the meeting, according to a person on the call. He ticked through a couple items before arriving at the repair bill. Microsoft didn't like it, and Smith argued the measure would threaten his company’s intellectual property. Later, as the legislative session continued, Microsoft treated the bill as an “existential threat,”

If Xbox is out of warranty and optical drive controller fries (it really happens) its the end of that console - drive is crypto paired to CPU, no optical drive handshake prevents updating/reinstalling os and cuts off online store.

Thanks to the devs that give Apple money to use their hardware while targeting GNU/Linux, Microsoft realized that there is a huge set of developers that don't really care about Linux, they only want access to UNIX/POSIX toys and supporting Linux OEMs isn't really their thing.

So with this in mind, and given that Linux kernel ABI nowadays is more relevant than just POSIX compatibility, WSL was born.

Trailing the path of BSD, Solaris, IBM i, IBM z/OS that also have Linux compatibility available as feature.

So ironically the Year of Desktop Linux is in the form of a VM.

And to avoid accidents, it requires top-down scrutiny of the sort most companies aren't prepared to enforce. You don't want to hear "The intern accidentally used a 3rd party proprietary code module in our GPL software and shipped the binary, a month ago, what do we do now?"

I couldn't for the life of me figure out why I can't see thumbnails any more in the image upload dialog, tried looking for all sorts of view settings.

What gives?

GNOME is that user interface where out of the box everything is super eye-candy and cool, and yet you can't really do anything unless you install a billion extensions and swap out a few builtin programs for some other that look like shite but at least have the basic features everyone expects.

GNOME has been putting the entirety of its efforts and focus on UI only for the last 11 years, and that has cause the whole UX to become a total nightmare. GNOME 2 was incredible, it was a pinnacle in UX and it's a shame the GNOME devs got carried away and destroyed basically everything in their attempt at beating Apple at its own game.

Hopefully the GPL and AGPL can protect us somewhat against the Extend.

Lobbying against adoption, against reasonable ODF standards, etc Industry strongarming and other anticompetitive practices, Giving their project the same name as an open source project with similar function, etc