Open source versus Microsoft: The new rebellion begins | Hacker News Reader

Open source versus Microsoft: The new rebellion begins

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115 pointsxlinux94 comments

This Microsoft hating article misses that now, Microsoft couldn't care less.

They have their own Linux distribution, all these years after the lawsuit they have become a Java distribution provider, recently added their own Go build for Azure, speaking of which, even if powered by Hyper V/Windows Host OS, 60% of Azure workloads are Linux based, more so if count ChatGPT/CoPilot stuff.

Then there is Github holding a big deal of FOSS universe as well.

VSCode and its forks used by cloud providers as Web IDEs, completly outshadow vim/emacs clones, to the point JetBrains felt pressured to come out with Fleet.

Their sales champions in 2023 were XBox, Azure and Microsoft 365.

What's your point actually?

I think the point that @pjmlp was making was that "Microsoft couldn't care less." But, while that may or may not be true, I see it more like microsft using open source software against possible open source customers...or rather against customers who have the potential to leverage open source. And, if that's true, then i would gather that microsoft does indeed care...its merely using a different set of tactics and tools (open source software), as compared to its tactics and tools from decades ago.

They don't care as long as the money drops into the bank one form or the other.

Just like Google, Amazon, Facebook, IBM, Oracle, Intel, AMD, NVidia and everyone else whose paychecks support FOSS projects cheered in HN and other forums.

I don't see those companies doing the same embrace, extend, extinguish moves, though? Maybe Amazon a bit.

Then you're not looking right.

Much as I love a good ad hominem, do you have any examples?

You really can't think of any example of anti-OSS behaviours from that list of companies, in spite of them sponsoring key FOSS projects?!?

It appears that neither of us can.

as the sole beneficiary of the windows tax they sure care as much as everybody who is trying to avoid it

Windows sales aren't as relevant as everything else they can get from games and Azure, see the 2023 financials, that place them head to head with Apple in earnings.

Windows 10 and 11 are trivially pirate-able by entering a few commands, pointing to a phony KMS server. This is actually a huge change from the Vista/7 era where you had to download and install sketchy activation cracks.

I'm sure Microsoft still wants to collect Windows license fees from enterprises and hardware manufacturers, but they're far more relaxed about Windows licensing than they used to be.

> Their sales champions in 2023 were XBox, Azure and Microsoft 365.

And that last one is why they care and what this article is all about.

I know it's a meme at this point but you just explained Embrace in 5 lines.

It is not embrace when you can fork it. :)

The steps are Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Embrace is the one you can fork.

Extend is the closed-source bits that connect to the open source stuff.

(For example, all the closed-source extensions to VSCode.)

What would be Extinguish?

Remove, restrict, irrevocably alter, or up the price to your service which users have come to depend on now that free alternatives cannot compete.

For example: Pylance becomes a premium plugin, or VsCode is no longer downloadable and can only be run in the browser if you have a GitHub account, or VsCode only runs on Windows 11 machines, or VsCode requires an Office 365 account, or they fork VsCode and start adding heavy "telemetry" while simultaneously rapidly altering pylance and plugin APIs so free plugins and original VsCode can't keep up.

Time to contribute another plugin for VSCodium.

Is this any/substantially different than the open-core licensing models that seem to be fairly well received by many?

So basically like open-core OSS where you hook in people in on the open source part and then start adding bit by bit proprietary extensions until the OSS offering is noticeably subpar to the closed one.

One of the things that comes to mind here is the fact that the default Python extension for VS Code is, perhaps surprisingly to many, not open source. https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-release

While it's possible to fork VS Code, it is not possible to fork VS Code and provide a seamless onramp towards a Python editing experience that is fully open source, because users are used to the nuances of the closed-source Pylance experience in VS Code proper. You could use the minified/compiled Pylance plugin in your fork, but you'd have no way to expand its capabilities to new hooks your fork provides. Microsoft's development process would always be able to move faster than a fork, because it could coordinate VS Code internal API development with its internal Pylance team, and could become incompatible with forks at any time.

It's worth re-reading the quote from J Allard in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... with this modern example in mind.

(Also worth mentioning https://github.com/detachhead/basedpyright?tab=readme-ov-fil... which is a heroic effort to derisk this, but it's an uphill battle for sure!)

There are other Python plugins, freedom of choice, isn't what FOSS is all about?

After all that is what everyone claims about Chrome forks.

There's a vast difference between a technical fork and a meaningful fork.

If it goes for Chrome with Google, also goes for Microsoft.

Which is meaningless. Embracing open source software is a _good_ thing.

Extending open source software / standards with proprietary additions is the only aspect which is deserving of criticism.

That's all fun and games until you find out the final stage is extinguish.

Extinguish isn't a thing you do, it's the intended consequence of step 2.

I feel like that's already happening with the integration of the issues tracker and the CI/CD actions into github. A lot of newer developers just see github as git instead of realizing there is git outside of it that can be run locally without needed a cloud service backing it. They might not even see a reason why they would want to have control over their own code hosting until microsoft starts squeezing them hard.

> Xbox

Rumors are they are leaving the hardware business since that hurts their margins and they can have OEMs build things like the Steam Deck and get away with selling Game Pass without the hardware risk. While profitable, dropping hardware could significantly boost margins (at the expense of the console crowd).

Yes, they migth be turning into SEGA, still hardly matters given the money on the XBox ecosystem, meaning the combined sales of all game studios owned by Microsoft, across all platforms.

Not sure what point you're making here. They have lots of products, some of which are open source, but Office /365 is still a huge cash generator.

They most certainly do care about Office / 365's grip being weakened.

Microsoft 365 cloud.

The challenge is not windows vs linux. It is avoiding the Office365 tax.

Cloud.

The German federal government alone will pay 1.28 billion Euros to Microsoft until 2025 [1] so I’m pretty sure they do care about their government contracts.

[1] https://amp.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/deutschland/it-open-s...

Which doesn't mean it has to be Windows, it might as well be Azure and 365.

There are Microsoft stuff that now are Linux only, like SQL Server containers, the Windows variant of them is no longer supported.

By the way several NRW libraries use custom Linux distributions.

Did you read the article? Schleswig Holstein wants to move to Libre Office, potentially ditching 365.

> 60% of Azure workloads are Linux based

Do you have a citation for this? I honestly thought it would favor Linux even more; I'm surprised it's this "low" for Linux.

If this is true, it makes me wonder how many of the small-medium back office deployments are now just cloud-only. While there's a lot of money in fortune 500 windows deployments, there's possibly even more money waiting for the conversion of small-medium sized businesses in their conversion to the cloud. But the SMB market would probably leans towards Windows-based services (I'm guessing).

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/virtual-machines/....

> Their sales champions in 2023 were XBox, Azure and Microsoft 365.

Indeed, but they're going to ditch Microsoft 365 as well.

Many people use the term "open-source", but this is truly a matter of software freedom. Microsoft won't ever be able to compete with free/libre and self-determination because their business model is predicated upon capturing and exploiting their customers, and it's gotten to the point where governments -- perhaps their most lucrative and complacent customers -- have had enough.

management executives also "capture and exploit their customers" in particular, their employees but also their contractors.. MSFT is enabling that model. All the participants know it. An individual person is not the decision maker. MSFT desktop OS appeals to the decision makers, for better and for worse.

> Microsoft won't ever be able to compete with free/libre and self-determination

That's an interesting take that doesn't seem to line up very well either with history or the article, which points out that governments have made moves like this in the past, only to return to Microsoft products at some point in the future.

Since at least the late 90's I've been hearing prognostications that Microsoft was doomed because of open source and how it's only a matter of time, and they are now the most valuable company listed on US stock exchanges.

https://companiesmarketcap.com/ - Microsoft is the number one most valuable (publicly traded) company on the planet. Microsoft has been "competing with free/libre and self-determination" for literally decades and they have been able to do it because free/libre isn't something most people care for in the slightest, and self-determination struggles to do the boring bits well - and that's most bits - or to offer any compelling integrated vision, or to compromise to make disparate tools work together for the greater good of the customer.

you see this kind of wishful (delusional?) thinking very frequently on hn:

> Microsoft won't ever be able ... their business model is ... have had enough.

statements made with complete certitude, as if these things aren't nebulous to begin with or in the process of being decided. it reads like the opening line to a christopher nolan superhero movie (i.e., a call to arms) rather than a position or even an opinion.

i personally don't understand what people get from the act of writing/posting such things - i mean i'd get it if we were on some hill about to rush into battle but this is an anonymous/faceless tech news forum.

They are telling themselves that and they want others to believe that reality. But it's not based on what's happening in the real world.

Hey, responding in this thread to make sure you see it. Would you be open to conversation re: FPGA deployment in Ukraine? Tips and pointers mostly. I don't see any contact details on your profile, however I would really appreciate if you were to find some time for us... In case you're open to it, please send me a line: ilya <at> hrest.org, or @badt:appar.at on Matrix.

> and they have been able to do it because free/libre isn't something most people care for in the slightest

flagrant editorialization .. there are countless battles over the course of the MSFT campaign that had serious outcomes..

a simple observation is that "most people" are children, elderly, infirm, crooked or otherwise not in the contest .. "most people" certainly do not speak English at all; they neither care nor not care as they are not meaningfully involved in a way that matters

in other words, PP is partisan gibberish

> "a simple observation is that "most people" are children, elderly, infirm, crooked or otherwise not in the contest .. "most people" certainly do not speak English at all; they neither care nor not care as they are not meaningfully involved in a way that matters"

You can't dismiss "most people don't care" with "most people don't care", it's the same point.

It’s actually the opposite of what you’re saying.

Software freedom can’t compete with having someone else manage your email, documents, and communication servers for you.

The moment you contract someone else to provide those solutions there’s inherently no way to have end to end “free” software experience even if your contractor of choice is using free software.

People don’t subscribe to 365 because Word is better than LibreOffice Writer. They subscribe because someone else is removing a bunch of labor from their organization.

Ah, I remember reading more or less the same exact thing on /. in 1992, the first (among many) Year of the Linux Desktop. The intervening, holy crap, 32 years have shown that open source is awesome when it scratches a developer/sysadmin itch and your primary customer base are devs/sysadmins. As soon as you want to sell to average Joe users, you need PMs, and UX people, and testers, etc, and the OSS business models have in fact never achieved to get those in the picture: not once in 32 years, an entire generation.

In fact, 32 years later I would go as far as to say that Microsoft has been deviously clever in promoting Open Source as its Great Enemy, the Nemesis that will bring it down. And while we were all busy promoting Libre Office and what have you, Lotus died, Ami Pro died, Word Perfect died. I.e. commercial companies with half a chance to be actual, true, competition. Open Source will not kill Microsoft. Better commercial software is the only thing that can.

At some point Firefox was quite effective at competing with Microsoft's browser.

So it happened at least once.

WordPerfect beat the brakes off Word, and I will die on this hill.

The reason the plan always fails is because the actual secret plan is just to get an extra discount, the plan may succeed if Microsoft stop doing that...

That may win when the budget deadlines come.

But underlying this was the European Union not liking being dependent upon the American monopoly of operating systems and other key software, particularly closed source proprietary American government controlled software.

And really Linux is European software. They should have been doing this decades ago of course.

I think everyone is looking around and seeing that the era of free trade, relative peace, and good relations based on trade is dead with the Ukraine war heralding a new age.

>And really Linux is European software.

Excuse me, but WHAT?

Interestingly, the wikipedia page for Linux Torvalds says he's "Finnish / American" rather than just Finnish:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds

So "European" probably has some validity through this chain, though "American" probably does too. :)

Firstly, Linus is an Finish-American citizen of born in a Swedish minority in Finland, living in the US, so how how would that make Linux in any way "European"?

Even if he weren't a US citizen living in the US, it would still be hard to call Linux "European" due to the following point:

Linux the project is a collaboration from contributors from across the world, so how would that make it "European"?

Just because the project was started by an EU citizen in the EU over 3 decades ago, doesn't really give the EU claims of ownership over what is essentially a public open project, even if the EU were to somehow ever attempt to claim it as theirs.

Companies like Facebook are global now, and we call them American because of where they were founded / where they are still HQ'd.

Linux doesn't have a HQ or a stock market it's listed on, so isn't the place it was founded a reasonable choice if trying to describe it as anything other than "global"?

Of course the EU can't claim to own it, just as they can't claim to own BMW if they chose to move all operations out of Europe, but we'd probably still call BMW a European / German company until it becomes established as being more to do with another single location rather than just all round the world.

There's a difference between something being "European" and something having started in Europe. Linux is not a private enterprise with an HQ in Europe so just because it started in Europe in the past, doesn't mean it's European today.

Especially when the guy who started it all is now a US citizen living and working on the Linux kernel from the US with most of the funding for the contributions coming from US companies. So shouldn't it be American now?

Small nitpick - Linux was created in 1991, while the EEC was transformed into the EU in 1992 (effective 1993), and Finland became part of the EU in 1995.

I suppose what I should have said is that Linux is much more European.

KDE is DEFINITELY European. And as part of the KDE project came office applications and the once-web-browser Konqueror.

Tim Berners-Lee and CERN were european, you can view the early internet as European even if TCPIP came from the US DARPA.

Suse, one of the most important pre-ubuntu distros is German.

Ubuntu is Australian, really that makes it part of the overall British Commonwealth and much more "european" than "american".

I can't comment on kernel contributions, package managers, etc.

What is important is that the EU has several times looked at "computing independence", and if you look at Windows and Linux, Linux was much more european from that standpoint. AMD is american, but it's my impression they invested early into building europe-based fabs, which gave them a leg up with EU antitrust against Intel.

From the "game of thrones" of geopolitics, AMD and Linux and CERN gave the EU some degree of parity, or at least an ability to stay close and relevant, with US tech innovations.

> Ubuntu is Australian

That sounds weird. What's that based on?

You're not meaning Mark Shuttleworth are you? If so, then nope, he's from South Africa. ;)

Yes I thought the article was a little bit ranty and missed the point. It's fundamentally about Germany trying to move off of MS software, well the reason they want to do that is because they don't want to depend on software that can be backdoored trivially by a foreign government.

The US can compel Microsoft to insert a backdoor in any of its products at any time and it will happen (probably has already).

Open source has this inherent advantage, at least backdoors have to be snuck by the eyes of the maintainers (though it can and does happen as we have seen).

So I think the writing is on the wall, this will increasingly be a competitive disadvantage for American solutions in Europe as time goes on.

After a Microsoft employee found a huge backdoor in Linux. Likely one of many.

This is funny considering I live in the center of Schleswig-Holstein and work in IT. People barely know how to work with Excel, they most likely won't figure out anything remotely different...

They might only need a calculator then. It's not ok to throw a spreadsheet at every problem.

Half the world is ruled by Excel.

This is (unfortunately) true.

Why? It’s a great tool

The tool is great, it's what you can build with it that has a tendency to end up in an horrid unmaintainable vba mix kludge.

I read once a story: some IT guy was fed up with answering basic questions about Office or part of it. So hi made effort to teach users that basics and some more. And then peoples started calling with more complicated questions :)

So: maybe teach Excel crowd about data normalization, one table per sheet ? ;)

That's basically what I do half of my day... I am supposed to develop, but can't get into a productive state due to my colleagues calling me all day with stupid questions I answered like 3 times already.

If you dont know excel, then there is very little to learn about libreoffice spreadsheet.

The problem i see too often is that users use verbiage like "I know/don't know Excel...", or "I know/don't know Word...", etc. However, many users that i see would be equally as lost in front of say, Google docs, or LiobreOffice Writer or Calc....i think we should go back to decades ago when people would use more general terms like "document" or spreadsheet"...but of course, that's likely not possible because microsoft has been quite successful at selling theki brand and associated brand names...and as much as i support efforts like what is happening in Germany and other areas of the world, the challenge is not only one of tech compatibility or training, but very especially around branding and mind-share. I say that sadly, because i want open source options to exist as equally *VISIBLE* choices in the marketplace.

I feel that. I work in tech since only 4 years now, but I see a more general problem. People need to be taught in a more software agnostic way. Like, how to properly use a search engine to research a software related issue instead of going into panic mode and call IT. Once people are able to research software specific issues, switching products won't be as much of a problem

> "People need to be taught in a more software agnostic way...switching products won't be as much of a problem"

Yep, I agree 100% right there!!! Not only does it help to ease support of those people, but they actually learn things better that way and gain much more independence! The weird thing is that some portion of the people who do not know how to be independent in basic computing are fiercely independent in other areas of their lives...which often speaks to lack of enough computing literacy some among populations...and while it might statistically be with older people, that is not always the case! I've seen some older folks be able to learn some computing basics FASTEr than some supposed digital natives. Not always of course, but more than i ever expected.

It used to be that tech was one of those areas where you could search for things and actually find answers fast, but lately I’ve noticed that the search results have gotten a lot worse. The techie blogspam took a while to catch up with more mainstream topics, but at this point it’s almost as bogged down in useless crap.

It’s still the best answer, but you might need to teach them how to recognize crap and THEN get them in the habit of doing web searches.

I'd argue LibreOffice is not going to make things any better. If you want to do something in Excel but don't know how, a simple Google search will lead you to tons of toturial articles, Q&A pages from IT departments of random universities and YouTube videos. Even if it's a missing feature, chances are that someone has asked about it, and another person points out it's not available and potentially suggest a workaround.

On the other hand, if you run into an issue with LibreOffice...

Any article that brings up LibreOffice as the driving force behind a move away from Microsoft has me both skeptical and amused.

Sure, it’s wonderful that LibreOffice exists, don’t get me wrong. It’s a piece of software that’s famously better at opening ancient Word-formatted documents better than Word itself. It’s lovely that it’s free and supported by a great community.

But I’ll be damned if it isn’t my very last choice for productivity software. It just is not somewhere I want to spend my time.

Idealistic prose about data sovereignty is nice and all but I’ve never seen an organization have an ounce of hesitation about Microsoft’s enterprise data privacy and security.

Really this manifesto is limited to organizations who have specific need to avoid things like search warrants, and in many cases all you’re doing is changing the search warrant from Microsoft to your company’s servers. Really if your information is that sensitive you probably need a more bespoke solution anyway.

Finally, this article misplaces the value that Microsoft provides. Software as a service means that the software is providing a service: in other words, companies aren’t subscribing to 365 because they need a better spreadsheet program than LibreOffice, they’re subscribing so that they don’t have to administer servers for email, documents, communication, etc. Open Source offers no such thing.

Libre Office is really bad. Its kind of amazing that when I opened the powerpoint variant that I couldn't find text size.... Seems like something that should be on the regular main menu.

I'm convinced there is some M$ operative inside that makes LibreOffice a bit worse. They claim they are 'cutting edge UX' or some Gnome style claim.

> upping hardware specs for Windows 11 for no good reason

This could very much be the main reason for this transition to succeed this time, more than any ideological points. In October 2025 millions of perfectly good computers will become obsolete. Windows 10 reaches end of support and Windows 11 won't work on other CPUs and mainboards without TPM. And everyone will have a choice to either throw them all away and purchase new ones, or to start paying Microsoft a yearly fee for extended support.

I don't think we ever saw this kind of forced upgrade with so little benefits for the end user. In 80s and 90s when upgrades were more frequent a new computer was substantially more powerful than the old one and you were very much looking forward to upgrade. Not this time though. If your 10 old computer has SSD, 16+ GB RAM, and 4+ core CPU, for many use cases it will be as powerful as the new computer. I can easily buy a cheaper new computer that will be worse than one of my 10+ year old higher end machines - less storage, less memory, etc. Sure, if I buy higher end it will be much better for video encoding and few more tasks, but for general office use or even development there won't be much difference.

The passing of years and historical dynamics have perhaps changed the nature of this debate. The conflict has evolved conceptually, and although equivalent to the previous spirit, it now seems to be characterized as local [F/OSS] vs cloud [BigTech].

There is no try. :D

FYI: The most premium OS I've ever had was Fedora Cinnamon.

I had thought Windows was the nicest because I had been dabbling in Ubuntu/Mint and free software was... cheap... Nah: I had been using Debian-family.

If you ever thought Linux was worse than Windows, I challenge you to use Fedora. You most likely had used a Debian-family distro, and those are not designed for the average user.

This is the year of Linux on desktop! Right?

Thanks to Sharepoint and Windows 11 things seem to deal less and less with drive letters. Mac users already have no drive letters. It all seems to blur and look alike.

Users don’t care that much, as long as they can do their job on the magic screen thingy without any problems. They HATE all the problems. They do not care about Mac or Android or Microsoft or Linux. They want to put data in things and machines so other users take that data and put it in their things and machines.

So make all the connections super stable, give excellent user support (which is not telling users to read man pages), let them connect to all their devices seamlessly and instantly and you will have your century of the Linux.

Could you explain what Fedora does better than the Debian-family of distros? I find Fedora's overall performance to be worse than other distros (including Ubuntu).

Way less terminal commands. Basically 0, although I was impressed at how easy it was to open the firewall for my kids minecraft server on linux vs Windows.

Things just work out of the box.

I don't mean using a GUI to download stuff. Everything you need is already there.

Very polished, macos of Linux

Lol I've been calling Ubuntu/Conical the Apple of Linux. Big marketing budget, low quality.

Please do not conflate Debian with the Ubuntu/Mint family. These are very different distros, and actually Mint also has a Debian-based LMDE edition. Fedora is nice but Debian is just rock solid if you stick to the stable release channel. (You'll mostly want to stay away from the Testing and Unstable releases, these are for experimentation not for production uses.)

Ubuntu and Mint are part of the Debian family of Linux distros....

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