I don’t think that’s the case anymore.

But then again “the SV hipster development ecosystem”. Who is that exactly?

That was a reference made by user tomato.

But if you prefer my point of view, those that fill up SV coffees or live in other parts of the globe trying to replicate the SV culture and are naive to the point to give Apple and Google human attributes, while believing they are any different from a profit oriented corporation.

MS now ships Debian for Azure through a collaboration with Debian and credativ, and also in the Windows Store running through the Windows Subsystem for Linux. They've hosted a Debian cloud sprint, sponsored DebConf, and engaged in good-faith substantive ways that don't only benefit their platforms. Of course, they care most about their platforms, but that's fine.

In the other direction, Debian does ship fully open source software (what Debian would call DFSG-free) with Microsoft as author.

Debian isn't playing favorites, of course, and is similarly working with Amazon and Google (among other partners of all sizes) in areas of shared interest.

I agree it's important to be able to Debian in the environment of your choice. That includes Azure as well as self-hosted and small-hosting-company options.

The default state for people needs to be DISTRUST of corporations (and governments) that they do not have a direct financial relationship with (when you aren't giving them cash).

I don't think that much of this holds water but it exists and the picture isn't one of "were standing up to defend your privacy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_concerns_regarding_Goo...

Microsoft is moving fast along the same path.

> MS do not tie an analytics product (on most sites around the world) into the world's largest personal-data-mining and advertising network.

They're trying pretty damn hard with Windows 10, which by default collects pretty much every keystroke you make. That data in turn gets shared and sold to advertisers - see MS's own privacy page: https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement

MS do not tie an analytics product (on most sites around the world) into the world's largest personal-data-mining and advertising network.

The only answer is to simply gather less data, or be more explicit about when you do. And Google isn't great at either.

Relatedly, Maps shows me when a location is likely to be popular vs unpopular. I have to assume that's based on the location history of everyone using Maps - seeing how long they spend in a place and at what time. But what percentage of Maps users are aware their information is being used in this way? I doubt the number is high.

Also, now I come to think of it, Google search itself. It shows different results sometimes when I'm logged in vs logged out, but it's not clear why. And I don't recall ever being asked if I wanted, say, my browsing history to influence future search results. It just does. Somehow.

You did.

It sounds like you want something different than transparency about when information is collected, but instead you want transparency about what information is used to give you a specific feature.

For example, you opted into location history a long time ago (likely), should Google again ask for your permission every time they add a new feature that takes advantage of your location history information? (assuming said features don't affect the privacy of your data)

That seems like a very strange onus.

Not OP, but - sure, why not? It would be really nice to have that. Especially if it wasn't the meaningless kind of transparency, "we use your location data as well as past interests to provide this feature", but something concrete - "we use regular GPS/cellular/wifi location updates to determine places where you've stayed for longer and correlate that with your recent searches in Google, as well as visits to venue sites that use Google Analytics".

(Personally, I'd be fine with such concrete announcements popping up the first time you use the app after a new feature was added, and if a feature is something one might want to not use, I'd be happy with it being opt-out. Just don't surprise people with application suddenly doing new things by itself, without much prior warning.)

Because if we lived in that reality, you'd end up complaining about how Google was sending you unwanted marketing emails about new features multiple times per week, and I'd be arguing that they were emails discussing new privacy updates.

Not to say that no one would want that, but as someone who does, by way of working at Google, more or less get emails similar to the technical descriptions of newly released features you want, very few of them are relevant to me.

Maybe they'd combat the perception I have of Google - that they just do UI redesign every couple of months, which more often than not lose useful features than add anything of value.

You say you get lots of those e-mails internally; I'd love to know where Google is actually adding all those features - because it definitely doesn't seem to be Inbox, or GMail, or Google Maps.

Weird, I'm pretty sure with my new Android phone, upon booting it up for the first time, I had to opt in to location services and a little popup explained exactly what it was doing.

This is based on the location history of everyone using Android. Its the Google Location Services requests going back and forth all the time that tells them where people go.

Respect for privacy is a continuum and Google isn't on either extreme. I'd even go so far as to say that different parts of Google have different stances on privacy. People who try to make them into a monolith with a single binary stance on the issue are lacking nuance.

"Old" schoolers have and will likely have for ever that evil 90s vision of MS. However it is changing a bit in that people too. They still may be evil, but at least the look more modern (opensource, new technology, using/contributing to Linux etc).

However the important thing (for MS) here is new people. If you come into the scene now or in a few years you only get to know the "new" masked MS image. Yes, they are still doing dubious stuff but is all under the hoods, buried by layers of hype, cloud, linux and fireworks.

Rebranding some big stablished company with that kind of history is something that takes a long long time.

I won't stick around to find out, my time is too valuable and the competition is strong. For me, Github doesn't really have any distinctive features except that is was the biggest, and so most convenient. I suspect most people and organizations will be in the same situation.

I suspect the vast majority of people won't be bothered to move their stuff unless MS pulls a Skype.

If they bundle the pro version of github with office 365 - just like with Teams, the 365 bundle becomes even more compelling for organizations.

What is that? I think its ownership of the huge amount of computer programs (and not to mention the associated metadata of authors and their professional network). The editor and the client provide a continuous stream of samples ready to be drawn from the world.

I believe its in the owners best interest to keep this golden goose of continuously increasing source of computer programs in good health.

The thing that I didn’t understand at first was why did MS gave up codehub (Google had Code, FB never pushed phabricator that hard) only to acquire GitHub later?

There's an increased chance of Microsoft starting to behave like they own Git, and trying to make it a part of their "platform" with proprietary extensions like their Git filesystem hack.

But they aren't the only 800 pound gorilla in the room - open source, google, apple, amazon have all taken a big chunk out of what MS was.

What prevents MS (or any one who acquires GitHub) from pulling a sourceforge? Well nothing prevents them, and I can't name someone who wouldn't want to monetize it -- that latter fact is going to be what kills the product/project.

and more recently there've been articles on their revenues hitting 100m. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/11/github-has-a-110-million-run...

but it sounds like their costs have outgrown their earnings.

I stand corrected.

But I also don't have a lot of confidence in them doing well by the community either... it could be as "harmless" as a move to "Microsoft logins" that kills it off.

You know wikipedia exists. Or people like me who will harp on on how privacy standards that are somehow acceptable now would be something inconceivable in 90's.

Also, in many years my amount of downtime due to Debian's unattended-upgrades is exactly 0. The same cannot be said of Windows updates.

I'm still hoping Microsoft see the light on all the telemetry and forced update nonsense before the Windows 7 cut-off in a couple of years. The trouble is, I can't see it happening as long as Nadella is at the top, and I can't see that changing as long as the big enterprise customers who aren't subject to that kind of nonsense are propping up the share price.

A few years ago I turned on my windows machine to see the dreaded upgrade. Being in a rush I went to another machine and the exact thing happened. I blew my top and replaced all windows with Ubuntu. I would have preferred Macs but I couldn't afford the Apple tax (high prices and not working on my existing HW).

That's nice for you, but if you use any non-open software or software not covered by the package repo then there's a fairly good chance you'll see downtime after an upgrade of your linux distro.

To be clear, I was talking specifically about the unattended-upgrades package, which is primarily for automatic installation of things like security fixes. In my experience, this has been rock solid: it's never broken a distro package, nor any dependency that non-distro software we had installed was relying on.

Windows 10 is almost usable with a keyboard and mouse. It’s much better than 8 was.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's what you get default out of the box with Windows as well?

Your OS can be configured to pull updates not only from official Canonical sources or those blessed by them but also any sources you please including your own. You can put up your own packages and use them just for you or promote them to all of planet earth. If you don't like a particular package or a particular version you can not update just that package although you might be unable to update others if they require the new package in question.

If you feel strongly about it you can fork and support old versions indefinately or take the package in your own direction.

Further you can even fork the entire ecosystem and not even call it Ubuntu anymore.

On Windows home you can't even decide not to update. You have to pay $99 per computer for that privilege and might have to pay again if you update say the motherboard. The windows store is only for apps that MS designates at its privilege and supposing you agree to give MS almost 1/3 of your revenue for a privilege it can revoke at its descretion at any time.

You can't fork Edge if you don't like how it works and if you could you wouldn't have the right to distribute such let alone create an alternative store/source usable by all for people to install/update such a creation.

You have pretty much misunderstood the entire point of open source software.

What? That's a stretch of a comment from saying both the Ubuntu and Windows behaviour of updates is the same out of the box.

can't with Windows 10

I understand the need for security, but updates shouldn't break my computer either.