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Comment by boxmonster | Hacker News Reader

The snobby attitude about Microsoft on HN makes no sense to me

They’ve worked very very hard in the past to extinguish and annihilate a lot of the values HN stands for. Either you’re too young or didn’t follow tech back then but MS and Gates truly did evil moves to try and kill any and all competition, especially Linux and open source. Many of us remember.

That was the bad old days. Things got better under Nadella. Just like they got steadily more evil at Google. There are no big corporations you can trust in the long term, but at least MS is behaving reasonably well right now.

> Things got better under Nadella

- Windows is now a dumpster fire - Azure is a mess - surface computers suck + much more

I feel like our definitions of “better” are very different

Well, yes. I'm talking about corporate trash antics like getting one of your insiders to wreck a competitor so you can buy out the scraps (Elop and Nokia), or using a proxy lawsuit to try to strangle the open opposition (SCO vs IBM). I'm not judging what's best on a technical level. No amount of hypothetical technical goodness can make up for Ballmer.

> Things got better under Nadella

I will believe that once they will sell Office for linux packaged in flatpak and 1:1 feature parity with windows version.

once you discard the friendly appearing PR ("Microsoft <3 Linux") they're behaving exactly the same as they always have

If you think that, you don't know half the rotten, criminal shit Ballmer did.

Microsoft has not proven to be a good faith steward of their own open-source projects in the 'new days', though.

See https://isdotnetopen.com/ and especially the recent controversies with Omnisharp ( https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2022/06/16/csharp-... ).

See also the first snobby, then underhanded, then petulant behavior of the Windows Terminal maintainers recently with respect to some performance improvements: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31284419

It's very reasonable to be skeptical of Microsoft's relationship to open-source in 2022, even as we might also feel positively about some aspects of their new open-source strategy.

>See also the first snobby, then underhanded, then petulant behavior

This just corporate open source as a whole. I don't know what else he expected. You don't participate in open source with the big boys if you expect a quick response or you expect to get any kind of non-trivial credit for something. It is not you who is paying the bills. No reason to be skeptical about it, this is how the game is played.

Things look better under Nadella. But they really aren't that much better.

Some people here are a bit older than a typical %MODERN_FRONTEND_TECHNOLOGY% developer and thus they remember very well what Microsoft did to Linux and open source community a decade ago and back.

Educate yourself on the topic and it will. Maybe start here?[1][2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents

[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/fsfe/projects/ms-vs-eu/hallowee...

Lots of people hate MS because of their monopolistic practices in the past.

Myself, I always despised the company because of the complete shit quality of their software, starting with DOS. That was a pile of crap from day 1, and while much has changed since then, you can still see the complete disregard for quality in so much of what they do.

Software is going the way other industries go: no real competition, no quality.

It's not that they want to do bad software, it's just they don't have any short-term profit on doing so.

A relevant primer, a comment by me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31987377

Reply on news.ycombinator.com