Their primary product is still proprietary, and if that's not bad enough, it's essentially completely spyware at this point.

I don't want to use their crap open source products so I can integrate with their crap proprietary SaaS ecosystem.

Just because they're finally deciding to release some token software with some level of open source, and buying political influence via the linux foundation, doesn't make them a friend of free software. There is more to free software than just the license: their strategy of vendor-lockin via Terms of Service instead of EULA, they are merely seeking to 'vendorize' free software projects to integrate with their paid products.

You could say the same about Google......

I hate MS, but please, don't make the case that no progress is better than some progress. They aren't perfect, and of course they are motivated to make money, but none of that means their work isn't good for OSS.

I disagree. They are losing developer mind share, that's the only reason they have any open source initiatives. None of what MS does is good for open source IMO, and they can keep their money.

There seems to be quite the concerted effort to make MS 'cool and hip' here and elsewhere. I'm not buying it, I'm not using their software, and it's still perfectly valid to dislike MS for aforementioned reasons. I view their work on free software as only a mechanism to co-opt.

Interested Observer here. What is Microsoft's primary product you are referring to? Windows or Office. From a quick Google search, it seems like Office (based on revenue).

- Forcibly upgraded as many Windows 7 and 8 machines to Windows 10 as possible without really asking permission, so that some manager could make their adoption metrics look better. - Implemented extremely-invasive data collection in Windows 10. - Migrated to a "Windows is a service! Better hope you like not being able to decline updates!" model with Windows 10, where the user no longer has control of their own machine.

I'm a huge fan of C# and Visual Studio, and I think MS SQL Server is arguably the best overall[1] relational database software, but I certainly don't trust them to have any motivations other than "whatever makes us the most money as possible".

[1] I like Postgres a lot and use it myself most frequently for personal projects, but if one has at least a small budget, SQL Server (IMO) has by far the best administration tools of any database and is very reliable.

This was a terrible decision, I agree.

> to have any motivations other than "whatever makes us the most money as possible".

Well they are a corporation. That's the end goal of any corporation.

> Implemented extremely-invasive data collection in Windows 10

This I don't agree with though. Yes, they collected data, and that is wrong. I was pissed off too. However, it was not as invasive as made it out to be. They did not track the websites we browse. They did not track who we communicate with like Google, Facebook and other such companies do. I would trust Microsoft with my data and privacy over Google and Facebook. And yet most of us use Google services without a second thought.

Another thing I dislike about Windows is the bloatware and ads in Start.

However, this does not negate their recent contributions. Is the end goal for these contributions to make more money? Absolutely. But that does not mean we should not welcome the good stuff from Microsoft just because its Microsoft.

Does this have any bearing on Microsoft's support for Open Source?

They bought GitHub, a profitable proprietary product, that also hosts open source code as a marketing project.

By that logic you could say that MS supports open source because some other people develop OSS on Windows. (And MS has tried to do this!)

> - They've open sourced a massive chunk of their (IMHO) best-in-class language runtimes and language implementations (C#, F#, VB.net) and design and develop new features in the open

Is .NET Framework (the real thing, not the vapourware rewrite) open? Didn't think so.

> - They've contributed more than 1700 changes to the Linux kernel that can easily be identified with a quick 'git log --grep'

And how many of those are just about Hyper-V/Azure? When is Windows going to support Ext4 and KVM VirtIO?

> - They're the first company to make a real attempt at an industrial strength alternative implementation of the Linux kernel. Linux was supposed to be about choice, remember?

So that they can execute another round of EEE. No thanks.

Then again, I guess we're fairly safe from that this time, since they haven't even managed to get SQLite to run properly.

> - They've open sourced the core chunks of the evaluation engine used in Bing (BitFunnel)

From the top of their README: "It doesn't work (yet)."

> - They're a platinum member of the Linux Foundation. In other words, they pay Torvalds salary

So when are they going to start acting like it?

> - They support Linux as a first class OS on Azure and make it cheaper than Windows

Just like all the other cloud providers? Meh.

> - They have one of the largest and most active GitHub organizations

How many of those projects are useful outside of Azure/Windows?

> - They've joined OIN and, ignoring the actual patents involved, have thus in the process made an implicit promise never to attack any core part of the Linux infrastructure in the future

Too little, too late.

VSCode alone is one of it not the most active projects on github (depending on the metric), and is a general purpose code editor equally stable on Windows/Linux/Mac. Yes, they have plugins you can install for Azure/VSTS/etc, but you can also install plugins for BitBucket, GitHub, AWS, GCE, or ~whatever you want. It's pretty generically useful. I think.

I read this list as, 'Yea, they're helping OSS.. but they make a profit also!' OSS does not mean you can't make a profit.

.net core is not vaporware. It's out and just shipped 2.1. The non-core one is not open source as it is very tied to Windows and they want the future effort to be the cross platform .net core.

  - GitLab SaaS actually provides CI as well and doesn't limit Pages to just Jekyll

- Provide virtio support for KVM/Linux, especially for graphics acceleration

- Open source DirectX 12 like Vulkan

- The list goes on and on

They can't do that yet, since the acquisition is still in progress.

https://hub.docker.com/r/gitlab/gitlab-ce/

Or a Helm chart:

https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/install/kubernetes/gitlab_chart.h...

Not extorting 10$ (average) for each Android device sold.

Considering a few billions Android devices sold, that amounts to an astronomical amount of money that could fund all the points above.

(even if the above calculations are wrong, the amount is surely still astronomical)

> Keith Bergelt, OIN's CEO, commented on Microsoft's announcement in an interview: "This is everything Microsoft has, and it covers everything related to older open-source technologies such as Android, the Linux kernel, and OpenStack; newer technologies such as LF Energy and HyperLedger, and their predecessor and successor versions."

Quote from https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-open-sources-its-ent...

But the telemetry (that you can't trust is actually off) it a complete non-starter. Snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

I recently installed an eval of Win10 in a VM. While nice in some respects, it soon became clear that you will work the way Microsoft wants. Telemetry, ads, Edge, activation, white backgrounds even in dark mode, all forced down your throat, etc. Windows 2000 was better in most respects.

Wait, I did think of something. Public support of ReactOS would be a big feather in their cap.

Free software was never supposed to be about choice, not sure where that idea came from. It's about freedom.

They're forced to. People want to use Linux. If a cloud provider decides they don't want to support Linux, it's business suicide. Microsoft's contributions to the Linux kernel, when I last checked, were almost exclusively related to Hyper-V. They're just doing what's good for them. If Linux was proprietary and enjoyed similar popularity, they would pay the owner to include these features.

Many people (not parent in particular, just in general) need something to be angry about, so they feel like they are taking a stand of some sort. Microsoft is a soft target, and this creates a bandwagon.

Edit: spelling

An important addition is that they not only buy flowers and chocolate to make up for it, but that they let all your friends know about this. In such a way that when you tell your friends "well, he's really nice now, but last month, when he missed the deadline, it wasn't that good to be home" and they simply don't believe you.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_... (2001)

https://youtu.be/86j8zOsmNFE?t=62 (2003)

> - They're now, or soon will be, the largest supporter of free infrastructure for open source projects on the planet (GitHub)

That's actually a bad thing. Open source needs resiliency and decentralization.

> - They've contributed more than 1700 changes to the Linux kernel that can easily be identified with a quick 'git log --grep'

A lot of that is so it can run better on Azure.

> - They're a platinum member of the Linux Foundation. In other words, they pay Torvalds salary

Torvalds' work provides them with more revenue than whatever they are paying the Linux foundation.

Not only revenue on Azure, but they also collect billions of dollars from phone manufacturers using Linux.

> What more do you want?

We want people on Microsoft's payroll to stop making noise on Hacker News.

We don't trust you. Cheap gifts won't make up for decades of bullshit. Bullshit that comes back each time someone suggests me to use MS Office, the ultimate embodiment of software monopolism.

In other words, you're saying it doesn't matter what they do, you've already made up your mind. And just to be sure, you don't want to hear anything that would contradict your opinion. Did I get that right?

Yes, because they don't garner any trust as an organization. They are merely courting today's developers which have voted wholesale to adopt other platforms instead of MS.

If MS releases their operating system under the GPL, I'll change my tune. Until then, it's all marketing and PR hype.

Their PR stunts are just a distraction, and all the happy foundation shit is likely all tax deductible anyways.

It does not matter that happy guy Satya is CEO, Bill Gates is still on the board and got away with all.

If a guy robs a bank then donates 1% of the money to charity, it doesn't change the fact that guy robbed a bank.

Ignoring the personal attack (the second I've received on this thread - no greater indicator of the quality of 'discourse' when it regresses to ad hominem), you almost managed to make one good point - the Linux commits are indeed mostly related to Azure and SMB.

Why do you act against your own self-interest?

Honestly, most of the FAANG companies are guilty, but I will give Facebook kudos for being fairly honest about the mutual benefits that came from open sourcing React.

Let's say I like C# and I also like Linux. Doesn't them making C# (and .Net) open source and cross-platform enhance my freedom to compute how I wish?

Or is that somehow different from other open source languages, like Python or Rust? How do those help with computing ethically?

Why do you need this on Linux? Only to integrate with MS proprietary products, that's why.

This means that when I'm writing a website or a Docker microservice, I want to use C#. And since the best OS to run those is Linux, there are no proprietary MS products in sight.

When I'm writing a cross-platform desktop application, I want to use C# too, but I can't, so I'll use another language.