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Comment by bwb | Hacker News Reader

So weird, I don't understand the freakout. Microsoft is a solid company, I am totally fine with them buying it. What is with all this craziness?

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Microsoft has a long history of not only opposing open source, but actively trying to attack and discredit it. That and they are somewhat notorious for their whole "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" approach.

Microsoft is where good products go to die. They change products and the communities and cultures associated with those projects. They are a big machine that has to please shareholders, and growth is difficult when you’re that big, so there are “hard choices” that can be made abruptly. These choices are often not to the benefit of the existing communities.

Ignore anyone who brings up “Embrace, extend, extinguish”. I’m not an MS apologist but no rational person can still consider that to be relevant. There are many reasons to distrust them, but that isn’t one of them.

No... Oracle is where projects go to die. Microsoft has other issues and it like many companies has successfully murdered good products (Skype), but it also realizes how important ecosystem is. Oracle just rapes and pillages companies and tech.

Microsoft was not always this cozy with open source and with regards to their acquisition policy.

Go look up the October Papers.

"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish".

From 20 years ago. Meanwhile, in the last 5 years they have opened up huge amounts of C#, are the most active organisation on the largest open source host o the internet, lead the development of one of the most popular open source editors, provide rock solid Linux support on their cloud offerings, and have been jnvolved in huge amounts of publicly available research.

I’m not saying they get a free pass for it, but they’ve more than earned their trust back over the last decade.

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