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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

I wish Microsoft would keep moving their recently changed reputation forward (at least with some people they seem to be doing good by building open source tools) by being clearer about their data collection and allowing more controls over it, as well as more controls over Windows Update, seems after the Creators Edition I lost control over my Windows Updates (namely I remember being able to pick dates for running updates, now I only get the option to pick the hours that I'm allowing them to update) I'm switching to Ubuntu and running Windows in a VM as a result, at least then I only lose what's on Visual Studio.

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> by building open source tools

While MS is working on some open source tools (Typescript is one example I can think of), they seem to have no problem violation licenses with their Windows tools (to only release code when they have no other choice) [0] [1].

> clearer about their data collection

Please remind me why an OS that you paid good money for (>$100) needs to collect your personal data and usage at all? :)

[0] - https://www.osnews.com/story/21882/Microsoft_s_Linux_Kernel_...

[1] - http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-admits-its-gpl-violat...

(edit: formatting)

You do realize that those links are from 2009, right? Regardless of anything else good or bad the company has done, the relationship between Microsoft and Open Source couldn't be more different today than it was then.

Disclosure: employee since 2008

Yes these are old links. However, I haven't seen any change in MS's behavior regarding Open Source since.

More recently they build an emulator for running Linux binaries (Bash), which again is closed source [0].

> relationship between Microsoft and Open Source couldn't be more different today than it was then

Please mention some examples of this?

[0] - https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues/178

By "more different" I mean the internal culture -- not necessarily the externally facing part. Ten years ago I was working on IronPython and IronRuby, open source reimplementations of other open source projects. Even though the originals are under a very permissive license, we weren't allowed to go anywhere near their source. Because of company policy, where external OS was essentially treated as radioactive, there was a vacuum around both process and engineering knowledge.

Today, the company has a lot of standardized procedures and tools around the consumption of external open source -- and, in fact, actively encourages it. Along with that comes awareness of appropriate and not appropriate usage. In the nine-year old example you give, that's obviously not an appropriate usage.

I'm not sure what your point is about the reimplementation of the Linux kernel API inside Windows. Most large software companies build some amount of closed source software. I don't know what decisions might lead to this being opened or not opened, but there are very few people who'd argue that a company should publish or make available all of their source code.

> Today, the company has a lot of standardized procedures and tools around the consumption of external open source

That MS consumes open source for their own good comes not at all unexpected to me. However, consuming is not contributing. I believe you made to point that MS now contributes to the OSS community. I may have misunderstood.

> I'm not sure what your point is about the reimplementation of the Linux kernel API inside Windows. Most large software companies build some amount of closed source software

Most companies don't clone FOSS but build on top of it instead. Also most companies are pretty open about using OSS (crediting the projects and their source code). I haven't seen a single written line from MS crediting GNU and the Linux community for their work. They only credit MS and their own people. (Some recent examples: [0] [1])

[0] - https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/wsl/2016/07/08/bash-on-ubun...

[1] - https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/heyscriptingguy/2016/09/...

Microsoft is a for-profit company. They build up reputation to use it. They have no reason to just amass it.

When they open-source software that is specifically to try to get the dev/tech community somewhat back onto their side. Which is the customer group that complains the loudest about their data collection and which has the only real chance of wandering off to the competition.

> as well as more controls over Windows Update

I would love this. We have now lost data from overnight tests multiple times thanks to Windows Update.

Used to have them set to only update on weekends, now I can't set my computer to do that... Now I come back to work and my work is all gone because Windows restarted. Not sure why they took away power from the user with their "Creators Update" or whatever it was called...

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