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Comment by npmaile | Hacker News Reader

I understand correcting the title to be more accurate to the situation, but I think the discussion should be focused on how Microsoft is taking power away from users, and has business incentive to do so. I don't like that the greater tech community rallies behind Microsoft for doing some basic contributions to open source and then hand waves away moves like this.

Edit: the comment section has shifted and I'm less disappointed.

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Open source contributions for Microsoft are just like charities for big corporations with despicable practices. They can use it to say "hey we are not that bad, after all we support FOSS!"

MS has been open-sourcing a lot of stuff in the past few years, which I see more as meaning that their IP has little intrinsic value anymore. MS used to sell software, so code was sacred and not meant for others to see; now it's more about services, so code doesn't really matter much anymore, and if it's code that can help people use their services, open-sourcing makes sense.

You can see this with Google, Facebook, and all the others which release huge amounts of FOSS; they are not in the business of selling software either.

Yes! This shift of business was somehow perceived by the public as the win of open source, but has actually amazingly been an actual loss on the control that you have with the money that you spend.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. People have short memories of Microsoft practices and for some reason have "drunk the kool-aid". Ballmer was better because his tactics were not "sleazy", they were straight and clear.

This new exec team is sleazy and trying to give a "good face" when the reality is that they are as bad as they have always been. But people get flashed with the new & shiny open source crumbs that are given.

How are Microsoft bad? The topic is about a change Microsoft made to benefit their online services. This isn't a great development by any stretch, for sure. And yet when compared with companies that collect and traffic in personal data Microsoft is in my opinion relatively(!) benign.

Comparing them to Google/facebook and saying they are benign misses the point. They are not using your data for there non-existing web ad-network but they are sending you ads directly through your operating system. You are safe on that front but losing control quickly.

They are funneling you into their cloud services. They are changing purchase models into subscription models. They own your operating system and can do what they want with it including kicking you off. And they also partner with law enforcement freely. Where thoses boundaries start/stop who knows but there does seem to be more underaged porn arrests with a single image found. Didn't microsoft develop some image detection that the police use? Perhaps scans are happening locally.

Facebook will polute your feed with personal ads. Google will polute the web with personal ads But microsoft will destroy your life.

Not sure who's better but why do we trust large brands?

Eh, I think you're stretching it a bit too far. The code these corporations release as FOSS is a tiny, tiny portion of their software portfolio.

The main reason they open-source stuff is mindshare among the developer community, which helps with recruiting, influencing discussions in the public sphere, and so on.

"some basic contributions" is a little unfair, don't you think?

* 2 of the top 7 programming languages in use on GitHub are Microsoft created and maintained.

* Jockeying for top place among companies contributing code to projects on GitHub, for 4 years running.

* Top 5 contributor to the Linux Kernel

* Massively popular IDE in VSCode

* Enormous contributions to Kubernetes and the entire community around it,including creating/maintaining Helm.

* Big parts of Azure are open source, including their kubernetes implementation, ML toolkits, IOT components, and even the infrastructure underneath the whole thing, Service Fabric. (Demonstrably capable of orchestrating the varied workloads and scale of the second largest cloud provider in the world).

* Owner/maintainer of GitHub, which for better or worse is the platform for the vast majority of open source.

I don't like windows, I don't like office, and I don't like this move... But let's try to maintain some intellectual honesty here. Microsoft is not anywhere near a "basic" contributor to open source.

I'd argue that a company at the near trillion dollars scale can and should be Contributing mere than the few tens of millions they've put into open source, but you are not wrong and I'm not particularly willing to die on the hill I've climbed.

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