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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

cough Bullshit cough

* VSCode got popular and they started preventing forks from installing its extensions.

* They extended the Free Source pyright language server into the proprietary pylance. They don’t even sell it. It’s just there to make the FOSS version less useful.

* They bought GitHub and started rate limiting it to unlogged in visitors.

Every time Microsoft touches a thing, they end up locking it down. They can’t help it. It’s their nature. And if you’re the frog carrying that scorpion across the pond and it stings you, well, you can only blame it so much. You knew this when they offered the deal.

Every time. It hasn’t changed substantially since they declared that Linux is cancer, except to be more subtle in their attacks.

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I actually hate this trope more because of what is says about the poster. Which I guess would, that they're someone wearing horse blinders.

There's a part of me that wants to scream at them:

"Look around you!!! It's not 1999 anymore!!! These days we have Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, etc, which are just as bad if not worse!!! Cut it out with the 20+ year old bad jokes!!!"

Yes, Microsoft is bad. The reason Micr$oft was the enemy back in the day is because they... won. They were bigger than anyone else in the fields that mattered (except for server-side, where they almost one). Now they're just 1 in a gang of evils. There's nothing special about them anymore. I'm more scared of Apple and Google.

That’s only reasonable if you believe you can only distrust one company at a time. I distrust every one you mentioned there, for different reasons, in different ways. I don’t think that Apple is trying to exclusively own the field of programming tools to their own profit, nor do I think that Facebook is. I don’t think Apple is trying to own all data about every human. I don’t think Microsoft is trying to force all vendors to sell through their app store.

But the thing is that Microsoft hasn’t seemed to fundamentally change since 1999. They appear kinder and friendlier but they keep running the same EEE playbook everywhere they can. Lots of us give them a free pass because they let us run a nifty free-for-now programming editor. That doesn’t change the leopard’s spots, though.

All these posts and no one mentioned their numerous, recent, abusive deeds around Windows or negligent security posture, all the while having captured Uncle Sam and other governments.

MS has continued to metastasize and is in some ways worse than the old days, even if they’ve finally accepted the utility of open source as a loss leader.

They have the only BigTech products I’ve been forced to use if I want to eat.

Yet I only ever see these tired EEE memes for Microsoft when Chrome is basically the web, for example.

I don’t know what to tell you, except that you obviously haven’t read a lot of my stuff on that topic. (Not that I would expect anyone to have, mind you. I’m nobody.) I agree with you. I only use Chrome when I must, like when I’m updating a Meshtastic radio and the flasher app doesn’t run on Firefox or Safari.

I’m not anti-MS as much as anti their behavior, whoever is acting that way. This thread is directly related to MS so I’m expressing my opinion on MS here. I’ll be more than happy to share my thoughts on Chrome in a Google thread.

None of those were independent projects or open standards. VScode and pyright are both MS projects from the get-go.

Sabotaging forks is scummy, but the forks were extending MS functionality, not the other way around.

GitHub was a private company before it was bought by MS. Rate limiting is.... not great, but certainly not an extinguish play.

EEE refers to the subversion of open standards or independent free software projects. It does not apply to any of the above.

MS are still scummy but at least attack them on their own demerits, and don't parrot some schtick from decades ago.

It’s not just EEE, though. They have a history of getting devs all in on a thing and then killing it with corporate-grade ADHD. They bought Visual FoxPro, got bored with it, and told everyone to rewrite into Visual Basic (which they then killed). Then the future was Silverlight, until it wasn’t. There are a thousand of these things that weren’t deliberately evil in the EEE, but defined the word rugpull before we called it that.

So even without EEE, I think it’s supremely risky to hitch your wagon to their tech or services (unless you’re writing primarily for Windows, which is what they’d love to help you migrate to). And I can’t be convinced the GitHub acquisition wasn’t some combination of these dark patterns.

Step 1: Get a plurality of the world’s FOSS into one place.

Step 2: Feed it into a LLM and then embed it in a popular free editor so that everyone can use GPL code without actually having to abide the license.

Step 3: Make it increasingly hard to use for FOSS development by starting to add barriers a little at a time. <= we are here

As a developer, they’ve done nothing substantial to earn my trust. I think a lot of Microsoft employees are good people who don’t subscribe to all this and who want to do the right thing, but corporate culture just won’t let that be.

> I think it’s supremely risky to hitch your wagon to their tech or services

OK, finally, yes, this is very true, for specific parts of their tech.

But banging on about EEE just distracts from this, more important message.

> Make it increasingly hard to use for FOSS development by starting to add barriers a little at a time. <= we are here

....and now you've lost me again

Note I wasn’t the one who said EEE upstream. I was just replying to the thread.

Hanlon’s razor is a thing, and I generally follow it. It’s just that I’ve seen Microsoft make so many “oops, our bad!” mistakes over the years that purely coincidentally gave them an edge up over their competition, that I tend to distrust such claims from them.

I don’t feel that way about all corps. Oracle doesn’t make little mistakes that accidentally harm the competition while helping themselves. No, they’ll look you in the eye and explain that they’re mugging you while they take your wallet. It’s kind of refreshingly honest in its own way.

> Oracle doesn’t make little mistakes that accidentally harm the competition while helping themselves. No, they’ll look you in the eye and explain that they’re mugging you while they take your wallet. It’s kind of refreshingly honest in its own way.

Fucking hell bud :D

Tell me I'm wrong! :D

I'm more upset that Microsoft is charging money for using a code generation model trained on copyleft code.

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