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Comment by alexfromapex | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft always does this, they fool people by pretending they’re in favor of open source or make something free but it’s just a trick used to bait and switch people into the proprietary anticompetitive Microsoft ecosystem.

https://www.vox.com/2019/10/14/20910510/microsoft-government...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

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Why should they open source everything? I never see anyone complaining how Apple doesn't open source Safari or XCode. I mean there are plenty other totally open source editors out there to choose from.

Maybe not Safari, but they have open sourced WebKit and a lot of kernel modules and other useful things: https://developer.apple.com/opensource/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25675763

And Microsoft has open sourced at lot as well. So? Why should any of them open source everything?

Saying Apple open sourced WebKit is a pretty funny way of seeing things.

Exactly, it was open source before Apple came along. Guess GP didn’t realize that WebKit is a fork of KHTML from KDE which was LGPL licensed (if memory serves).

They've been pretty good stewards though, for a long time.

I don't know how much of it is lip-service, but webkit.org talks about using webkit on non-Apple platforms, and webkit-gtk gets discussed on their mailing list.

It feels to me like a truly collaborative open-source project, in a way that's unlike most of what Apple does. Again, I don't know how much of this is an aberration, but I've always been impressed with the whole thing.

WebKit was forked from the LGPL KHTML. Unless Apple wanted to get sued and lose, they needed to release WebKit under the terms of the original code.

You can’t push something as a standard, claim that the fact that it is standardized allows for interoperability, benefit from the work other people do to conform to your standard, then prevent your own work from being used by others like you claimed would be possible. Apple sidesteps this issue by rarely promoting standards in the first place.

How is that the standard? You can write you python code in PyCharm with their own set of tools or use vim or emacs with other open source python servers.

Microsoft has total right to pursue that goal. We should better help others so that they don't fall in the trap...

Why? Because they're the new Microsoft that completely embraces open source, we have been told, and it was seen as paranoid and ridiculous to suggest that they were merely the old Microsoft with a new trick.

Who told you that? Nobody said they would open source everything. There were never plans to open source Visual Studio or Office or Windows. And why should they? Did they sign a contract in blood?

There's a way to respond to comments. And this definitely isn't the right way. You might want to read HN guidelines.

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