Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by redwood | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

redwood·

It's great to see the open source crowd particularly in Europe is finally turning corner here.

You know something's broken when Microsoft gets to claim to be the biggest backer of open source.

Meanwhile they'll break your back and steal all your trust and credibility if they can

View on HN

> You know something's broken when Microsoft gets to claim to be the biggest backer of open source.

They can say whatever they want. They're just lying. If you spend even a little bit of time looking into it you'll find it's just a marketing strategy.

I spent a little time looking into it, and it turns out that Microsoft owns an outfit named GitHub, which apparently offers free hosting for open source projects and is used by a lot of open source software makers. And Microsoft has around 4k employees with contributions to OS projects on GitHub. So maybe "biggest" is a lie in light of their anti-OS efforts, but it is at least arguable. Can you propose a bigger one?

Microsoft is the biggest supporter of Microsoft gaining market share.

Red Hat is the biggest supported of Red Hat gaining market share. They are also a big supporter of open source...

I'm not claiming Microsoft is a good actor (and they certainly produce a whole lot of derpy trash along the way), but the argument itself is not particular sound.

You mean the outfit that has misappropriated the code of those hosted projects to train their commercial code generator which is a very clear violation of the spirit if not the letter of the licenses of many of those projects?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com