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.