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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

I tweeted about this release, and they specifically asked me for contributions, saying they would love help with making the project more Ruby like, actually following conventions. I told them that I don't work on anything Microsoft related, for personal ethical reasons, and they actually handled that response quite gracefully.

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That's interesting.. Where do you draw the line as far as Microsoft relatedness goes? Is your motivation more to make sure you never contribute to Microsoft goals, or is it actually never to be exposed to Microsoft technology yourself?

Is there something Microsoft affected you personally with or is it their business practices in general?

Microsoft attempted to destroy humanity's crowning achievement (so far): the World Wide Web. Totally unforgivable.

Now: people sometimes use Microsoft products, and they're often beginners. I will write software that runs on Windows, as that's often the people who need help the most.

But contributing directly to a Microsoft product is too much for me.

Germany attempted once to take over Europe and lots of people died. Totally unforgivable.

Now: people sometimes visit Germany, and they're often just tourists. I will build things for Germans, as that makes me money.

But contributing directly to Germany is too much for me.

I too enjoy absurd comparisons.

Well, stop judging the Microsoft of today with the one of yesterday. Many of us worker bees never went through that time period, and we really are just trying to build better things.

Comparing "embrace, extend, extinguish" to the Holocaust isn't exactly helping me not judge you.

I was just invoking Goodwin's law earlier rather than later.

Your management hasn't really changed. I grew up with MS in the 80s and 90s -- I'm not quick to forgive a monopoly that set the whole industry back by 10 years.

So what does senior management have to do with this? Just crap on any peon at MS who wants to engage with open source doesn't really hurt them.

The peon actively chose to work there and participate in Microsoft's attempts to dismantle any competition in any field they enter through highly questionable tactics.

So Machiavellian huh?

Such cynicism and paranoia just breeds an equal amount of such on our side. It makes it that much harder for those of us who wish to engage and do good in the OSS community.

I'm not really sure what you could possibly expect after MS spent most of the natural lifetime of this industries senior developers' behaving badly.

Rather weak response. You could also have said why you think Microsoft either hasn't changed, or that regardless of having changed hasn't earned their respect yet.

Now the thread is just worthless.

This goes beyond being 'not ruby-like', as it shows bad craftsmanship (e.g. mixed identifier case, bad indentation, unrunnable code). You don't need help by others for that.

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