No, they are not.

But your argument is a logical fallacy. The fact that people who disagree with me are not automatically “paid shill” doesn’t imply that “paid shills” aren’t there.

Of course I cannot prove it, but the signs are there. How else do you explain the sudden change of heart of the HN community overnight? Who usually have very strong opinions on this topic.

To set the record straight, I have not ever nor do I currently work for microsoft. If you have IP tracking skills you can probably figure out where I work from these posts. As a matter of a fact, I don't like a lot of things about msft, this just isn't one of them. I dislike that msft is getting a disproportionate amount of hate about this stuff and yet Google and Apple don't seem to get the same level of flack. People seem to get more upset at them related to privacy. I wanted to offer a different perspective that acknowledges that this is the state of things across the board, and this one thing is less harmful than it's being made out to be. Microsoft embraced open source when it was friendly to their business and shunned it when it was not. They may very well shun it again, but with the proliferation of cloud providers and the dominance of AWS in the space, they just don't have a real choice. Windows simply isn't enjoying the dominance it once had in the server space. What I am trying to say is that this incident isn't evidence of anything except that Microsoft is like every other company that will use any advantage it has to push its product. Google and Apple do it too. Let's put our energy in things that pressure companies to behave properly like lobbying governments to step up their anti-trust and privacy enforcement.