I was curious what the Linux people think about Microsoft and any bad practices that most people should know about already?
Embrace, extend, extinguish
Microsoft is definitely the corpoest of them all.
Probably not the worst corpo, likely even, but out of the corpos, they are the most corpo corpo of any corpo.
- They own LinkedIn, and I could just stop this list here.
- They’re the founding fathers of Embrace, Extend and Extinguish.
- They are the vanguard of videogame studio consolidation, after buying Activision and Bethesda.
- AI
- Everything they do is soggy bread: you can eat it, it’s probably mostly healthy, I think, but if a product is not the minimum viable product then it will be; take the Halo franchise as a reference for blandness, Windows for end user tolerance - both are controversial yet functional and popular software that people complain (and do nothing) about. Halo took quite a hit in popularity, but still…
- Remember when a software company got in trouble for monopolistic practices? That was a thing that happened at some point, and it was Microsoft. Not that it will ever happen again, nowadays all the cool kids have some slice of the tech landscape on a chokehold.
Apple is highly restrictive on their OS and over priced. They are extremely pro consumerism with heavy marketing and engineered obsolescence to ensure you are always pressured to buy their new tech, and they are historically very strongly anti-right-to-repair.
Microsoft is bad. But at least they are primarily a software monopoly.
I’m not sure, at least the unrepairable mess made by Microsoft is software rather than hardware - you can reinstall a janky OS but you can’t unexplode a phone that disassembled itself when you sneezed in its general direction.
There’s no fine line between the two companies.
Edit: they continuously fucked up Halo in unexcusable ways, fuck them, they’re worse than Apple. Forgot about that.
Yes. Microsoft is the king of “good enough” software. DOS was good enough (and had a free C compiler!). Windows gets the job done 95% of the time when it’s not freezing up or needing rebooting. Office is okay - and nothing else is 100% compatible so you get a bonus of vendor lock-in. New features are few and far between, as are bug fixes for non-critical issues.
They tried to destroy linux and free/libre software, and when that didn’t work, they started cornering the market and pushing for a move from “Free” to “Open Source.” They also support SaaS model, and have made it next to impossible to get a new computer without their mediocre OS. On top of that, their OS is full of spyware, and is starting to become adware too.
But that all pales in comparison to the fact that you do not own your own OS: you can run Microsoft’s OS, but you can’t modify it or share it.
Oh, and this falls more in the realm of personal preference, but the deliberate lack of customizability is a real pain in the ass.
4/10 OS, only slightly better at disguising its capitalist greed than Apple.
pushing for a move from “Free” to “Open Source.”
Can you explain more? Is that related to the clown gpl guys criticizing BSD/MIT/ISC license and laugh on FreeBSD for letting Apple to do whatever I can’t remember?
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
Free software can be freely copied, modified, distributed, etc. This doesn’t mean you don’t have to pay for it.
Open source software has its source code published. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re able to copy some or all of it, modify it, distribute it, etc.
It’s getting more and more common that, even in cases where code is open source, only part of the codebase is actually available. This is something that Microsoft (and other wealthy tech companies) loves to do to show that it’s “transparent.”
Thanks.
Open source software has its source code published. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re able to copy some or all of it, modify it, distribute it, etc.
GPL as an example.
Free software can be freely copied, modified, distributed, etc
If you are citing the GNU’s website, you should remove the “modified”. I’d quote a mailing list user:
Say if OpenSSH was licenced under (A)GPL, companies would likely not use it because they wouldn’t be able to incorporate it into their IP, they would then try to code a shoddy implementation, and have numerous security bugs which would affect the end user. In other words, you are just shooting yourself in the foot.
Did you mean
Is that related to the gpl advocates who criticize BSD/MIT/ISC license and laugh at FreeBSD for letting Apple do something (I can’t remember what)?
I’m not trying to be a grammar nazi, I just want to make sure I’m interpreting you correctly and not putting words in your mouth.
Afaik, BSD and MIT licenses qualify as Free Software licenses. I could be wrong; I am not a lawyer, nor am I Richard Stallman.
As for your first question:
Can you explain more?
@rand_alpha19@moist.catsweat.com did a good summary of the distinction, so I will expand on m$'s role:
By most Free Software advocates’ accounts, the rise of the term “Open Source” was a deliberate move to make proprietary software less of a bitter pill for us radical digital anarchists: “look, our code is Open and Transparent (but you still can’t reproduce or modify it, even if you buy a license).” At the same time, Open Source advocates argued that this was the “Shoe-In-The-Door” for Free Software into the corporate/capitalist landscape—it’s not, because it doesn’t actually advocate any of Free Software’s Four Essential Freedoms (Five, if you consider Copyleft to be essential, as I do).
So basically the corporate world took the concept of Free Software, which was starting to be a threat to their businesses, sanitized it of any actual freedom, and sold it back to devs and users as some kind of magnanimous gesture that they were letting us look (but not touch) the code they wrote. Open Source.
M$ has been essential in this shift. Perusing their github, they make it clear that they’re willing to toss projects onto the pile, but make sure as hell to keep the Freedom from infecting any of their larger, popular software (e.g. Office, Visual Studio, Windows). And in return, they get access to whatever code you host on their service, assuming they can interpret vague phrasing in their Privacy Policy loosely enough.
pretty much.
If you need a point for developers: all public code repositories hosted on GitHub are harvested, at least in 2021, and used to train copilot regardless of their license. Furthermore, GitHub is OWNED by Microsoft now.
