Yes, we all remember Embrace, extend and extinguish. Even people who weren't around then. Because it gets brought up in every single Hacker News thread about Microsoft.

At this point I really don't think it's useful to cite a Microsoft strategy from the mid 1990s. It's clear at even a cursory glance that their approach has changed dramatically.

> At this point I really don't think it's useful to cite a Microsoft strategy from the mid 1990s. It's clear at even a cursory glance that their approach has changed dramatically.

I respectfully disagree. MS has spent a long time building up a lot of bad-will. Just because they've done a couple of nice things lately doesn't mean we should forget all that.

I hope they become awesome, and continue to be pro-FOSS, but it's going to take more than a couple of good steps to convince me.

Couple? F# and asp.net have been open over 5 years, yes under Steve Balmer. All this is not entirely recent but they have accelerated the pace and extended the scope. If you choose to ignore it, its your prerogative.

OK, so we have what percentage of their products open (admittedly, some of them are pretty significant)? compared to all the other negative they've done? I'm not ignoring anything, and I'm not really sure why you assumed that. In fact, if you blindly say they've turned to the good side, I'd accuse you of the same...

All the bad they've done presumably extending back to the 1990s? A company isn't a person - a significant amount of the workforce, senior management and even the CEO is different than it was back then.

But they chose to stick with that company and culture, presumably that "brand". I'm not saying they can't turn around, but they've still got a long way to go to prove to me this is anything different than EEE.

Also, they didn't just stop in the 90's. A lot of their questionable practices have continued on, and are still going on. I'm not basing my mistrust only on the 90's. It's just one factor out of many, but one I still feel should be taken into account.

It's worth bearing in mind that Microsoft isn't a singular entity. It's a company made up of employees. How many employees from the mid-1990s are there today? How much of their leadership?

How many of the employees that were there in the mid-1990s work at companies you adore or support today? Maybe other companies are where Embrace, Extend, Extinguish lives today.

Technology moves at an incredible pace. Acting like any news story from the mid-1990s is relevant today is incredibly silly.

I agree that it can vary a lot. I'm making generalizations. And I'm not basing it on just the mid-90's. I'm basing it on everything else since then.

Forgive, don't forget. I trust them less and less. I'm probably subjective, because of their contributions to EEE and adding spyware to their key product and huge espionage of spyware added to OS as "basic functionality" in every new release.

No, it gets brought up because the after effects of that philosophy are still felt even today.

Got a few examples to bring up? Because I'm not seeing how Java suffered. If anything, Oracle is a bigger threat to Java than MS.

2 examples that affect me every week when serving SMB clients:

- old IE installs

- PDF printing functionality not included in older versions of Office and Windows

More experienced people/sysadmins can probably bring out lot more issues. And I totally agree with you that Java didn't suffer in the end, but how many lawyer hours were spent on stuff that shouldn't have been an issue in the first place?

A tiger can't change its stripes, even if it proclaims that it's now a harmless little kitten.

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

Don't trust Micro$oft. Let them die.

I didn't know about it and I'm glad it was brought up.

Well, Microsoft wasn't trying to "Kill Java". They were accused of trying to kill "Java portability". which isn't the same as killing Java (Try porting android Java code to IOS for example).

The claim is that Microsoft omitted the Java Native Interface (Allows Java code to call C/C++ code) and instead used their own J/Direct interface for calling Win32 APIs directly.

That said: 1. I have to admit J/Direct was an awesome idea. Being able to call Win32 apis directly without writing JNI wrappers is very useful. You wouldn't be able to port python code that uses the win32api module either.

2. JNI Code is very often not portable as it is. If you're writing JNI Code, you're most likely already using native OS apis, and relying on OS specific features.

Java portability was a main feature of Java. Kill that and you kill Java. Java Android is not really Java.

What in your mind, can Microsoft do to Java at this point in time? It's been a decade since that case, and Java has matured and hardened to the point where any form of EEE is going to be an utter waste of time considering the ecosystem of the computing world. This is a response to JetBrains. The company has IntelliJ and with Project Rider, a viable competitor to Visual Studio. With the emphasis on Azure, it's in MS's best interests to add additional language support to VS. Competition is a good thing.

C# is pretty much MS version of java. I think they did a pretty good job with the language. They keep adding things to it. P/Invoke is pretty awesome.

Between this and Donald Trump, it's like it's the last season of "Planet Earth" and the writers are just going nuts.

It's amazing how every time this is mentioned it's downvoted when it's actually very relevant. Microsoft shills are hard at work on HN.

Sigh.

I have (somewhere ;-) RMS's John Hancock on a small cheque I wrote and he cashed for the FSF nearly thirty years ago.

I did my duty on hating Microsoft and pushing Linux for those years when it mattered. By 2005 I was estimating Microsoft's 'packet' TTL at about 10 years ...

Nowadays Microsoft are like a beaten bully, out-eviled by much creepier players, and they're acting reasonable, mostly just asking to be paid for decent products that do not rape the customers and sell their info to whomever.

Why be stuck in the last century?

> Microsoft shills are hard at work on HN.

If you have any evidence of this, you should email links to [email protected] so we can investigate them. We've banned pro-MS astroturfers before; one in particular who made dozens of accounts and used them to reply to himself in arguments. But I don't know of any evidence that they're "hard at work on HN" now.