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Comment by rfrey | Hacker News Reader

If I may, I think you're harvesting downvotes (very light grey as I write this) because your phrasing could read that Microsoft the company is frightening you because they're the Big Evil, etc... this being one of the inevitable (and inevitably tiresome) derailing comments that enters any thread about Microsoft and immediately gets downvotes because Boring.

After I re-read your comment it seemed you might be saying Microsoft tech intimidates you, perhaps because of the perception of it being big enterprise, dominated by Chief Poobah Architects, etc.

Ambiguity's a funny thing. :)

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That's fair. I say Microsoft "scares" me because it's historically "uncool," which means it's likely that the (open source) developer community is less dynamic and comprehensive. People are rightfully picky about the work they do for free!

It used to scare me because it abused its market dominance in much the same way Google does and because its ultimate end goal is inevitably end user lock-in, which is something I want to avoid at all costs.

It's true that they have changed over the last couple of years and have adopted open source, etc., but it seems to me that this isn't really because they've become intrinsically "less evil" - it's just because the market has forced their hand, and they now have to choose between future irrelevance and not being evil now.

I am pretty confident that if they once again gain a powerful monopoly like they used to have, they'll abuse it just like they did the last time.

One way they could do that is to bait and switch on open source/linux versions of .NET.

I've looked at F# and it is a nice language, but I don't really want to do any OSS development on it unless Microsoft somehow convinces me with a license that handcuffs future Microsoft so that they won't be able to do that (e.g. GPL, assuming that would work. IANAL).

This is almost an aside, but you should take a look at some of the stuff that comes out of Microsoft Research. They employ some of the biggest names in Haskell (Simon Peyton Jones for one) and have done some really interesting and bleeding edge work.

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