> 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.