Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

(Takes deep breath.)

Oh wait, you are serious? Let me laugh some more!

and desperate for clicks

I'm not that worried about MS these days. I even got asked a few weeks ago if I wanted a Mac instead of my Dell Win11 PC running WSL2. After the faff of setting it all up, I can't be bothered to switch back now, as it does the job well enough (and Teams + other tools crash less on the PC, compared to the previous Mac)

I'm far more worried about Facebook, Google and Amazon, but it's hard to know which one of them is the more evil these days.

Microsoft will always be evil. The 'lipstick on a pig' has never ever been truer.

It won't be long before they come out with Microsoft Linux Mk 2 and tell the world that this is the ONLY TRUE Linux OS and that all the rest are impostors and should be deleted forthwith.

I'm sure that their version will contain huge amounts of telemetry and other nasties just to keep track of us plebs

At least RedHat didn't fall into the hands of MS. They'll be out there making sure that their software only runs properly on MS Linux. Nothing like a bit of vendor locking to keep the money coming in.

I will never ever use any MS branded or owned product again.

MS can go suck on this [see icon]. I hope they get a real bloody nose.

The benefit of OSS is that if you put "all kinds of telemetry" into your software, everyone would know about it, plenty of Geeks would notice and pretty soon no one would use it.

You need to move on.

Strong "leave Britney alone" vibes from this one.

A leopard that changes it's spots ? That goes against all experience.

Does it? I'm given the impression that organisations often learn more from their failures than they do from their successes. The 'leopard' in your example is an organisation of people, projects, history, procedures - things that change or are replaced over time For the spots on this ever-changing leopard to remain the same would require a conscious decision to keep them the same or else another prevailing pressure.

I still see signs that Msft haven't changed their spots...

Look at how they are using their market dominance in the Windows OS and Office market to force customers to move to Azure. Which, from my limited understanding is illegal.

You mention the concerns over Microsoft's ownership of Github, and still manage to say they're not evil with an apparently straight face?

Microsoft have stopped trying to quash Open Source, and are instead feeding off it like a giant tick nestling in the fleshy parts of a growing animal. They're still evil, just slightly less terminally so.

Well put dajames . Icon for your choice of epithet.

The idea that "Satya Nadella ... knew that to make money, Microsoft had to really embrace, and not extinguish, open source." is the wrong end of the stick. He simply recognised that the extinguish part was impracticable, so drew in his focus to embrace and extend. Nevertheless, firing off the odd extinguisher when opportunity arises is definitely still there in the small print.

I suppose that it is at least arguable that MS might not be "open source attitude" evil any more, as demonstrated by the article, although you might not be convinced.

However, there are more sorts of evil available that are distinct from their open source attitude. Their telemetry, for example. Tricksy popups trying to make you agree to things you do not want. Outlook, which seems designed to suck your email inside a proprietary blob from which it cannot be usefully extracted.

Or, and very much worst of all, those system-generated "assistant" messages trying to sound cheerful and friendly. Or ones that let you say "not now", but never what you really want, namely "FOAD, INWTSTSAAMA". Those are definitely the most evil.

But running WSL on my Win10 machine means I can drop into a shell at will and either do something on my machine (so no need to learn Powershell) or ssh into any number of my Ubuntu servers seamlessly.

Yes, there is puTTY. But that is so clunky it could only be a Windows app.

My last job needed an asset management tool. With fuck all budget I spun up a Debian VM on their hypervisor (no licence) installed a LAMP stack, got SnipeIT working and everyone happy until the boss learned we'd gone "non Windows" and insisted it was shifted to a cloud subscription service.

One quote later, and all of a sudden it was staying.

You can SSH into those servers without WSL. The client is supported at any command prompt.

PuTTY is how a Unix developer develops a Windows app.... it doesn't follow any Windows best practices.

Which include pulling in shitloads of rancid bloatware, vendor lock-in and fucking up the developer's hope of delivering something useable on a stable platform with reliable APIs.

WSL is a dumpster fire and extremely slow.

WSL2?

Microsoft hires people to write software so they own the copyright and have the right to select whatever licenses they want to distribute that software.

I get to read those licenses and to decide for myself whether to rent their software. My dislike of their choice of license has not changed in over thirty years so I do not rent their software. The difference between back then and now is that it is easier to not pay Microsoft for software I do not want. Hate is definitely the wrong word for my feelings toward Microsoft. To me they are mostly irrelevant but they do provide some entertaining news.

Perhaps this article is asking me to trust Microsoft: sure, just as much as Google, Amazon and Oracle.

That's the point.

You get to choose between four evils now.

Aren't you lucky ?

Yes MS support lots of FOSS initiatives and such like but I'm sorry they've just been naughty once too often after promising to be good and I'm afraid I live by "once bitten, twice shy". I have no issues with MS or MS FOSS aspiriations, I'm just very wary of them.

I couldn't agree more. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on ME.

Micros~1? Move away from the Dark Side? In your dreams.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/11/lenovo_secured_core/

is about the Lenovo laptop that won't run Linux without fiddling in the BIOS. It quotes a Microsoft employee about how running Linux on hardware with a Pluton chip is an "unsupported scenario".

Those of us old enough to remember the fuss about UEFI see parallels.

:) I was about to write much the same thing, so thank you for saving me the composition time.

Micro$oft haven't changed.

Nope, it's not. Give 'em an inch and they'll patent the ruler.

I'm actually a MSFT employee, so dismiss what I say on that basis if you like. But all my work is on Ubuntu running in Azure, which I get to via a MSFT provided MacBook Pro. I haven't used anything running Windows (except as a hypervisor host) since I got to MSFT 4 years ago.

MSFT really is a pretty decent open source contributor. Yes, they still have proprietary stuff, but the "embrace, extend, extinguish" policy is long gone. When we use an OSS product, AFAICT MSFT contributes any changes back to the community in any case where that makes sense for the community.

Back in the '90s, I worked in a networking company that was continually screwed over by MSFT arrogance ("we're changing the network mini port driver interface yet again for no good reason, so FU"), so I get where you're coming from. And I don't deal much with the Windows folks, but the parts of MSFT I see try to make customers happy, not jerk them around.

I've seen nothing that indicates any real change in their behaviour.

For corporations, there is only profit. They're in favour of something if they decide it helps their profits, and they're against something if they think being in favour of it would work against their profits. And even there weren't all those signs strongly hinting that much of Microsoft's Linux love is indeed mere lip service, it could be against Linux and OSS within the blink of an eye again, despite the obvious fact that they need it to run their own business.

>There is no 'good', no 'evil'. For corporations, there is only profit.

Yes, that is true. But also more nuanced than first appears.

There is short term profit, maybe made by risk taking or economy drives. There is long term profit, made perhaps by investing in staff and technology, and earning the trust of customers over time. Gross generalisations, to be sure. Investors may have their own values beyond money, as do staff and customers.

> For corporations, there is only profit.

Submit the evidence is against you. Plenty of corporations, esp silicon valley startups that appear to have minimal interest in profit.

Executive 'compensation', on the other hand...

yeah, just like a deep sea angler fish is a lighting consultant.

Than understood that it too could cut development expenses as people get more and more used to bad software. The web and Linux shown you don't need to write great software - as long as it works somehow and costs "nothing" for most users it's perfect.

Thereby Nadella could save of Windows development cutting features and dumbsizing the UI - after all, what's the competition? Linux and Web applications - both of them far from being high-end UI and applications. Then go cloud-first and start to make money renting software you don't have to invest much to develop. Win-Win for Microsoft.

FOSS is bringing IT backwards, not forward. Everything is becoming brittle, overly complex, fragmented, and uncomfortable to use. Paradigms of the 1970s with all their inherent limitations are worshiped as an "act of god" and deemed "un-modifiable" mostly for religious reasons, while they just make systems more cumbersome to use. It is true - internet evangelizations by activists is brainwashing people, especially youmg ones, that worse is better just because it's "free" and it's "open" so a few selected corporations can exploit you better without paying you - as the dire situation in which a lot of FOSS projects are show perfectly.

And IT just become a sub-product of the personal data extraction and behaviour modification industry - an industry that without FOSS maybe would not exist just for the costs to build it.

Enjoy Microsoft is FOSS-friendly now - to better exploit you, together the others- just the whole IT is much less friendly to users than it was thirty years ago.

Odd. I use Win 10 AND Linux on a daily basis - each for what it does best - each sitting on separate, identical 2Gb SSDs, sitting in the same box and using identical resources. i7 chipset, 32 Gb ram etc, and selected by SATA power switch prior to boot.

Increasingly, I find myself forced to conclude that it is the Win environment which is "bad", Linux being very much faster, and more stable. I know which environment I prefer to WORK in.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/11/lenovo_secured_core/

I see where M$ is going... do you?* Win10 was a headache when I had to deploy it, so many changes to do a simple task, it became difficult, frustrating and time consuming. I read about Win11 being meant for Alpha testers... Glad M$ is not in my support scope any longer.

*Save more money while you license us to death to make more.

I don't know. Reading your 2014 article of which this seems to be a replica:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-open-sourcing-of-microsoft/

I am not entirely sure where you come from. Sure, a lot has happened, in absolute and relative terms, .NET being one of the notable things. However, that does not say much about the motives.

Some things, like WSL for example, seem to me an incarnation of the same old BORG-style embrace.

Other recent news, as others have pointed out, suggest that the old mentality is still alive and very well, To those one might also add this one:

https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/microsoft-store-killing-open-source-app-sales-angering-developers

So, if one wanted to be really nice, one could talk about giving the company the benefit of doubt, surely nothing more.

I'll believe it when I see it (which I have not), then wait 5-10 years just to be sure.

-> Microsoft has become more valuable than ever because it finally figured out that it was better to join Linux and open source than to fight it.

You seem to be saying that MS has become more valuable ONLY because it 'joined Linux and open source'. Is that true? Does nothing else they do or sell, or external factors, impact their share price?

I don't really trust MS when it comes to Linux or open source generally. The fact that they use it is neither here nor there. While it may be possible that MS has changed, I don't really believe it. I would like to see a lot more evidence first. Until then it's not proven.

Azure wouldn't exist if it weren't for Linux.

Borkzilla actually tried to make its Azure platform run on Windows Server, and it failed abysmally.

So yeah, Borkzilla is now a Linux advocate - except on the desktop.

The leopard isn't changing its spots, it's just trying to survive in a world which needs it less and less.

Gates stopped doing day-to-day work at Microsoft in 2008. In 2021, the billionaire was pushed off Microsoft's board for having an affair with an employee.

His business with Epstein totally had nothing to do with it. Totally.

Has zero rhetorical value. Which is about the amount of faith anyone should hold, that any large captialistic company will ever change it's profits generating spots.

If the past doesn't characterize the present, then neither can predict the future.

Stop judging Microsoft on what it did a decade ago and judge it by what it's doing today.

They have managed the "Embrace" phrase, are working on "extend" and would move to "extinguish" in a heartbeat if they could pull it off successfully?

https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/60248.html

> "Starting in 2022 for Secured-core PCs it is a Microsoft requirement for the 3rd Party Certificate to be disabled by default."

I will NOT get over it! Microsoft can never be trusted, even if some of their moves look a bit benevolent at the beginning.

I'll believe MS actually likes Linux when I see MSWine. It can even be closed source and cost $50. Until then, the open source Linux efforts look to me to be a way to move Linux users inside the wrapping of a Microsoft resource extraction environment.

Well if it is, can you provide a link for the source code for Windows 12 on GitHub?

I couldn't find it.

when you immediately submit an article you intended to schedule for April 1st...