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Well gee, I wonder why people have been saying negative things about them for so long?
Perhaps if it's been that long there's a kernel of truth to the matter.
Perhaps they're a shitty company who does shitty things selling shitty products.
I guess if there are always new 20 year olds just discovering something, that must mean there are also always new 15 year olds that haven't discovered it yet, and 80 year olds that have gone Dawkins and lost what they had, and the just plain ignorant or unobservant with no real excuse.
They had to do the open-source thing for .NET because of external pressure - not because they've changed.
They had to get GitHub because of the eyeballs. It's not some altruistic play.
In both cases some VPs spun it around, juked the stats and got their bonus.
The first E of EEE feels so good makes you forget the inevitable outcome. Like heroin.
Corporations don't have some innate "essence" that defines their nature, their behaviour is defined by internal and EXTERNAL factors, yes. So what?
The very fact that you recognize that external factors have influenced how they approach open source is a tacit acknowledgement that their behaviour has indeed changed.
> They had to get GitHub because of the eyeballs. It's not some altruistic play.
No corporation is completely altruistic, so what?
Are they going to ship an official cross platform UI library any time the next century? Decades after the Java lawsuit they still ship only a crippled copy of their scrapped Microsoft JVM for other platforms.
> Microsoft is a huge open source contributor now
Aren't almost all of their contributions for integration with their proprietary technology?
> Sorry to say, but believing nothing with MS has changed is deranged.
Yes, they got worse. They maintained Windows XP for ages and you could actually feel the improvements they shipped. Windows 11 meanwhile makes me wait for them to add a robotic arm with a knife as hardware requirement, to improve the backstabbing experience.
So because they haven't produced your pet project means they haven't changed?
> Aren't almost all of their contributions for integration with their proprietary technology?
No. They didn't have to make .NET cross platform and run equally well on Linux, they didn't have to join the Linux foundation and make contributions to the Linux kernel. There are hundreds if not thousands of examples like this that would have been unthinkable under Gates and Balmer Microsoft.
> Windows 11 meanwhile makes me wait for them to add a robotic arm with a knife as hardware requirement, to improve the backstabbing experience.
Microsoft is much, much larger than just Windows. You seem to have a very limited understanding of everything they do.
Good to know that their flagship cross platform framework not even having an UI component rates "pet project".
> No. They didn't have to make .NET cross platform and run equally well on Linux
Which they never did, instead they renamed .Net core, which to this day isn't a feature complete replacement for .Net.
> they didn't have to join the Linux foundation and make contributions to the Linux kernel.
Given that they sell cloud products with Linux integration, yes they did?
> Microsoft is much, much larger than just Windows.
And here I thought everything they do is compensation for being tiny, I mean it is literally in the name.
The B&MG foundation sold their remaining 7.7m shares.