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Comment by ausjke | Hacker News Reader

are you sure about this? MS has never been friendly to open source, the recent crazy moves from its side may just be a Troy thing, sorry I just could not trust M$ as history is the best teacher.

I feel MS is forcefully getting into OSS ground and may damage the freedom we have enjoyed. Anyway I have no interests in anything it's doing. No trust, no anything. I just hope it will not use patent or something it is trying to leverage now to sue anyone it wants later, after all it has deep pockets and it is never an ethical company per se.

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I am aware of Microsoft's history, and I am fairly certain that Microsoft changed behavior towards the FLOSS community is not out of love for free software.

But Microsoft must have, over time, tried nearly every single dirty trick in their playbook against Linux/FLOSS, and none of that really worked. Short of taking out a hit on Linus Torvalds, there is little they can do to keep people from using Linux (and even that would not really help).

And in the face of this situation, the attitude at Microsoft now seems to be, "if they are going to run Linux on the server, at least we want them to use our cloud to host those servers, and our development tools for building their applications". They may do so only because they have no other choice, but so what? The olden days where Microsoft utterly dominated the IT landscape or developer tools are gone and unlikely to come back. Microsoft wants to stay relevant, so they go with the flow.

> The olden days where Microsoft utterly dominated the IT landscape or developer tools are gone and unlikely to come back.

Well, if all these plans to 'embrace Linux' succeed they might come back after all. And what happens after that is anybody's guess.

Microsoft is clearly aiming for a much stronger presence in the server market than what they achieved to date and targeting developers on the systems that build for that server market is a smart move.

> I feel MS is forcefully getting into OSS ground and may damage the freedom we have enjoyed.

And how exactly are they going to do that? The last I checked, I could download a distro that was completely independent of anything related to Microsoft. I could even get something like gNewSense and not deal with any nonfree software. Hell, if I was REALLY dedicated to .NET, I could just fork Rosyln. It's Apache 2.0 license after all.

Seriously, I don't think Microsoft is going to make Windows free and join the FSF anytime, but I think they've recognized that they do need to increase their support on Linux if they want to remain relevant going forward. This is a strategic business decision based on industry trend.

People need to exercise some critical thinking skills here. Microsoft is reacting and responding to industry trends to ensure it remains profitable. Just like every other business out there.

Embrace Extend Extinguish

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend_and_extingui...

Anyone who downvotes replies like this is displaying ignorance of Microsoft's pattern of behavior through their entire history.

Sure, maybe it's different this time ... But usually it isn't.

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftKilledMyPappy.aspx

Seriously, when was the last time Microsoft employed EEE? People have been saying "maybe it's different this time.." for years. I'm getting sick of seeing the "EEE" meme every time Microsoft does something.

It seems like this reply would be more appropriate when attached to BoysenberryPi's comment.

1) There's much more to Microsoft's historical bad behavior than EEE.

2) Noone in this sub-thread invoked EEE.

It may have been more appropriate to the thread above or the sibling, but I was one who downvoted the original so I wanted to respond to the calling out.

Whether or not EEE was specifically invoked is sort of irrelevant, the implications (trojan horse of Troy) were clear to me.

There have been 3 submissions today about Microsoft and the same EEE trope has been posted multiple times to each one. it adds nothing but noise to the conversation when Microsofts behaviour, especially in the last 3-4 years, has not been terrible.

> Whether or not EEE was specifically invoked is sort of irrelevant...

By responding to a point that hasn't even been raised, you add noise to the conversation. It would have been substantially more useful (and injected signal into the discussion) to address the points that either jblow or ausjke raised.

A random example from google: anti-open-document lobbying.

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2330040/microsoft-c...

It seriously helps when citing articles like this you actually take the time to read the proposal and the response. The British gov't was proposing to move to only ODF to the exclusion of OOXML.

Here's a quote from the blog post:

"To be very clear, we are not calling for the government to drop its proposal to use ODF. Nor are we calling for it to use only Open XML. What we are saying is that the government include BOTH Open XML and ODF."

I'm not sure how that's considered "anti-open-document lobbying". Especially since every version of Office from 2007 has had support for ODF.

That's not EEE, that's Microsoft trying to convince an important customer to keep buying their office suite. What a crime!

Thanks for the article. My gradual transition to MS from Mac became a lot easier when I realized that MS was indicted for things that Apple does routinely in both their OSes these days. MS's very success worked against them.

I'm habitually downvoting any comment that includes the string "M$".

There is no clearer sign of ill will towards other participants (not Microsoft!) and no readiness to engage in a civil, fact-based discussion.

Been doing the same for about a decade. The whole M$/Micro$oft thing is fucking childish.

And I'm a FreeBSD user...so it's not like I'm against FOSS.

> Anyone who downvotes replies like this is displaying ignorance of Microsoft's pattern of behavior through their entire history.

And you, like many people are overplaying the power Microsoft has in order to play your own game of FUD. They has a lot less power than you realize. How can they even possible extinguish Linux? Even if they somehow make gov't all over the world use Windows server, that won't stop individuals and organizations from using Apache and nginx. Their own compiler for .NET is Apache 2.0 License. What are they going to do? Exercise some copyright law?

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