I am one of those wary of Microsoft. The current CEO was around during the Halloween Diaries. Even if he is well meaning, he is just an employee who can be replaced any day at the whim of large shareholders like Ballmer and Gates who consider Linux to be a virus.
Nobody at Microsoft ever had a committed ideological opposition to Linux, it was a pragmatic decision based on what they perceived as a threat to their business. That certainly doesn’t negate the damage of all the shit they pulled, but it does mean that it is highly unlikely that they’re going to reverse course and start extinguishing Linux for ideological reasons now that they’ve figured out how to make money without Linux being the enemy.
It's similar to how you don't want companies to have your personal data, even if you trust them "100%". When money becomes a problem, or a solution, you'll be their last priority.
Some of the news about Windows 10 would be unthinkable a few years ago. Priorities change, and this company in particular has a history of being extremely hostile.
But that’s not saying that Microsoft is 100% trustworthy or that they will never do anything bad ever again. I’m only saying that the “sinister plan” for this one particular software component is to make Windows more useful to Unix-land developers, to try and get them to buy Windows PCs instead of the usual MacBook Pro. Notice how that explanation still assumes Microsoft is still doing it for their own financial benefit, but doesn’t require an agenda to destroy Linux. They have realized that this isn’t a zero-sum game.
It's disappointing that literally anything that Microsoft does has this same comment right on top. Does it add anything to the discussion? We've all seen this comment at least a thousand times in the last 15 years. You haven't even taken the trouble to chalk out a plausible path for embracing and extending. Forget that, you haven't mentioned who they're embracing and extinguishing. At this point it's just repeating a tired meme for the sake of karma.
Not calling you out in particular, but here are other tired HN memes that can be reliably milked for karma
* If you're not paying, you're not the consumer, you're the product.
* It can be difficult to explain to something to someone when their job depends on not understanding it
* Joel Spolsky's article on rewrites
A bit of a rant/recall follows: I had lost content to a doublespace bug and was asked to pay for drive space via an MS DOS upgrade to 6.22, I have seen how Microsoft encouraged piracy in schools and colleges in India, how they have used FUD to suppress open source education and adoption efforts in the government and education spaces. I also recollect all the dirty stuff around Frontpage "extensions", IE extensions + IE's excessively forgiving tendencies to HTML violations and incorrectness, how MS took spyglass software and did bad things with it. Later, the Haloween Documents showed how MS said one thing in public and plotted another thing in private. They were Gurus of scheming behaviour. Then there was the Microsoft Windows tax, where you had to pay the Windows license fee even if you planned to run Linux on your computer. I also had to struggle with the MS Java, J++ rubbish. Microsoft used to do such bad things so deliberately. I also recall bad things around UEFI, around making it difficult for Linux distros to dual boot on laptops (which got resolved later).
Recollecting all of the above doesn't make it easy for me just to accept that with some code releases and PR announcements, MS would have turned over a new leaf.
People behave as they are measured. Satya Nadella is changing the public image of Microsoft, and even walking the talk. I learned just now on Wikipedia that he tripled MS stock, and that anonymous polls within MS have called him the best CEO of a US company. I am not an MS employee, so I won't know if he has managed to change the internal cultural tendency of being insincere and vicious (see above for examples).
I'm just apprehensive that at the end of the day, he is just an employee. Employees can get fired anytime, overruled anytime.
Perhaps I am being unfair to MS and Satya Nadella, and to all those MS employees who are giving their best. To them all - I apologise for my ill will.
I don't apologize for my "ill will" and suspicion. You lie down with dogs; you wake up with fleas. I get it: in some cases, you play the hand you're dealt. But don't expect me to make or infer some distinction about which side you're on.
I think a lot of the apologists for Microsoft here on HN just didn't grow up with the Microsoft of the 90's, and didn't see them buy, steal, or destroy every interesting technology to come along in the late 90's and 2000's. (Shall I go through THAT list?) I suppose they can be forgiven for having rose-tinted lenses that only see back about 5 years. To them I say, just let us have our bitterness. It's been earned.
You can use some other words instead, for example "abbandon". Or they leave the product/feature so buggy that its useless. If you rely in MS tech, you always run the risk that it will be discontinued, or became unusable. I don't suppose this is done out of malice, MS is a corporation, it operates organically. I can imagine one manager fighting for his feature to get into the Windows OS, because then he can get a bigger bonus. Even if the feature is not complete, even if the users wouldn't want it, he can use internal politics to get the feature in, so he can get his bonus.
No, some of us have. Lots of us haven't.
So it is valuable for "today's lucky 10000" and obviously relevant to the discussion. Also, the phrases you list are less "memes" and more "truisms".
Microsoft has seen huge growth under Nadella, and that was accomplished through selling cloud services. Linux does not threaten this business model or the future of the company in any way. There's nothing to "Embrace, extend, extinguish".