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.
Microsoft has shown themselves to be very pro-open-source in the last 5+ years. Just look at things like VS Code. Microsoft is just the Nickelback of software, its cool to hate on them for no real reason (any more).
In case you are genuinely wondering, a lot of the hate towards Microsoft stems from their historical hostility towards open standards[0] and open source[1].
It is not hatred, decades more of experience. Throughout the 90's and early 2000's Microsoft abused their monopoly position to the detriment of many. Open source options were much more limited then than now. The only reason Microsoft is changing now is that they have no choice.
I have problems with Microsoft, but I'm also annoyed the amount of praise some devs give Microsoft for doing anything related to open source. Some devs just fawn over every little thing Microsoft does, while also expecting Microsoft skeptics to forget most of their history just because of the past five or so years.
I know the latter is a downvotable attitude, and I apologize because it's very unlike me, but it is one of my few sore points, and this comes from years of web developer hell dealing with IE, years of working at places which only considered solutions that Microsoft invented, years of dealing with Microsoft BS left and right.
Microsoft has a long history of not only opposing open source, but actively trying to attack and discredit it. That and they are somewhat notorious for their whole "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" approach.
The Internet is such a terrible medium for communications subtleties. I agree though... but imagine how that would look from a PR perspective. Microsoft is, essentially, the anti-thesis of open source.
This is amusing in the light of Microsoft's attempts in recent years to cosy up to open source and pretend that they're embracing it via Codeplex, Mono, MPL, etc. I think this shows what their true values are.
I remember back when Microsoft used to be anti open source too. They would release super straw man type articles about how proprietary software was actually cheaper with lower ToS and other poppycock.
Weird to see a startup making such simplistic, wrong statements to promote their business rather than to protect an entrenched business.
You are kidding me right? There are loads of Microsoft shops, who see open source as evil, and have severe problems in using anything that is not Microsoft. Scary, I know.
I don't care at all about Microsoft being the largest open source contributor. It doesn't change my opinion about them one bit. In fact, I use it against them because they constantly talk about it as if it were a big deal.
Microsoft and Microsoft fans just can't let their actions speak for themselves and allow opinions to change naturally. They just have to force themselves on developers and say "wow you don't love me, OKAY, I'll just buy the platforms and services you love so you'll have to love me". I know why they do this though - it's because Microsoft's history is akin to Sauron, Darth Vader, or Lord Voldemort. Microsoft's history is just comically evil and the only reason they've changed is because the landscape shifted in such a manner where Microsoft was FORCED to change. They aren't doing this from to bottom of their hearts and they don't deeply believe in the open source idea and spirit; they are only doing it because, by the grace of God, the internet became the place to do business and not the desktop.
Microsoft would still demand its pound of flesh from all of us if they could; and they'd still be a closed source firm that looked down upon people who believed that free, high quality open source tools were a win for society in general, and they sure as hell wouldn't have let go of Balmer. Microsoft and .NET developers with stockholm syndrome need to stop treating us as if we're dumb for not bending the knee before Redmond.
The continued hatred of Microsoft amazes me. If Linus Torvalds, Eric Raymond, and RMS all joined Microsoft and proclaimed it safe, I suspect the accusations of selling out or being drugged would be leveled within milliseconds.
I fully realize RMS would never do this; my larger point is that with a huge chunk of the population I don't think there is anything Microsoft can possibly do to convince them they aren't evil/truly friendly toward open source.
Maybe the end game is the same as it always was: find the next profitable thing and leap on it? Microsoft is opportunistic. They were a major UNIX vendor in the '80s (Xenix); then they were married to IBM with OS/2; until one day they weren't.
Microsoft has traditionally been the one to get the hate for this because their moves were so brash in the '90s... But the other big tech companies aren't any better. Apple is a friend of open source and standards only when it happens to suit them. Google does lots of open source but they want to be the ones holding the reins at all tiems (Blink, Android, etc.) Facebook spends a lot of money on looking smart and friendly to developers so that we'd ignore the Orwellian pile of information they hold on most people. Etc.
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