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Comment by webmobdev | Hacker News Reader

Embrace, extend, extinguish - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

I remember that era quite well, especially as I naturally gravitated towards Linux and open source. It was a genuine concern at the time.

Seeing as that was over 25 years ago I have to wonder how much it holds true today. Looking at MS moves over the past decade (the .NET ecosystem, Mono, VS Code, Github, Azure, etc) I’m not that concerned.

Really? This is pretty clearly the "embrace" step. I can't help but see things like the inability to use passwords with github unless you use the github-specific cli tool as an attempt to extend.

See also, directx for wsl.

Sure, we're mostly in the happy embrace stage now, and wr may even be able to use some of the extentions, but pretty soon the barriers to entry will start going up more and more.

I guess in the same way google is extending with all these electron apps?

Google isn’t a convicted monopolist so I guess there’s that.

Or maybe, just maybe, after 25 years and multiple changes of leadership it's not the same company. I'd be curious to see how many employees from the mid 1990s are left. There are murderers walking around today that had shorter sentences.

Note that I'm not defending them specifically, I just think it's strange the EEE stuff gets reposted every once in a while without a 1996 tag...

Well, if despite all the changes the culture of bribes carried from the 90s to this year, I wouldn't count on the same not happening to the EEE tradition. See https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/25/22995144/microsoft-foreig...

Give me the name of a major multi-national corporation and I'll find you a news story with some kind of bad behavior involving them.

Again, not defending Microsoft specifically or deploying what-about-ism but acting like they're the only completely self-interested gigantic ruthless corporation and continually calling them out specifically (with articles dating back to 1996) is a little bizarre.

>Or maybe, just maybe, after 25 years and multiple changes of leadership it's not the same company.

I and many others who lived through and remember the period will believe there has been change once you can purchase a copy of Microsoft Office for Linux. Everything else is just words.

Personally I'm recalling the way Microsoft introduced Windows only incompatibilities to their version of the Java Virtual Machine...

I don't know what the future holds. Perhaps it's now some variant of EEE more centered around control than extermination. Who knows?

At the least, I do find it concerning that MS controls several of the most popular developer tools (VS Code, Github, NPM). Ditto for gaming with their recent acquisitions.

I thought Stallman control most popular developer tools - emacs, gcc and gpl.

Do they possess some product that would benefit from extinguishing Python, being a direct competitor?

Any machine learning or data science offerings would benefit for being in a position where you can make things hard for competitors, they wouldn't extinguish python they'd use python to extinguish other projects by subtlety breaking behavior those projects depend on.

This is actually probably not too hard as python C extensions can integrate pretty deeply with python internals. A few well thought out changes could make it pretty difficult for a c based library to stay compatible with python, although of course most of the companies they'd try that on have the budget to hold their own.

There’s a couple C extensions I’ve been maintaining for my personal usage for a few years now and they break things on a semi-regular basis.

Mostly I upgrade fedora, rebuild the python extensions against the new python version and bob’s your uncle but every few versions I have to go digging through the change logs to figure out how to get it to work again. Not that big of a deal, usually only takes a few minutes.

I could target the stable API but that’d be a lot more work than fixing up a function call here and there usually around once a year.

And the python devs have traditionally gone out of their way to make things easier for the big C-api library devs.

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