Re:Microsoft Becomes Sponsor of Open Source Initiative
by bitmapbrother on Wednesday September 27, 2017 @02:54PM
(#15351085)
I can't help but think of the irony of mentioning IBM in your comparison to Microsoft considering Microsoft indirectly bankrolled, via BayStar, the SCO lawsuit against IBM for the alleged violations of IBM's Unix licenses in the development of Linux code at IBM.
Re:Microsoft Becomes Sponsor of Open Source Initiative
by Fnoord on Wednesday September 27, 2017 @03:40PM
(#15351514)
Yeah, that's irony. There's more.
A former monopolist getting flak from a current monopolist who tricked IBM with MS-DOS [1].
If you want to be pedantic on the history of Microsoft, however, I'd like to remind you of the history of IBM [2]. Of particular relevance are the parts "IBM in Germany and Nazi Occupied Europe" and "1969: Antitrust, the Unbundling of software and services".
Do we still (respectively ~75 and ~50 years later) hold this against IBM? No, we don't. Its longer ago than Microsoft's practices, so I understand people still hold a grudge (heck, I'm one of them, I still tend to avoid Microsoft products). It'll take some time. But that doesn't mean my grudge is still rational.
[1] http://thisdayintechhistory.com/11/06/ibm-signs-a-deal-with-...
25 years, so that's since 1992.
Do you also remember IBM? Did you hold it against IBM when they started to become actively part of the open source community?
Microsoft is changing from a proprietary software company pur-sang to a more service-oriented (and, like Google & Facebook, privacy-invasive) company. We need to forgive Microsoft and move on not out of love for Microsoft but for our own sanity. New threats have arisen.
What Microsoft did (see the Halloween documents for a peak into that), any other big, powerful company or monopoly could've (and has, see e.g. IBM or Intel) done in the past.
As of now, the invasive privacy concerns en masse (by a plethora of corporations and governments) are a much bigger threat to our liberty than Microsoft.