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Comment by tonyhart7 | Hacker News Reader

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tonyhart7

its been 20 years, their strategy now is to incorporate open source into their product offering

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That strategy is over 20 years old:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

In regards to FOSS, Google, Facebook, Amazon, IBM and co, are much better at it than Microsoft has been.

Arguably not, if they're still doing eee... Even vscode is just a shell again with most noteable extensions /language servers being proprietary again

FAANG still wins out.

Are they? They extended DNS, LDAP and Kerberos to make Active Directory so that now every Microsoft-locked corporation is stuck using Microsoft as their internal DNS. They do the various things they do to get everyone stuck using their email instead of any other standard IMAP/SMTP/webmail provider. Azure is "somehow" one of the three major cloud providers.

Yes, given how many FOSS projects change their licenses thanks to FAANG leeching, and walled garden platforms built on FOSS software.

Lots of projects started off with the BSD license instead of GPLv3/AGPL/etc. and then discovered what the consequences of that are, but those consequences haven't been hard to predict for a while now, since they're the reason those other licenses exist to begin with.

Which is why all big tech companies belong into the same basket, and not be idolatriased only because they happen to contribute to some FOSS project that helps their bottom line, have marketing toys for engineers or whatever.

Contributing to FOSS projects because it helps their bottom line is the reason everybody does it. It's a good reason to do it. That's not the problem.

The problem is when you try to establish barriers to the customer ever switching to a competitor. Microsoft isn't the only company that does that but they are obviously a company that always has and still does do that.

Every single FAANG does it, but for some strange reason the HQ address changes the point of view on them.

Truth be told, IMAP & SMTP are wildly obsolete in today's needs. Have a look at this: https://jmap.io/

Jmap is a desperately needed upgrade, but email as a whole needs to be rebuilt. The fact that it’s so core to our current infrastructure, but is really poorly suited for maybe 75% of its usage, is a bad situation that’s only going to get worse.

Of course it’s ridiculously hard to change something that’s so foundational, and I don’t trust any of the players with enough juice to pull it off (besides Google if they actually put their whole ass into it)

Yeah, and block as much as possible the possibility to include their cash cow (office) in open source: the desktop Microsoft Office apps are impossible to run under Linux without a VM, and the web versions are a PITA and lack many necessary features.

What i absolutely love is that this exact strategy is why coding agents dont work with proprietary tools. Open standards have so much context out in the open that any harness/agent can work effortlessly with it. But things like excel and word need manual integration which will be slow and painful and wont offer the same seamlessness for a feasible amount on effort.

Its an amazing schadenfruede, and im revelling in it

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