Are you guys serious? While you all are bitching about the fact that less than half the extensions are currently missing, the rest of us are going to enjoy playing with and learning from the ones that are there.

> Are you guys serious? While you all are bitching...

Uh, there's only one user bitching. Everybody else seems fine with it.

> Uh, there's only one user bitching.

I'm not bitching about anything. I'm providing a contrary view to the effusive and largely uncritical praise that much of the tech press spews whenever MSFT announces that they've open sourced this tiny thing, or ported a part of that thing to a non-Windows OS.

If you read my other comments elsewhere on this page, it becomes clear that I very much want for MSFT to have stopped bullying, subverting (and impeding the function of) standards bodies, engaging in anticompetitive lock-out, and other such shady backroom dealings. MSFT is a big company that hires rather smart people. They could use their money and collective brainpower to do really great things for the computing community.

Thing is, those of us who've been around for at least the past twenty years have seen the "Good Microsoft" act, and we remember how that act was rather short-lived. If MSFT were to do something substantially significant (such as joining the OIN [0], making a public promise to remain a member and substantially participate in its proceedings for the next twenty years, as well as a public promise to never tamper with it or its proceedings [1]) before many of us old hands start thinking that this is an actual change in corporate direction.

[0] http://www.openinventionnetwork.com/

[1] That is, to never, ever do anything even remotely like the shit they did at ISO.

Haven't you seen ATT use the "ATT owned gigabit fiber service is coming soon, we're rolling it out real soon now!" feint in regions where Google Fiber is actively rolling in enough times to recognize just how cheap promises are and how insignificant the cost of breaking those promises is? :)

I genuinely hope that the corporate overlords within MSFT are very serious about becoming a good actor in the computing community. MSFT is a big company, and they could do a lot of good for both the software and hardware sides of the community.

However, this is far from my first rodeo, and this isn't the first time we've seen MSFT play the good guy. If they stick to form, the community that they fostered will be forcibly forgotten and left to wither in the sun in a -comparative- blink of an eye. Just ask the Samba guys about those Plugfests they used to attend. :)