> formerly reputable corporations
I'm sorry but when was Microsoft ever reputable? They have a long history (and reputation) of being merciless in every single way they can, and have for as long as I can remember.
I'm sorry but when was Microsoft ever reputable? They have a long history (and reputation) of being merciless in every single way they can, and have for as long as I can remember.
However, me thinks this relates to the times before Github became an offering by Microsoft. But the deal was just too hard to miss, getting this massive army of minion coders who all pray to the octocat and now do the Balmers dance.
Oh so much fun, now it turns out, that all feed the new AI overlords.
Please note I am not attempting to address the reputability of GitHub pre-acquisition. That is a separate matter.
It made a lot of sharp business choices in that decade, but it also left a LOT of money on the table for developers, as part of a strategic goal to grow the platform.
Then the 00s came, platform growth slowed (because they were already running on everything desktop), and the "vs linux" decisions started coming.
Microsoft was disreputable in the 90s to the point they were almost broken up several times.
Microsoft in the DOS days was still fighting hard for market. Microsoft in the Netscape days? Eh... less of a competitive claim. Post ~2005? No claim.
For me, the definition of "reputable" changes when you're a competitor among equals vs when you're a monopoly.
They went on an open source charm offensive a few years ago. "Oh, we've turned over a new leaf" etc.
A lot of people believed that they'd had a legitimate change in heart because of the change in strategy.
More realistically, Linux had driven them into near irrelevance in the server market and just pushed them from "extinguish" or "extend" to "embrace".
Their dubious anti-Linux tactics via leaning on OEMs in the desktop market remained more or less unchanged.
and with vscode, copilot, and wsl2 they're doing a terrifyingly good job :-/
I really hope people don't let their guard down.
you said: I'm sorry but when was Microsoft ever reputable?
nobody said Microsoft had ever been reputable.
GitHub is the formerly reputable corporation here.
GP comment doesn't even make sense without that.
They're still probably the most indirectly trusted company on the earth
Why? because almost all enterprises do run some non-trivial amount of MS code
Either Windows, Azure / Azure AD or AD at all, Teams/Outlook, VS Code, or anything else.
And please, let's do not start arguing that some startup made of 30 people uses Macs only.