> judging by the downvotes, there's a surprising number of Microsoft fanboys here.

Seriously, do we need to lower the content level of discussion here to "fanboy" camp accusations, it's not productive.

Also, please review the guidelines:

Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downvote you or announce that you expect to get downvoted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't regurgitate guidelines that long term users know and deliberately ignore.

Please stop backseat modding. If you have a problem with a comment, flag it and it will be reviewed. Thanks.

teh_kiev was right, and reminding fellow users of the guidelines is fine. I wish users would do it more.

Indeed I was just about to post the following in reply to your comment above:

Please don't add meta commentary about downvotes and who you imagine downvoted you. It's against the HN guidelines (two of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and is invariably tedious.

The Windows 10 privacy issues really do leave a bad taste, and I will be sticking to Windows 7/8.1 for as long as I can. There is a reason there are free upgrades to 10 being pushed so hard, and it's not because they are feeling nice.

It seems like they are giving with one hand (open source to developers) and taking with the other (data from their unsuspecting users).

> sticking to Windows 7/8.1

Well, you know, you can't walk into the same Windows twice. (Unless you ignore all updates.)

Do you also use only DuckDuckGo?

There are different expectations for the Internet and the software that runs your hardware.

Windows 10 privacy settings and .Net as a viable technology platform from licencing and technology point of view are two different things, though.

"The different Microsoft" aspect comes from open sourcing the key technological components so migration away from Microsoft licenses is at least a legally plausible, and that people can indeed see what goes into the sausage.

From developers point of view this is a huge improvement and makes the .Net a much more appealing proposition.

Is a company evil? Does it make good products? To me, at least, it's not very helpful to mix these two discussions.

Well they did fire all their technical writers; they kinda had to stop writing those updates when there was no one to write them.

Nah, nobody in the open source community really cares about them. HN is heavily used by Microsoft employees - and they are legion. That's all you're seeing here.