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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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)

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.

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.

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