How does Microsoft make money? They make money by renting from a platform which is monopolistic and enforced. What do they do to maintain this? They deliberately force people onto their platform by abusing their market position, and try to crush any opposition by any possible tactic, including dubious legal cases designed just to bankrupt their opposition. What else do they do? EEE, and also just blatant unnecessary reinvention /ripping off and lock-in when they get the chance.
They didn't abandon some of the visible tactics and start paying open source because they had a moral revelation, it's a company with the same business model it's not possible. Those tactics were just inneffective and co-opting, more subtle EEE has to be the game plan.
Why does that make me angrier than equally evil Facebook/Apple? Well if I was a farmer driving around one of those trucks with source code preventing me from fixing it I'd be pretty personally furious. But I'm not, I'm a developer and those guys are the ones trying to make everyone drive the coding equivalent. But it's worse, because coding isn't just my livelihood, it's a lot of how I think and express my thoughts. They're not messing with my job they're trying to restrict the way I think, so their shareholders can make a buck.
"Microsoft is running Github for charity" have a word with yourself.
Feel free to show me which part of the criminal code "not making money" falls under. You want to rant about EEE (irrelevant for decades now) or some other silly plan to undermine open source development, feel free. But expect to be called out for your pointless drivel at the same time.
I'm fine with being cautious about Microsoft. I think at this point it's no longer necessary, but sure I can understand that. But the EEE plot-line is a 20 year old joke. It's not funny anymore.
"We are pro open source except our entire business model which is build around a closed source platform on which we sell closed source products"
Yeah they're worse than they could be but that's not really the central point.
The legal thing you asked for a source on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co. Some people dissent from this reading of the case but it's also not that important, in practice they act like this.
It's never time to stop being cautious about megacorps.
To think that Microsoft spent $7.5 billion for altruistic reasons, without a plan to actually turn a profit on the purchase, is dangerously naive.
You thinking tech companies don't have loss-leaders is naive.
I don't really know anything about US laws, but I think they do have to act in the interest of their shareholders, i.e. make them more money.
(My view of capitalism meshes with Churchill's view of democracy: It's the worst except for all the others)
This is true, but "long term interest" for Microsoft means 30, 50, or 100 years from now. People seem to forget that people actually liking your company is important for long term profits, and therefore doing good things is quite easy to align with the notion that companies only do things that make them a profit.
I find myself saying this a lot - companies are by definition amoral (lacking a moral sense or understanding), not immoral. Just because they are driven by profits doesn't mean they don't do things that are moral or good, as many good things are in the interest of a company's profits. Especially their long term profits.
This hasn't been the case with Microsoft. They had their most successful era, and created (at the time) the richest man in the world, all while we hated them.
They aren't the biggest player right now, so their main focus is getting people to switch from a different provider (AWS) to Azure. A great way to do that is for the developers to like using Azure more than AWS.
After all, most of Microsoft's "evil years" were when they were on top, not in a distant second place.
I also think that developers have a lot more power in companies, especially smaller and newer companies, than they used.
Who's "we"? The open-source advocate reviled Microsoft in their own clique but the vast majority of the software industry just quietly went on with their lives.
That assumes that this situation is a zero-sum game. It's not. Microsoft clearly benefits from this, but so does everyone else.
As I asked a few days ago: "Do proponents of Free Software, on the whole, assert that the concept of intellectual property should not exist?"
If so then I can see why a closed-source supporter of open source is an abhorrent concept.
I have viewed GitHub as a net negative for Free Software for a number of years, this Microsoft deal amplifies that...
And yet, the hue and cry is "Unless you open source every byte of GitHub's code and infrastructure you're just evil monopolists trying to smother us!" Given all that Microsoft has done to embrace and support open source I think the onus is now on the Open Source community to justify their distrust of Microsoft because "Duh, it's Microsoft" simply doesn't fly as a legitimate argument anymore.