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Comment by chirau | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting how entities are societally not allowed to change for the better. Somehow, though, entities can change for the worse. It's a never forget situation.

What will it take for you to actually believe that they may genuinely be changing? Or you will always prefer to remember the dark times of CEOs past and a workforce that is probably half gone from those days? You want them to change their name, open source Windows?

Just because their path to cleaning their name has not yet passed through your preferred Open Source project does not mean they do not mean any good. The mere fact that such a large behemoth which you admit was blatantly against OSS but is now embracing and even backing some projects should tell you that entities can change, in either direction, good and bad.

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Companies aren't people. Microsoft (and most any other corporation) will do whatever is in its interest currently. And their behavior isn't consistent, it changes as the makeup of the leaders and their priorities change.

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.

The question is why Microsoft is still viewed as anti-FOSS while Google and Facebook are viewed as pro-FOSS. Yes, your answer explains why some people might view ALL corporations as somewhat anti-FOSS. But it doesn't explain the discrepancy.

Who are the idiots that view Google and Facebook as pro-FOSS? Did they somehow miss how Google is locking more and more OS functionality behind the Play store? Or Facebook's locked-tight Occulus?

Google is pro-whatever-is-most-profitable-for-Google. Sometimes this leads to pro-FOSS behavior (they’re consistently among the top contributors to Linux), sometimes not.

I would assert their office location, Silicon Valley corps are loved by FOSS crowd.

I think a more measured perspective is to understand that Microsoft has decided to change its strategy at the top level, but also still is a company full of people looking for ways to capture value, and who have had a history of success capturing value in ways that are harmful to the broader software ecosystem.

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"

I honestly don’t understand why Microsoft gets so much love on here. They built a ton of tracking into almost every pc on earth, and they are now pursuing a locked down AppStore model with windows S. Edge, as a browser, is just a way to collect more of your data. They added ads to your OS, cortana is invasive, and the search bar is a pain and is possibly sending all my queries over the web, I can’t tell.

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

I agree with everything you said, except:

> they are now pursuing a locked down AppStore model with windows S

Isn't Windows S Mode pretty much dead? I thought Microsoft gave up on it a few years ago and I don't believe there's any new hardware being shipped with it. Also, those that do have S Mode enabled by default can do a one-way switch out of it in the settings.

It seems like it's still supported though.

Basically because they are following Apple and Google footsteps, the love childs of many here.

After living through a few iterations of "they're horrible"->"maybe they're not so bad"->"oh wait, they're actually still horrible", nothing is going to convince me they're genuinely changing. In fact, I can't think of any instance where a shitty company became genuinely not shitty.

There's an old saying that I can't quite remember. Possibly something about leopards and spots.

Why pretend a corporate entity can be rehabilitated when it is in fact an entity that always makes selfish decisions? The bigger they get the more true this becomes.

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.

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

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.

>> 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.

I don't believe it's "as soon as their business allows them", but as soon as the owners decide they don't care. You can have a company that runs at low margins and does some good if that's what the founder wanted. The problem is that the founder will eventually die, and someone else will own the company. That could be due to going public, taking on other private investors, or just leaving the company to family. New owners are so often driven by money that they will abandon being nice or supporting a cause.

Lets all follow Mark Cuban's pharmacy company as an example. He's offering drugs at a 15 percent markup. Great cause - making meds affordable to people. It will eventually be co-opted by greed, but lets see how long it takes and who actually gets greedy.

> It's interesting how entities are societally not allowed to change for the better.

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.

That's not necessarily also a positive change in general. I don't know if "they are going to be evil, just wait!" is a useful point of view when you could be taking advantage of their not being evil today.

Well sorry if I'm not buying the good Samaritan act.

There are still many bad things they do, like pressure schools into teaching only about MS products in "computer" classes.

That's fine, but it has an opportunity cost.

I came out of a dotnet post-secondary school but I'm now currently working on a React/Node/GraphQL team, I don't see it as a negative in the way you're portraying it here. I think C# is a great starting language both because of the great tool support and the sort of medium level of abstraction.

> I don't know if "they are going to be evil, just wait!" is a useful point of view when you could be taking advantage of their not being evil today.

You can do both, at least as a user. Take advantage of the positive resources (github, etc) while being aware of or even supporting alternatives as well (god help us if we ever lose GCC and CLang becomes a monopoly).

Totally agree with that, no reason to not take advantage of other environments as well.

Businesses, including Microsoft, do only what is necessary for survival. This time, they have apparently embraced open source, while still keeping most of their core stuff closed, because doing otherwise would be bad for them.

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

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

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

As another commenter touched on, they're literally doing the same playbook and currently are in the process of closing the source on previously open C# extensions in Visual Studio IDEs.

And you can't compile iOS apps on Linux, and literally no one is angry about that fact. Apple is viewed as pro-FOSS (or at least less anti-FOSS than Microsoft). IDK, I'm having trouble finding answers to the original question here.

Even if you could compile iOS apps on Linux, it wouldn't be worth anything without Apple's signing key to bless it to run on a locked iDevice, which they charge $99 for.

I’m not sure it’s them not be allowed to change as much as it was the absolute appalling way they did business for decades. Stink lingers.

This is based on a 50k/year expense of donating to open source? That's incredibly small compared to Microsoft s other actions.

Let's assume for a moment that corporations have human features and that they can "change". (We all know it's not how companies work: it is a network of individuals optimizing their choices having in mind maximizing their own profits and the profits of the corporation.) But if we engage in a thought experiment and assume corporations have morals, and can change their "behavior" because of ethical issues, I personally would be convinced they actually changed if:

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

Aligned incentives.

MS has definitely improved compared to where it was. But we're not just tarring them with the brush of past activities, they have made recent hostile actions. Just this week we've had on HN them announcing changing .NET tooling to make it less open source and more proprietary.

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

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.

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

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.

Interesting. I wonder how much the Microsoft hate is just people like this who just want everything to be open-source, and Microsoft is just the largest most obvious target for their activism.

This horse has been beaten to death a million times already.

Microsoft can't open source Windows since it's full of third party code they licensed and don't have the rights to open source. Probably also why apple couldn't open source MacOS.

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

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

So would first class support for open cross-platform APIs like OpenGL and Vulkan on Windows and Xbox.

Is there enough demand for that?

Is there demand for running Windows programs on an ad-free, telemetry-free, and wallet-free platform? I daresay.

Respecting my default browser choice.

Not forcing me to have a Microsoft account to install my paid copy of Windows 11 Home.

It's possible to do what you want. If the installer has no Internet access, it will give you the option to create a local user.

Very user-hostile but there is a way.

Should they do that one day (hopefully never), it would be Office for WSL, that is, not Linux but their Linux with lots of strings attached and technical/legal trapdoors. I also hope they will never be involved in any WINE development: WINE can severely hurt their business and they fear it to the point they created WSL which is and works as its exact opposite: prevent users from running Windows software without Windows by allowing them to run Linux software without Linux.

When do you want Apple iMovie for Linux? Or are we just picking on Microsoft here?

I don't think it makes sense to talk about "entities". People deserve a chance to redeem themselves. But corporations are not people even they have lobbied some governments to pretend they are. Why should a coroporation that, unlike a person, is the sum of its past deeds be given the benefit of the doubt that they have actually changed. I don't think it is wrong of people to be highly suspicious of these image-washing PR stunts.

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

Open sourcing Windows would be a good start.

Mostly because they compete in areas and as a corporation we don't expect them to help their competition.

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

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