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Comment by bigtones | Hacker News Reader

Dude, it's 2016 - that was twenty years ago.

Microsoft still acts unethically today. NT still has backdoors, almost their entire stack is proprietary. Just because they have made some parts of what they do free software doesn't turn them into the technological equivalent of Jesus. Yes, I am happy that they are freeing some of the stuff they do, but it's clear that they're doing it as a marketing move not because they care about user freedom. So I don't see them ever making the whole stack free software.

They're not Jesus, but they are not Satan either. I've seen EEE called on every single good gesture Satya's Microsoft did, and it's getting old. Is Microsoft the savior of OSS? No. Is the company doing something nice by open sourcing components? Yes.

> NT still has backdoors

For someone speaking of ethics you really can't just leave this here without any support...

http://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-microsoft.en.html

They seem exaggerated for "back doors", because it's possible to avoid them. Yes some defaults might be malicious but the bar for calling something a backdoor is higher than just malicious.

Have you seen the backdoors on Mac OS X, customized Android versions and every other commercial OSes out there?

> backdoors on Mac OS X

That's proprietary too, so sure. But why are you mentioning Apple in a thread about Windows? I never said Apple was good either...

> customized Android versions

Android is mostly proprietary as well. Replicant is as close as you can get to a free fork of Android.

> every other commercial OSes

s/commercial/proprietary/g

Because many HNers like to bash Microsoft, while at the same time give a white pass the SV beloved companies, which happen to have similar practices.

Which backdoors on [current] Mac OS X versions are you referring to?

The ones that no one knows that exist or not, Microsoft isn't the only company selling closed source OSes.

Darwin doesn't count, because it isn't the full stack, nor can we be 100% sure that even that part of the code is shipped like that.

Done a lot of code-review of Linux lately?

If you bother to read the whole thread, my point is why HNers single out Microsoft, when the same cannot be proven for other companies as well.

Seriously old memes. At least we don't still have to deal with the cringe worthy "M$".

I still see it here and there, and it's great sign about author's bias. usually saves me from reading the rest of the comment.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/22

if $ was a legal domain character slashdot would change to M$.org

Some things never change, it's in Microsoft's DNA. They are just luring people back in with their open source initiatives because they saw that their stack was becoming obsolete.

As soon as they're back on the horse, we'll see the same behavior we used to see from them. That's my opinion of course. Fool me once...

Unless they initiate extend step, it is just a Fool's cry. EEE works for open standards, I do not see them trying to fork WebGL/HTML.

Dude, I heard the One Floppy is buried in the oak forests behind the Celtic Bayou and can be used to resurrect the Old Ones, who shall bring about a new era of M$$$$$$$....

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