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Comment by nadams | Hacker News Reader

> And some young people parroting how wonderful Microsoft and Bill Gates are today.

Compared to what Microsoft used to be like - recently Microsoft has made some pretty, surprising, awesome moves.

Specifically their open source movement (including .Net). You would never have seen that 10-20 years ago. I'm sure if you walked into Gates's office and said "I think we should open source this" - I have a feeling he would fire you on the spot.

They even now support Linux on their Azure platform - and that's not a it-will-run-but-you-are-on-your-own.

Now, I'm not saying Microsoft is a saint or that I would want to work for them. But considering they didn't take action against the mono or ReactOS projects makes them ok in my book (not that they would have any real legal case - but they could drag those projects through an expensive lawsuit which would just end up with a deal to cease development).

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I've said this before (and was downvoted naturally):

Microsoft's new Open Source strategy needs to be viewed with exactly the same amount of suspicion as IBM's and Oracle's.

It may just be a move to reduce their expenses, since they may get unpaid software contributions and testing (Oracle's CEO pretty much admitted this in an interview).

I view it as an attack on the LAMP stack. Mono with self-hosted HTTP throw OWIN seems like a killer option. Let's face it, C# is a much better language for development than Java.

It's not as if Microsoft voluntarily got nicer. They did every dirty thing they could to dominate the PC industry and simply failed. Now they're beginning to steer their leaky ship in a better direction, good for them. For me personally, I'll never be a fan of the company that selfishly held the web back with IE for a decade because they didn't want to compete. Sic semper tyrannis!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents

What you don't understand is that Bill Gates is from the future. I don't wanna talk about time travel shit. Cause if we start talking about it, then we're gonna be here all day talking about it, making diagrams with straws. It doesn't matter. The point is, Gates grew up in a dystopian world and traveled back in time to divert money from the assholes that created it towards charitable enterprises to fix the parts of humanity that were breaking down. Only time will tell if this strategy will work, but we have all the time in the world (and then some), thanks to time travel.

This is an interesting post. It sounds believable to me.

I'd like to think that we will get to a more ethical future.

I partially agree. Much of MS' recent moves are admirable, but they're clearly revivals of sidetracked projects and desperation moves to stay relevant as desktop OS dominance alone is beginning to lose its grip.

I wouldn't be all that snide about them. However, I can't say I find their platforms particularly palatable in general.

I was going to say the same. The move to open source .net is brilliant. I wonder if some enterprising company will try to convert .net into asm.js so we can run it in the browsers.

What do you reason would be the benefit of doing that?

Access to non-managed code browsers (Android/Apple).

That is plain stupid given that .NET can be compiled to native code.

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