Yeah. I vote for the next 5 million dollars to go towards resolving the file-roller drag-n-drop issue[1]. Well, maybe better make it 10 million! Next month this issue will be 4 years old after all.
GNOME? Don't even think about it. The next version of the file manager will probably remove icons all together in favour of a single, big button that opens a random file in your home directory.
GNOME is that user interface where out of the box everything is super eye-candy and cool, and yet you can't really do anything unless you install a billion extensions and swap out a few builtin programs for some other that look like shite but at least have the basic features everyone expects.
GNOME has been putting the entirety of its efforts and focus on UI only for the last 11 years, and that has cause the whole UX to become a total nightmare. GNOME 2 was incredible, it was a pinnacle in UX and it's a shame the GNOME devs got carried away and destroyed basically everything in their attempt at beating Apple at its own game.
The visual design of KDE was annoying and distracting to me, too. (Ditto the other non-GNOME DEs I tried.) If I had continued
to use it instead of abandoning it after 5
minutes, it would've become much less annoying, but some of the annoyance would've persisted indefinitely.
So I've been using GNOME for the last year and a half. In many ways it is worse than the GUI of MacOS or Windows, but it looks great.
Article forgot to mention secure boot shenanigans. I actually own a laptop that literally refuses to run anything except win8 that come with it and doesn't let me disable secure boot. People say that it is a bios bug... but there are no plans to fix the bios.
> On Ubuntu, all pre-built binaries intended to be loaded as part of the boot process, with the exception of the initrd image, are signed by Canonical's UEFI certificate, which itself is implicitly trusted by being embedded in the shim loader, itself signed by Microsoft.
Note that the keys uses by Microsoft for signing Windows are different from the ones they use to sign anything else, and some motherboards and laptops only come with the former. Early x86 Surface Pros, for example (even though you could disable secure boot entirely, and be forced to go through Scary Boot Prompts).
Misplaced blame. You can blame hardware vendors for this. They're supposed to provide a way to load arbitrary signatures, but some didn't (I think they all do now though). Microsoft also has a service where they will sign your executable. And before you claim that's a problem, remember that SSL works the exact same way.
Slippery slope fallacy. That article is from 7 years ago. They're not boiling the frog, you've just fallen for XKCD 605.
They may have dropped the requirement, but hardware vendors are still allowing loading your own keys. Because, there are more factors acting on this than just Microsoft.
They literally had a requirement that ARM Windows RT devices be not user unlockable. If someone lunges at you with a knife, but fails to stab you, it is not a "slippery slope fallacy" to believe they tried to kill you. What would it take to convince you? Zero remaining unlocked computers on the market?
Honestly I don’t think I have anything to contribute to this idea that doesn’t devolve into a philosophical question or can humans be selfless or is it selfish to want to help people. But I would be curious to meet someone who was truly selfless in software engineering, I think most examples of philanthropic software engineering are driven more by ideological rather than humanitarian reasons.
I'll just put a couple of things out there, as honest conversation
about the language I see on HN, rather than nitpicking about what you
say personally.
> devolve into a philosophical question
I'd say evolve. Philosophy is the "Master science". It's good to
understand the literal meaning of the word "love of wisdom" and that
the highest degree awarded is a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD). Not sure
where the disdain for "philosophical questions" comes from in some
quarters. Things like NP completeness and the quantum/wave nature of
reality are the kind of questions that we sometimes ascend to.
> philanthropic software engineering are driven more by ideological
rather than humanitarian reasons.
Firstly I think something can be both ideological and successfully
humanitarian. The former describes the intent and the latter an
outcome. Also (I'm not suggesting you imply this here) "ideological"
tends to be used around these parts as a sort of derogatory qualifier.
Ideologies can be good or bad. In general I prefer people who are up
front about their ideology. It's a credit to many people that they
have something they are prepared to stick by.
It's interesting how entities are societally not allowed to change for the better. Somehow, though, entities can change for the worse. It's a never forget situation.
What will it take for you to actually believe that they may genuinely be changing? Or you will always prefer to remember the dark times of CEOs past and a workforce that is probably half gone from those days? You want them to change their name, open source Windows?
Just because their path to cleaning their name has not yet passed through your preferred Open Source project does not mean they do not mean any good. The mere fact that such a large behemoth which you admit was blatantly against OSS but is now embracing and even backing some projects should tell you that entities can change, in either direction, good and bad.
Businesses, including Microsoft, do only what is necessary for survival.
This time, they have apparently embraced open source, while still keeping most of their core stuff closed, because doing otherwise would be bad for them.
Microsoft will gladly ditch open-source in the future, if it becomes the best option for survival.
I think a more measured perspective is to understand that Microsoft has decided to change its strategy at the top level, but also still is a company full of people looking for ways to capture value, and who have had a history of success capturing value in ways that are harmful to the broader software ecosystem.
And it's important to note that big companies are full of individuals trying to make their own careers.
For a less contentious example, I imagine top-level leadership recognizes that the immediate financial gains that come from bloating their flagship operating system with ads to the point where it feels like a mid-2000s filesharing app is short-sighted, but there are thousands of VPs who get promotions if they can point to a number and say "look at that revenue, I created it"
Why pretend a corporate entity can be rehabilitated when it is in fact an entity that always makes selfish decisions? The bigger they get the more true this becomes.
Why speak about it in terms of something cleaning its name? There's no reason to consider any corporation as "on your side", just something you can use the inputs from today and probably not tomorrow.
I have no special hate for microsoft, but it's like praising the wind for blowing - it's going to change direction again, trust me.
Should they do that one day (hopefully never), it would be Office for WSL, that is, not Linux but their Linux with lots of strings attached and technical/legal trapdoors. I also hope they will never be involved in any WINE development: WINE can severely hurt their business and they fear it to the point they created WSL which is and works as its exact opposite: prevent users from running Windows software without Windows by allowing them to run Linux software without Linux.
> It's interesting how entities are societally not allowed to change for the better.
Corporations make changes that suit them first, users second. Microsoft "loves" open source now, as they own one of the biggest dev-centric social media platforms.
> What will it take for you to actually believe that they may genuinely be changing?
They are changing into what makes more money in the long run.
That's not necessarily also a positive change in general. I don't know if "they are going to be evil, just wait!" is a useful point of view when you could be taking advantage of their not being evil today.
I came out of a dotnet post-secondary school but I'm now currently working on a React/Node/GraphQL team, I don't see it as a negative in the way you're portraying it here. I think C# is a great starting language both because of the great tool support and the sort of medium level of abstraction.
> I don't know if "they are going to be evil, just wait!" is a useful point of view when you could be taking advantage of their not being evil today.
You can do both, at least as a user. Take advantage of the positive resources (github, etc) while being aware of or even supporting alternatives as well (god help us if we ever lose GCC and CLang becomes a monopoly).
Interesting. I wonder how much the Microsoft hate is just people like this who just want everything to be open-source, and Microsoft is just the largest most obvious target for their activism.
This horse has been beaten to death a million times already.
Microsoft can't open source Windows since it's full of third party code they licensed and don't have the rights to open source. Probably also why apple couldn't open source MacOS.
Companies aren't people. Microsoft (and most any other corporation) will do whatever is in its interest currently. And their behavior isn't consistent, it changes as the makeup of the leaders and their priorities change.
IMO the right way to deal with that is to reject the instinct of considering a corporation to be a person, just rationally look at whether their recent actions, look for potential conflicts of interest, and make sure any deals are guaranteed to be in in your interest.
For instance, Microsoft has been known in the past for screwing people over in creative ways. Famously they screwed over Spyglass by buying the code that became IE with a royalty deal, and then giving it out for free, ensuring that Spyglass got percentages of $0, which it seems they definitely didn't expect. So there it would make perfect sense to take a look at any deals that could be subverted creatively with a very critical eye.
On the other hand if they just give you a donation because they want PR or some such with no strings attached, then there's unlikely to be a problem.
The question is why Microsoft is still viewed as anti-FOSS while Google and Facebook are viewed as pro-FOSS. Yes, your answer explains why some people might view ALL corporations as somewhat anti-FOSS. But it doesn't explain the discrepancy.
Who are the idiots that view Google and Facebook as pro-FOSS? Did they somehow miss how Google is locking more and more OS functionality behind the Play store? Or Facebook's locked-tight Occulus?
Google is pro-whatever-is-most-profitable-for-Google. Sometimes this leads to pro-FOSS behavior (they’re consistently among the top contributors to Linux), sometimes not.
I don't think it makes sense to talk about "entities". People deserve a chance to redeem themselves. But corporations are not people even they have lobbied some governments to pretend they are. Why should a coroporation that, unlike a person, is the sum of its past deeds be given the benefit of the doubt that they have actually changed. I don't think it is wrong of people to be highly suspicious of these image-washing PR stunts.
I honestly don’t understand why Microsoft gets so much love on here. They built a ton of tracking into almost every pc on earth, and they are now pursuing a locked down AppStore model with windows S. Edge, as a browser, is just a way to collect more of your data. They added ads to your OS, cortana is invasive, and the search bar is a pain and is possibly sending all my queries over the web, I can’t tell.
Why should we think they have turned over a new leaf? They have gotten worse, not better
> they are now pursuing a locked down AppStore model with windows S
Isn't Windows S Mode pretty much dead? I thought Microsoft gave up on it a few years ago and I don't believe there's any new hardware being shipped with it. Also, those that do have S Mode enabled by default can do a one-way switch out of it in the settings.
Mostly because they compete in areas and as a corporation we don't expect them to help their competition.
At best they get praised for doing things in a way where they benefit or are forced to face a worse alternative without control or a hook.
Whenever they seem to do something selfless the control, hook or incentive to taking in some patent comes along with it.
I don't expect to put .net stuff and the like in the same category as GNU tools anytime soon.
Is it something of CEO's past? I remember the ODF debacle, the MAUI naming
, the numerous anticompetitive business practices, etc all not being far off. Hell even OEM bundling court cases are not a thing of the past
> What will it take for you to actually believe that they may genuinely be changing?
They can't change, as nearly every other (successful) company can't. They're built for profit, but human related values such as morals, honesty, sincerity, and generally being good to others etc. have no place in business: those are obstacles that soon or later must be removed to maximize profits. I expect pretty much every company to act in a benevolent way when they're young and still in need to establish a good public image, but as soon as their business allows them, they become evil, I mean not in a superhero comic baddie way ("muhaha! I'll conquer the world"), but rather in a very cold "we don't need to be nice anymore" way.
It's just how they're created, and the environment they "live" in that shapes them: if you dwell in a sea full of sharks, you better learn to behave as a shark, especially if being a shark guarantees more rights and less obligations than most humans.
>> I expect pretty much every company to act in a benevolent way when they're young and still in need to establish a good public image, but as soon as their business allows them, they become evil, I mean not in a superhero comic baddie way ("muhaha! I'll conquer the world"), but rather in a very cold "we don't need to be nice anymore" way.
I don't believe it's "as soon as their business allows them", but as soon as the owners decide they don't care. You can have a company that runs at low margins and does some good if that's what the founder wanted. The problem is that the founder will eventually die, and someone else will own the company. That could be due to going public, taking on other private investors, or just leaving the company to family. New owners are so often driven by money that they will abandon being nice or supporting a cause.
Lets all follow Mark Cuban's pharmacy company as an example. He's offering drugs at a 15 percent markup. Great cause - making meds affordable to people. It will eventually be co-opted by greed, but lets see how long it takes and who actually gets greedy.
After living through a few iterations of "they're horrible"->"maybe they're not so bad"->"oh wait, they're actually still horrible", nothing is going to convince me they're genuinely changing. In fact, I can't think of any instance where a shitty company became genuinely not shitty.
As another commenter touched on, they're literally doing the same playbook and currently are in the process of closing the source on previously open C# extensions in Visual Studio IDEs.
And you can't compile iOS apps on Linux, and literally no one is angry about that fact. Apple is viewed as pro-FOSS (or at least less anti-FOSS than Microsoft). IDK, I'm having trouble finding answers to the original question here.
Even if you could compile iOS apps on Linux, it wouldn't be worth anything without Apple's signing key to bless it to run on a locked iDevice, which they charge $99 for.
MS has definitely improved compared to where it was. But we're not just tarring them with the brush of past activities, they have made recent hostile actions. Just this week we've had on HN them announcing changing .NET tooling to make it less open source and more proprietary.
Let's assume for a moment that corporations have human features and that they can "change". (We all know it's not how companies work: it is a network of individuals optimizing their choices having in mind maximizing their own profits and the profits of the corporation.) But if we engage in a thought experiment and assume corporations have morals, and can change their "behavior" because of ethical issues, I personally would be convinced they actually changed if:
1) They immediately turned of all telemetry and made it opt-in, clearly explaining what they are gathering, when, and politely asked people to turn it on.
2) They immediately stopped forcing people to create online accounts and misleading them in all possible ways so that they have to disconnect their network etc. in order to use their system without this bs.
3) Instead of boasting on their Hyper-V-related work in the Linux kernel, they would work on interoperability with Ext4, and develop an equivalent to bootcamp so that other OS-es could gracefully coexist with Windows (last time I checked Windows installer completely ignores Linux and makes the existing system unbootable).
4) They would collaborate with the Wine project in order to make the newest version of Office work smoothly on Wine.
I could go on forever. They won't make any of these, because it is against their best interests. Linux and macOS are still competing products. MS is making tons of money off Linux running on Azure, but they need to be careful about the desktop aspect. That's why you see what can be perceived as inconsistency: they want to attract people to them, but at the same time they want to exploit their customers as much as possible.
> Microsoft deleted the open source Hot Reload feature, 'cause they decided to shit it only in commercial edition of Visual Studio 2022. After scandal and closed discussion, MS decided to return it.
With the Linux virtual machines that are integrated into windows, known as WSL2 I can see how Extend will be the next step. The proprietary binary blobs for graphics and compute acceleration are already there.
Hopefully the GPL and AGPL can protect us somewhat against the Extend.
Let's not forget lobbying against government adoption of free software: Over the past five years Microsoft has developed one of the most sophisticated lobbying networks [..] two of Microsoft's policy priorities, limiting the adoption of open-source software [..] stand out as areas wherein what's good for Microsoft may not be good for all CIOs. - https://web.archive.org/web/20040915234341/https://www.cio.c...
Mandating their patented, proprietary exFAT filesystem for SD cards, despite plenty of adequate FOSS filesystems, so they can extort patent fees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT
Using Secure Boot to lock Windows RT devices from being able to install alternative OSs, with no way for the user to unlock it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_RT#Restrictions_and_co... (and disallowing all software except that found on the Windows store)
Remember how we were told our fears of Secure Boot doing exactly this were unfounded? Oh but it's not "real" PCs, just Windows RT devices. If we worry that the category of "real" PC will get narrower and narrower, with more and more "special purpose" locked-down devices taking its place, effectively preventing normal people from switching to linux because they'd need to buy a special-purpose device, those worries will also be dismissed as unfounded.
>Microsoft’s top lawyer advocated against a repair bill in its home state.
>February, Microsoft held a meeting for state lawmakers to go over the company’s priorities. It was a snow day, so executives convened over a conference call. Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, ran the meeting, according to a person on the call. He ticked through a couple items before arriving at the repair bill. Microsoft didn't like it, and Smith argued the measure would threaten his company’s intellectual property. Later, as the legislative session continued, Microsoft treated the bill as an “existential threat,”
If Xbox is out of warranty and optical drive controller fries (it really happens) its the end of that console - drive is crypto paired to CPU, no optical drive handshake prevents updating/reinstalling os and cuts off online store.
Yes there are some people in Microsoft who are concerned about competition from OSS, but unlike IE I don't see any dirty tactic here TBH. It's their job to sell their product and highlight bad things about open source competing products. It is the same for other side of the camp as well.
Lobbying against adoption, against reasonable ODF standards, etc Industry strongarming and other anticompetitive practices, Giving their project the same name as an open source project with similar function, etc
GPL FUD is still with us. A lot of corporations have "no GPL software" policies. They make exceptions for Linux but resist any new GPLed software over the concern that the license is "viral" in ways it really isn't.
It's dumb. I'm convinced that if you simply renamed the license it would go away. The text could be unchanged. It all goes back to Microsoft pushing FUD against the GPL years ago.
The GPL is scary enough even with the ways it really is viral. Just look at the torches/pitchforks any time some company violates it accidentally. People calling for the company to "lose" its GPL license and have to stop shipping products, or have to open-source their entire portfolio. Crazy stuff.
And to avoid accidents, it requires top-down scrutiny of the sort most companies aren't prepared to enforce. You don't want to hear "The intern accidentally used a 3rd party proprietary code module in our GPL software and shipped the binary, a month ago, what do we do now?"
The article fails to mention how Microsoft corrupted the ISO standardization process to ram through their Office XML file format. They were very scared of companies/countries/organizations adopting the open standard OpenDocument format:
A 6000+ page spec ratified in less than a year. The spec was so bad, Microsoft themselves didn't adhere to the standard and updates were needed to clarify much ambiguity baked into the spec.
The whole Windows Subsystem for Linux saga is kind of interesting, and maybe illustrative. With the GUI interface (WSL2g) working, you can basically do Linux development pretty easily on a Windows machine, with some caveats (Linux network control commands didn't work, they seem to want you to use Powershell for that).
However, I think it was more out of necessity as most developers seem to view Linux as a far easier development environment relative to Windows or Mac. You did have to sign up for the Insider program (at least with Win10, not sure about 11) which meant a lot of telemetry and constant updates. They've also now released WSL2 for Windows Server:
To get the full use out of it, though, you probably need a Windows Pro license, which costs ~$100-$200 last I checked (lower if it comes bundled with the inital purchase of the computer). I eventually just wiped Windows entirely and installed Debian, because the telemetry and updates were getting to be too much... flashing the BIOS at the same time. There were a few challenges (getting the drivers for my laptop's touchpad to work definitely wasn't that easy, but eventually found instructions on the Debian forums).
Practically, Linux is just easier to understand, and that's where open source is better than proprietary. Regardless, and equally practically, knowing how to use a Windows or Apple system is still necessary if you want to make software that can be run on those systems, and of course Android/iOS. However, there's no reason not to make Linux (and RISCV) the primary standard in academic education, which is still where Apple and Microsoft (and ARM and Intel) market heavily.
The WSL saga is quite easy to understand and a proof that Microsoft has lost an opportunity to own Desktop UNIX by not caring enough with the POSIX personality on Windows NT.
Thanks to the devs that give Apple money to use their hardware while targeting GNU/Linux, Microsoft realized that there is a huge set of developers that don't really care about Linux, they only want access to UNIX/POSIX toys and supporting Linux OEMs isn't really their thing.
So with this in mind, and given that Linux kernel ABI nowadays is more relevant than just POSIX compatibility, WSL was born.
Trailing the path of BSD, Solaris, IBM i, IBM z/OS that also have Linux compatibility available as feature.
So ironically the Year of Desktop Linux is in the form of a VM.
There are a lot of comments here about not forgiving corporations for their past because corporations are not people but are legal entities with profit-driven motives. I agree that we should not view Microsoft's donation to Gnome as altruism. Corporations make donations because it is in their own interest. Having a brand of generosity is valuable to the bottom-line.
Overall, however, I am happy to see that Microsoft now operates in an environment where donating to open source is in their best interest. It was not always this way, but the open source software movement has successfully created incentives for corporations like Microsoft to act altruistically.
It is not productive to call out corporations for being self-interested. This is already known. Instead, the discussion should explore how to maintain an environment where corporations are continuously incentivized to contribute to the open source community. Similarly, how do we incentivize companies to give up on the business model of proprietary software?
FWIW, Microsoft ran an anti Linux ad campaign in the early oughties in Germany, which fairly openly spread FUD [1]. The text reads
An open operating system isn't exclusively advantageous
An open operating system is prone to mutations. With Windows 2000, all services and daemons are from the same vendor. This saves time and thus real money. For more info, go to http://www.microsoft.com/germany/windows2000
It was quite badly received in the Linux/OSS world and brought a lot of backlash. That said, MS have obviously changed their opinion to the extent that at some point they were among the five largest Linux kernel contributors [2].
Yes, don't forget, be conscious, but for me is fine that Gnome take that money.
The situation remembers me in some capacity to a recent Atlanta episode when one of the black protagonists choose to accept the money/opportunity of a white rich dude, even knowing the whole troubled past about slavery, and knowing that he is scamming him.
By the way, the recent Gnome 42 was a milestone on UI/UX and performance improvements, that may be in part of that MS $ (oh, this donation is more recent, but you get my point).
saying linux is cancer (and communism even though this is only seen as a terrorizing thing mostly in the US) were pretty strong statements. strongarming companies to NOT sell computers with linux is not so far in the past either. I 100% understand if someone is suspicious of MS. That said, corporations are driven by profit and MS's views on how to profit have changed in the last 20 years. Obviously this shift is driven by a changing world, not ideology.
Bottomline, M$ is still a for profit company, supporting open source projects is sth the world needs more of and if there are no strings I do not care where the (legal)money come from.
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