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Comment by not_your_vase | Hacker News Reader

Have you noticed that MS mostly stopped using EEE, and changed strategy to just ignore rules/laws/licenses, and wait to see what happens? We hear it frequently that "today's MS is not the same as the old MS", but I have my doubts.

This particular one just the latest. But the really big one (IMHO) is the one where they simply started to ignore EFF[0], when they were asking them about the copyright status of co-pilot. If the court decides against EFF, that will have a lot of effect on the legality and enforcement of most of the OSS licenses (though I'm an armchair-lawyer, not even in the US). Fun times ahead.

[0]: if I remember well, it was EFF, who mentioned that MS stopped responding to them. I have found the lawsuit, but filed by not by the EFF. Google is more useless by the day.

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> Have you noticed that MS mostly stopped using EEE,

No, I haven't. Notice that MS now loves Linux... provided you run it on Azure or as a component of Windows (WSL). They adopted Chrome...'s rendering engine and then abused their desktop OS market share to shove the result down people's throats. They don't have the leverage they once enjoyed, but the approach didn't change, at least not in general.

Hardly any different from FAANG so beloved by FOSS folks....

I don't see the connection between Amazon, Facebook, and Netflix and free software.

Apparently everyone celebrates the stuff they put out into FOSS, whereas their agenda is hardly any different from Micro$oft.

In the case of Go quite recently, there was such outrage about opt-out telemetry that the proposal was walked back, and implemented (correctly) as opt-in instead.

Yeah, however there have been other cases where the outrage was ignored, like on how the modules story went.

Modules isn't any worse than NuGet for privacy. Neither are good, but it's hard to say the outrage was "ignored" - people bring it up constantly.

> people bring it up constantly.

Of course. Because the Go team ignored everyone and implemented it anyway.

> Hardly any different from FAANG so beloved by FOSS folks....

I don't see what you mean. I'm not sure about "FOSS folks" but at least in the HN community FAANG has little sympathy.

I think they were referring to how react, etc is looked upon favorably by HN readers while .net, etc is criticized, most of which is invalid.

...yes, those are also poorly regarded:

- Facebook honestly mostly seems orthogonal to open source concerns

- Apple most certainly does get criticized for the incompatibility of their App Store with copyleft licenses, and the way they deliberately avoid GPLv3

- Amazon is the poster child for bad interactions with the open source ecosystem

- Netflix... honestly I don't know of any problems aside from DRM (and I'm pretty sure that's imposed on them, not really their choice)

- Google is absolutely criticized on a regular basis for how they interact with the wider community

Though of course even if your claim were correct, it wouldn't really matter; whataboutism is a bad argument because two bad actors isn't zero bad actors

I think this is a tendency of all internationals mega corporations. Law is not homogenous around the world, and since you are consequently anyway in violation, you learn how to use that in your favor and ignore it for quite a while. And then, once its start to be annoying, you can finance an army of lawyers to delay or even change the law.

For one part it is quite reasonable to work like that, on the other side it is really unethically and bad for the society as a whole.

The current system highly incentivises sufficiently large corporations to embrace the Nike principles: Break the rules, fight the law

The worst case scenario, if you lose a game stacked in your favour several times in a row, you pay a pittance, or performatively correct a now-obsolete injustice.

VScode telemetry will remain opt out because it yields very valuable information. Microsoft is not a democracy, and the outcry here is less than a rounding error, a footnote in some internal director’s morning agenda.

The current system highly incentivizes pretending not to know.

Obtaining power at any cost requires the internal director to pretend he doesn't know, what he's doing.

The vast majority of social capital is made by lying to people, pretending to not know you've done it and dropping relationships with anybody who is not pulling in your direction.

Silence is vastly underrated, I say ironically, so I shouldn't be typing this out.

Oh, I find this note quite interesting. I noticed that every time when a BigCo's shenanigans come to light, many people are ready to scream Hanlon's razor!one111!! - and BigCo is very happy to accept this reasoning every single time. It's like they are prepared in advance to use it as a defense, in case their doings come to light. Even if the same thing keeps repeating again and again and again and...

I do the same.,. But in the last month I got three traffic tickets.... One for not using blinker, one for not keeping my lane and one for speeding

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