Any contribution that M$ (remember when people would sub the S for a dollar sign?) makes to open source or open standards is to support their own bottom line and we shouldn't expect anything else. The directors have a legal responsibility to the company and to boost the share price, not for the betterment of humanity. To this effect, companies will contribute to open standards when it's better for the share price, and will seek to screw open standards when it's better for the share price.

Public companies are inherently evil by default -- this is because the only goal of a public company is to strengthen the share price. I've said it before and I'll say it again: always assume bad faith when you're dealing with a company.

From this, it doesn't matter what people thought of Microsoft before, or what they think of them now. Microsoft like all companies has a single goal. If we can pressure these companies to coast in a certain direction then great. But we shouldn't ever believe that companies can 'turn over a new leaf' when they legally cannot. FAANG is the same. Ford is the same. Starbucks is the same.

Every company is exactly the same, but the larger they grow, the more visible and impactful these actions become. Microsoft has been in the spotlight for decades because it has been a juggernaut for decades. But it's hardly unique in what it does. Our real concerns should be why regulators were quick to put the smack down on Microsoft but have since turned into paper tigers and are allowing unhinged monopolization from FAANG in 2022.

Their ad and marketing budgets are basically to woo public opinion into belief billionaires should exist, however.

Look at the Coinbase story; employee and investor wealth gone. CEO wealth intact. And society gains little to nothing net new from enriching that fraud.

Billions locked up in deference to a handful of CEOs means less liquidity in the open market. Which is intentional, I understand; if dollar value collapses these guys might have to work to survive, and of course humans could no longer do the necessary trade of real things to stay alive and prosper if an arbitrary financier cannot claim an arbitrary % of economic activity thousands of miles away.

Human agency is coupled to wishful thinking still. Which is understandable; we only just crossed the threshold of <50% of adults believing in higher powers. Was still 80% around 2000.

People being laid off is not lost wealth.

Speculative value is not wealth.

"Billions locked up" requires an explanation. People with money generally invest it in assets or other companies. Who is locking up billions? Why? Is it a meaningful % of the total money supply?

Things have changed since sometime in the 1980s.

That's not the definition of a sociopath.

IBM created the playbook, Microsoft perfected it, FAANG copied it.

The extremism of this positon makes it hard to swallow the message. You might as well be right, but accepting it at face value would be a huge cognitive dissonance for many people working in public companies.

Basically, the “are we the baddies ?” answer would be “yes” for a huge chunk of us, and I don’t think that’s how we see it personally. Companies have to make money, but the evil label needs way more nuance.

To apply this to another context: I genuinely think that IKEA has had an outsized positive impact on our everyday life, even as they aim to make money (not the core “charity”, but the rest of the group), or as they make truely dirty legal and commercial decisions to trick the system in their favor. And they didn’t improve flatpacks by accident, it is their stated mission, and I’d be crazy proud of my job if I designed the Expedit series.

IKEA has been illegally logging forests in romania for decades.

The first public conpany was involved in slavery. Show me a large enough company and there will be a history of fraud, illegality and human rights abuses.

Also using tainted wood isn't the only thing IKEA has ever done, just as breaking the speed limit or parking illegally isn't he only thing I've ever done. If you were held to a "one strike and you're out" good/evil standard would you really stand up? I know I wouldn't.

There's also a trend to give big companies liability for their supply chains. Germany just enacted a supply chain law last year and there are talks about similar laws for the EU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_Chain_Act

The specificity of your comment (large enough company) is misleading. The flaws you call out are everywhere, not just large companies.

Humans are imperfect. Human organizations and institutions (companies of all sizes, governments of all types, schools, churches, and so on) are also imperfect.

I don't mean to say that we shouldn't set high goals, devise mechanisms to deal with imperfection and so on (checks and balances, regulations, etc), just that there isn't anything particularly unique about "large companies" in this regard.

As I see it though, what IKEA displaced wasn’t the family owned expert artisans manufacturing built to order furnitures.

It was piss poor, badly designed, actual shitty materials, poor country labor intensive flat packs.

When I was a kid my family bought cheap mass produced furniture from shopping malls, the looks were fine, it came from Vietnam or China [0], and the quality was laughably bad. Finished product would be slightly crooked. Screws slightly loose. Smell terrible. And people would have that “what did you expect for that price” grin. [1]

I can’t imagine employees were treated in a stellar way either, we heard scandals after scandals about third world factories, and the quality itself was a testament to how much humans were involved in all of that.

So, I see IKEA as a provider of somewhat decent furnitures instead of shitty ones, most other parameters staying the same (they don’t, I genuinely think they’re not worse than the 80s~90s post colonialist euro companies)

[0] how the table turned, quality wise…

[1] to address the obvious “why didn’t they buy more expensive furniture that could have lasted way longer instead”…the answer is simple: upfront money. The same reason people don’t buy 5 story apartment buildings even if that would bring them more money in the long term.

"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness."

If your country (cough-cough USA) had already descended into the "crap products globalisation stage" before IKEA came along, it will feel like a net positive.

If your country (cough-cough Sweden) got IKEA before that stage, I would say, yes, IKEA displaced quality furniture.

I'd say the overall problem is un-accounted for externalities. Cheap crap from China or Vietnam is just a symptom of the same illness.

Crappy products are okay, in a free market economy. But crappy products with huge environmental costs undercutting "kosher" crappy products, is not okay.

What use are even labour and environmental laws if one can skirt them by pushing the problem elsewhere?

If you want to go into Ikea and just buy long lasting solid wood products, go ahead! Indeed I'd argue Ikea has made new solid wood furniture more accessible, heck sometimes new Ikea wood furniture is cheaper than consignment store wood furniture!

I've seen (and own) some solid wood furniture from IKEA. I'm usually an IKEA defender (see another post I just made on this thread).

I would not describe their solid wood furniture as "nice". Given the way they tend to assemble even small members from multiple small scraps of wood glued together rather than single pieces, I think calling them "solid" is even a bit of a stretch, at least in some cases. They're also made out of fairly soft wood, usually, and barely finished, if at all.

A bit the same way so many corporations are “carbon neutral” through offset, even if it’s a scam under most of these.

IKEA using it’s position to do something could be a realistic solution, I just don’t know if there is much hope in that regard.

The coffee scene could be a exemple where traceability helps a lot to improve the market (as a consumer there are options to do the right thing for non crazy prices), while the global picture stays grim as the most sold coffee will always be the unmarked super market value pack.

Worker protection: same as for Amazon, I wish they rapidly advance their robotization programs. In the meantime I strongly support more regulation, and would like security and social policies baked into the prices, especially as I don’t think there would be that much actual impact. Just as wish more companies across the board get unions.

If we change the ecosystem, other companies would evolve to be the winners. (Or IKEA and Amazon would change.)

I say that as a sample of the population who deeply wants the bland, blank slate aesthetic in reaction to the rococo and non-modular furniture I had to deal with in other people’s home and surroundings.

Paradoxally, I am sure it will come back as a reaction to people like me, and next gnerations might want to get back to their roots and resurface diverse and culturally more anchored styles. When it does, I hope they’ll have small production tools (home grade cnc mills ?) to do so in small batches at low cost, and get crazy with the stuff they make.

It's usually most or all of: hideous; difficult to assemble (why people complain about IKEA when basically every other player in their market is far worse, I do not understand); worse-made than IKEA furniture; still, somehow, more expensive than the IKEA equivalent.

IKEA's about the best option out there for people who don't have a lot of money and also would rather not furnish their home with cheap antiques from the 1920s (go much newer, or much older, and it starts getting expensive), having to do a lot of DIY re-upholstering in the process if they want anything with cloth on it.

If you know that the system is broken and it is setup in a way that rewards bad behavior, what do you think is the best course of action: to expect that exceptional individuals will be always in charge to avoid the mistakes, or to fix the system so that even normal, fallible humans can be at helm and not having everyone else worried about potential abuses?

I assume normal and fallible humans are the ones who are going to setup this new system that will prevent abuse?

Still, we have set up memory safe practices and languages and standards, building standards and regulations, and food safety regulations that work quite well. Just because humans make mistakes and are fallible doesn't mean that humans are incapable of working to prevent mistakes and the consequences of human fallibility.

I'm not suggesting we shouldn't try, but it isn't really silver bullet.

An employee from a corporation benefits from a corporation that abuses their power. Ordinary citizens that vote for a corrupt politician do not, and have no invested interest in them.

I probably wasn't as clear as I should have been.

It's less about matter of eliminating abuse, and more about damage reduction. We can have systems that even if someone screws up, the consequences are not catastrophic.

The answer to this is that if it's nearly impossible to find a more ethical job (e.g. a non-profit medical research worker cooperative) when the system you're under doesn't economically incentivise ethical job creation. If your probability of finding one is incredibly slim, you're practically excused – you're just doing what's needed to have a normal life.

The structure is so deliberately conceived that I wouldn’t be surprised if it kept the same functioning even as a public entity. They’d make less money, but would probably still concentrate decision power into a few chosen hands and lock the whole from external influence.

Has that not been a critique of software engineers working at FAANGs? That they think they are working for a moral company while the “Don’t Be Evil” company mottos are replaced in the background with anti competitive practices and deals with authoritarian governments.

Tbh I think claiming that it’s an extremist opinion when there’s an entire century+ old political school of thought that views the entirety of capitalism as amoral, is either putting your head in the sand at the thought, or an equally extremist opinion on the good of companies

If something nearly half the world followed is considered a extremist then I do not believe the word has any meaning left

It's way too easy for people working at big companies to think "the company might be evil, but not me / my team". The Corporation gives everyone a moral shield that lets them rationalize all the shit that happens, but the money that pays their salary and the stock options they get all come from the same source.

See Better Off Ted for a great look at this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Off_Ted

Aren't they in fine the same thing?

If you believe that the logical consequence of a system is the emergence of amourphous amoral entities harming the greater good, aren't you actually fundamentaly against said system? I kind of get the opposite take-away from your line of thoughts: I believe that a lot of people who think of themselves as capitalist but actively distrust corporations are actually latent anti-capitalist.

You can have a market-oriented economy on small scales, and we can have independent professionals competing to see who provides the best services at the lowest prices, and we can use money and capital as the means of production just fine. The problem is when we take a system in one scale and think "bigger is better". This is when we get "amorphous amoral entities harming the greater good".

Mind you, if you think about it this also applies to other socio-political systems. Communism, per se, is not a problem. If the general idea of "communism" was just a bunch of hippies living however they wanted, there wouldn't be so much reason to be against it.

The problem is when you have people going full Trostky and actively work to make it a Global-scale system, effectively turning the State into an "amorphous amoral entity harming the greater good"

Once you deal with all edge cases. You end up with an OSS license.

I still recall people fawning over how Google was going to be "different" in 2006, and how it was going to save us from Microsoft. Nowadays, they are essentially what MS was in its' heyday. Blind faith in corporations is not the way forward.

I've always understood the hacker ethos to have strong tenets of working towards decentralized power structures through tech. Nowadays, that idea feels farther away even on a site like this one.

This is, first and foremost, about the business, not the people or the technology.

The further corporatisation of OSS through lobbying organizations like the CNCF is a sad state of affairs. But it is also the place where VCs are putting a lot of their money. That and until 2 weeks ago, Web3

Directors do not have a legal responsibility to boost their shareprice.

Companies do not have a single goal.

Public companies are not obliged to increase their share price.

Every company is different.

I'd also add that on top of all that, different countries have different corporate law.

And law indeed differs... But everywhere someone will be made responsible for not getting the best for their buck (the simplest case: being fired).

That applies to FAANGMxyz and also the rest of the top 500 shareholder companies.

(https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/15/oil-shell-directors-sued-for..., https://www.forbes.com/sites/timabansal/2021/05/27/big-oil-u...)

It will be a lot harder to argue that developing a closed-source component is, in the long run, bad for Microsoft, though.

That's an often-repeated maxim, but it's not universally agreed to be true.

Quoting https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/08/24/stakeholder-gover... for example:

"The fiduciary duty of the board is to promote the value of the corporation. In fulfilling that duty, directors must exercise their business judgment in considering and reconciling the interests of various stakeholders—including shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, the environment and communities—and the attendant risks and opportunities for the corporation.

Indeed, the board’s ability to consider other stakeholder interests is not only uncontroversial—it is a matter of basic common sense and a fundamental component of both risk management and strategic planning."

I read this Harvard text to basically say: "Don't cheat if the cheating will be coming to bite you later. Be generous if you expect additional profits to come from this generosity."

> Be generous if you expect additional <reward> to come from this generosity.

Options for reward could include (without being limited to): "profit", "platform adoption", "trust".. and those rewards often affect each other over time.

Google for something like "obligation to maximize shareholder value" if you want to find numerous articles debunking the myth. Here's a good one [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

Maximizing shareholder value is a management philosophy that became increasingly prevalent between 1975 and 2000. In both management ("What we should value and pursue") and case law ("What you will be sued and found guilty for not doing").

Why did it become popular? Because there were a huge number of inefficient companies at the time that were continuing business as usual under some guise of "We think this is best." While Japanese companies ate their lunches by working harder, faster, better, and smarter.

Holding management to shareholder value -- and sueing the heck out of them when they didn't focus on it -- was a more objective measurement of effectiveness.

After 2000, it became clear that the metric had become the target, and was now being pursued with a myopicness that was to the detriment of the company.

There are few absolutes in "high performance"

But nobody said they need to break the law, or hurt employees. Given the constraints of the law, they have a single mission of maximizing the share price. Which is exactly what Microsoft and other companies do every day. If the environment gets in the way of your business (i.e if you are an oil company) then you will only care about the environment to the extent that you are legally obligated to.

There are dissenting papers [2] mostly revolving upon Dodge v. Ford Motor Company, but there are many intractable problems when you assert such primacy. Over what duration? As compared to which company? Accounting for intangibles? Valuation of non-monetary factors? Accounting for market gyrations? Primacy by what percentage? That dissenting paper glosses over much of the nuance of Stout's thesis [3], as well as case law ever since that point to the problematic practicalities of courts deciding how companies should carry out the distribution of the benefits of organizing stakeholders together.

So many people who should know better keep repeating this canard. Shareholders can certainly mount a challenge through corporate governance channels for example, but they fare poorly when mounting a challenge through the courts.

[1] https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v...

[2] https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2022/04/26/why-we-should...

[3] https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...

Why does it matter? Well, because the higher valued your company is, the more investment you can get, and with more investment, the better you can beat the competition.

And if you don't do it (bad stuff), then your competition will do it and will ultimately will beat you.

So it is basically the only way to survive. That is, keep growing. Stop growing, and you are on path to demise. No public company have the luxury of saying "Well, we have grown enough. Let us just focus on sustaining what we have got".

The sales-force are bonus-pay-based on how much cloud they sell.

Some of the development groups are paid for delivering sustainable software that is also open-source.

It's not black and white. Many politics are being played.

I do believe Scott Guthrie and some of the other VP's are good folks that understands the need for being open and honest. Anders Hejlsberg too for example.

But is's not black or white.

Yes

> and to boost the share price

Not exactly. They have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders and must always act in their best interests. But the law allows a great degree of freedom in interpreting that. For example, actions that may depress the share price in the short-term can be argued as being good for the long-term health of the company and the courts are OK with that argument.

You should have felt free to say that it is utter stupidity for people to assume good faith for public companies. But sadly, the times we live does not allow pointing out stupidity in a harsh manner. Don't go easy on stupidity people. You will end up in a nice stupid world without joy or happiness.

> always assume bad faith when you're dealing with a company.

I think this is the biggest problem that humanity is facing right now, and a lot of currently accepted "mainstream" end of world problems derive from it.

And the issue is that these entities are locked in a process where not-the-fastest-growing means on the path to death. And to side step this, they have to do bad things without getting caught. The dominant player will be the one who does the baddest things without getting caught.

For example, In the world of pharmaceuticals, the dominant player would never be the one who play by the rules set by the authorities. But the one who has got authorities on the payroll.

If you are starting about "evidence that authorities are on a payroll", take a look at the above point regarding "not getting caught"...

Sadly, this does remove the higher bounds to what a company would do to secure its bottom line. Which is why I think this is the biggest danger that humanity faces right now. And this is going to get worse, because what ever higher bound we have right now, is going to be pushed higher and higher, in a world full of perpetually distracted people...

I think this is true for large organisations, the larger they are the more their behaviour seems to become dictated by the rules of the environment it operates within; whereas the smaller the organisation the more principled they can be as individuals have the power and will to override those rules.

Also with something as large as Microsoft there are so many departments that one can be actively working against the interests of another, i.e MS can and probably does simultaneously do good and bad faith activities for open-source - and yet we commonly anthropomorphise them as if they have the integrity and consistency of an individual... A human flaw i guess.

"There is a common belief that corporate directors have a legal duty to maximize corporate profits and “shareholder value” ... this belief is utterly false."

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/public_benefit_corporation

Agree with your arguments, but more generally companies are inherently evil by default, because their only goal is to maximize profits. You can only hope that they will behave correctly regarding their employees, their competitors, their neighborhood, and the environment.

Does Microsoft contribute financially to any social programs or other philanthropic projects? Are all those contributions done solely to support their bottom line?

Being anti-“M$” is one thing, but you it’s hard to disagree with their stance on philanthropy and environmental issues.

What?

However, there are several legal opinions that complicate this interpretation.

I recommend you read the case eBay v. Newmark that very much complicates this. Here is a nice summary:

https://www.litigationandtrial.com/2010/09/articles/series/s...

You might also look at Dodge v. Ford Motor Company one of the more in-famous cases supporting/complicating the shareholder value "requirement". In it's opinion, the Michigan Supreme Court in-famously states: "A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders."

Both cases deal with companies will very small numbers of shareholders where minority shareholders successfully litigated based on some argument that the majority had a responsibility to maximize their minority returns.

I've been consistently surprised by Microsoft doing non-evil things over the past decade, until I accepted that I no longer had reason to hate it.

Conversely, for a while, I was surprised by Google doing evil things, until I realized that the Google of 15 years ago no longer existed. The company has over 10x the employees of the old Google of "don't be evil" days. Even if no one had left, it's over 90% of people who don't know how to not be evil, and don't know they're not supposed to be evil. In practice, most non-evil people I knew at the old Google have long since left (although far from everyone, but enough that it's probably <1% pre-evil).

Microsoft was evil in the nineties. In 2022, it's not a saint, but it's pretty good.

Google was genuinely good in the early '00s. Today, it's pretty evil.

The same has happened to many of my non-profits. Open source was started to strip ethics out of free software, and many genuinely nasty organizations from back then now behave like the FSF of the nineties. Conversely, some of my favorite non-profits went woke, and stopped doing what they were created to do. A few of my favorite academic institutions turned into Enron, while others moved up. Etc.

Organizations are abstractions. Swap out the people and incentives, and it's a new thing under an old name.

This reminds me of an old story, might be fiction, that conveys the idea. five chimpanzees were put in a cage, bananas in the center everytime one tried to get a banana they would get cold water untill they simply stoped trying. Then one by one they replaced the chimpanzees do one one of the new ones, tried to take one of the bananas the old ones would stop him. Slowly they replaced all of them and none of the new chimpanzees, who had never received a cold shower, took the bananas.

The same with corporations.

Most software engineering and executives jobs have a tenure of three years, and I think culture is definitely preserved for longer than that. However, it's very rarely preserved over decades.

You're citing a classic joke. The experiment doesn't replicate when people tried to test it:

https://www.answers.com/Q/Did_the_monkey_banana_and_water_sp...

So if in the company the average tenure is 3 years, then the culture is what has been practiced in the last 9 years... Even if the company itself is 20 years old.

In another company with tenures of average 5 years then company culture is what has been going on the last 15 years.

What do you think? Does this idea mire closely match your experience?

I can't say I was intimately familiar, but at the level of reading books and trade press as good enough for the statements I'm making.

You don't need a lot of depth of knowledge to know when a culture completely changed. If you go outside and see a Toyota Camry and another Toyota Camry a week later, you can't tell whether the car is the same one. On the other hand, if one day, it's a Porsche, and the next week, and 18-wheeler, you can be pretty sure something changed....

I would agree for most companies and it's probably true for Microsoft but that doesn't really apply to Google. Google is 23 years old. 20 years ago the people who wanted to work at Google were looking for a young fast-growing company shaking things up with its search engine, a heavy focus in engineering and opportunites everywhere. Nowadays, the people who want to work at Google want to work for one of the most prestigious tech company. That tends to attract a completely different kind of person.

Also that last point probably only work if the punishment is incredibly big, and I doubt something like that exists for the scale MS operates at.

The Ship of Theseus is a question about the nature of identity, not an answer.

And according to you, the incentives of this new Microsoft are...?

https://www.npr.org/2014/07/28/335288388/when-did-companies-...

They lost the server space, but they're retrying to seize desktop from Linux with WSL and invading the developer tools space and trying to isolate Desktop Linux as an "irrelevant layer which runs MS software and technologies, which is not visible and accessible as the laymen", and Linux server as a layer "which you don't need to think about" (i.e. make Linux irrelevant as a whole OS for developers at scale).

Canonical is helping them with this endeavor, because Ubuntu desktop doesn't make money. If they can piggyback the userspace to Windows and earn money from servers, they're kosher.

It's really ugly. However, De Icasa is not a saint either by pushing Mono on GNOME and Linux and allowing some borders to dissolve to allow Microsoft in, regardless of it's intended or not.

They're obviously doing that, but they don't really need to.

Desktop Linux is its own enemy. 2 major GUI toolkits, frequent upgrades to them, generally with breaking changes, multiple DEs, frequent upgrades to them, also with breaking changes, a full decades of bickering over a solution that solves actual end user and operator problems in a standardizing way (systemd), immature GUI software after decades (Gimp & co), chronic lack of funding because nobody can figure it out, etc.

I've been around Desktop Linux for more than 15 years. I still hear bad arguments I heard back in 2005.

Plus, the ship has sailed. Mobile devices outnumber desktops and laptops and will only continue to grow. The money surrounding mobile dwarfs desktop. And Linux lost on mobile, it was it best chance to become the primary platform somewhere. Android doesn't count. Android used a cheap and standard kernel with many drivers and plopped a million proprietary things on top that look nothing like Desktop Linux.

You'll say I'm wrong, yet I'm willing to bet $100 that this discussion will look the same way in 15 years.

I'm part of a community who does amazing things with all these fragmented parts and assemble unimaginable things while staying productive and inventing new ways of work.

The overall maturity of these small parts have not reversed the tide, but actually changed it a lot.

As a macOS and Linux user for 15 years, I see that both can work seamlessly without much effort, but Windows built on a completely different platform, can't talk this language of protocols and composability natively, or work as seamlessly.

Microsoft is right to feel threatened, because they're threatened by two sides.

People who assemble cars from scratch can accomplish things from that are amazing too, but only 0 1% of the population will ever want to do that.

Android is doing what every Linux embedded platform had been doing anyway. If anything, they're more open than the rest of the mobile/embedded space. It's not like e.g. OpenMoko looks more like Desktop Linux than Android does.

It is unfortunate though that some free competitors to commercial software still struggle a bit. GIMP has worked fine for my rather simple image editing needs though.

I think mobile is another beast, I'm not going there yet :D

I was using Linux desktops 20 years ago and the same arguments were made. They were FUD and they still are.

1) having "too much" choice is nothing to complain about.

2) if you are a beginner, pick a stable distribution and your desktop will be completely immune to churn. Use it as a productivity tool, not as a playground.

3) if you are not a beginner you should be able to maintain a desktop. If you are busy, pick a simple DE and use it on a well know distribution.

Sorry, but take the horse blinders off.

If this kind of criticism coming from a long time user of Linux desktop (not as active nowadays because work is Windows, but most of my work is done in IDEs, browsers and through Cygwin anyway), FOSS supporter, etc is FUD, then boy, are you going to have a hard time fighting Microsoft's or Apple's marketing teams.

> 3) if you are not a beginner you should be able to maintain a desktop.

And therein lies the main rub :-)

Most people aren't able to "maintain a desktop". They don't really maintain either Windows, or MacOS. Most people are at best, "perpetual intermediates". Only a small fraction of users want or actually become power users. Most just trundle along trying their best to learn the least possible. And that's in every domain you can imagine.

This is the thing that will condemn Desktop Linux to being a niche product. That's fine, up to a point.

He offered the solution though. If you are not able to "maintain a desktop" (either because you don't know how to, just don't want to, or don't have the time to, etc) then use a stable distro and accept the choices that were made for you. Thats not much different than just installing Windows or buying a Mac and accepting whatever decisions Microsoft/Apple made regarding how the desktop experience should be.

There's a good number of large tech companies providing Linux desktops for both tech-savy and other employees and it just works.

> Sorry, but take the horse blinders off.

Horse blinders? Ironic given how you looked only at half a sentence and ignored the rest.

I'm willing to take it, but only because I think there won't be a Linux in 15 years.

And yeah. Android doesn't count. It's essentially an enclave that runs Dalvik programs.

Linux basic assumptions about hardware don't hold on mobile.

I think Linux is suffering from the Lisp curse. Because they never choosed a DE, there is endless splintering and re-invention of the wheel.

Let's see. I've added a reminder in my calendar with a link to this comment.

> Because they never choosed a DE...

But they created a Desktop Standard which allows every DE to behave the same where it matters. This unified a lot of things. So every DE is a shell and workflow with same underlying principles underside. Much like POSIX.

Sure. Except the end user won't care. As end user I don't see it implements DS.

I see that KDE has bug A and Gnome has bug B. Or KDE has feature C that Gnome doesn't have, and vice versa. All in all as user. No DE fits me because bugs and features are scattered around.

E.g. Haiku did it right. You don't get to choose. It's baked into the OS

This is a "grass is greener over the fence" perspective. You can install apps for missing functionality or report bugs for the things you don't like.

Except, Windows and macOS doesn't care about your bug reports, and some of the applications are not implemented on these systems because there's no financial incentive, and open source tools for these platforms are low quality.

On the other hand, this modularity and composability does wonders in the Linux side.

Linux DEs have feature levels. from LXDE to E17/XFCE to GNOME/KDE. People try, change, select and settle. Their most important settings are carried around. BTW, Qt/KDE guys allows amazing interoperability between GTK and Qt, regardless of your primary choice.

So, after some time it's borderline nitpicking IMHO.

Not really. Just because neighbors grass is greener, doesn't mean Linux grass isn't a black wilting mess.

> So, after some time it's borderline nitpicking IMHO.

Example of "nitpicking" I/colleagues ran into: Multi monitor support, HDR, DE bricking after update.

And due to Linux fractious nature even if one distro fixed it, another would still have that issue.

Stuff that never happened to me with Windows/MacOS.

Linux's grass was a much darker green in the past, but wasn't black, neither back then, nor now.

> Multi monitor support

Just plugged a secondary monitor into one of my colleagues Linux box a week ago, a second desktop appeared three seconds later. Used two monitors for 6 years, until 6 years ago. It was working fine, then.

> HDR

Don't have an HDR panel, can't say a word about it, but VLC handles HDR-SDR conversion just fine.

> DE bricking after update.

My current MacBook Pro bricked after an OS update, because of a bug in an OpenVPN client's OS integration. No, the tool is paid, and no, macOS has no OpenVPN client embedded in it. Maybe I shouldn't have installed a paid, premium OpenVPN client, who knows. Anyway, I wiped and reinstalled the thing as a result.

The symptom? A frozen progress bar under the Apple logo. No time remaining, no error, nothing. Can I have the logs please? "Haha, of course not, you peasant."

And I only wiped and re-installed a Linux distro once, 15 years ago, because I did something the tool warned me to not to do.

And Windows somehow succeeds to corrupt my older computer's BIOS after installing updates and reboots. Sometimes it hangs all fans blazing during the restart. No, it's not the battery. That also never happened with Linux.

So, I arguably have a much better experience with Linux w.r.t. macOS and Windows in the last 15 years.

Sure. And I had encountered it - from just not registering, it being "there" despite being unplugged. And it randomizing windows on plugging in.

Using Linux always feels like fighting uphill battle with gremlins.

> Don't have an HDR panel, can't say a word about it, but VLC handles HDR-SDR conversion just fine.

Pity, really.

Neither Weyland nor X.org support it. Amazing, another fork in the road.

> My current MacBook Pro bricked after an OS update, because of a bug in an OpenVPN

That's different. This was post install update. Clean machine.

I ran into similar issue that bit Linus from. Linus Tech Tips.

I updated pop_OS! on fresh install and bang! Welcome console my old friend.

I remember Linux 15 years ago and it was even worse. But just because it got better doesn't mean it's good.

Can exactly the same not be said for Windows or MacOS? The difference being that you're basically locked into your choice with Windows/MacOS.

But who is "they", Linux the OS doesn't exist as Linux is just a kernel. There are countless distributions that assemble operating systems from parts, throwing GNU userland on top of Linux kernel and other bits of software on top of the GNU userland and the kernel.

FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD are operating systems, the developers do both the kernel and the userland.

In the early days of PC BSD I've tried to kickstart a new DE, just for PC BSD to break free from the rest of open source operating systems, and to have an UI that only work on PC BSD, is consistent - the same way Windows and macOS have their UI layers. And I failed at it, because I am human and I need to earn a living.

People that wrote if not the original kernel. So l guess Linus and co.

If an OS is to "win" desktop, or mobile, or whatever, it needs to minimize forking between its libs. Go for one way to do it, rather than a muriad of related ways

I'm referring to Lisp Curse. http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html

In summary: Because Lisp was easy to fork, any time two nerds disagreed it was forked. And because they weren't working on same database you got Lisps with patchworks of functionality/bugs that each on their own couldn't compare to more or less monolith language like C/C++ or Java.

Same dynamic in Linux land.

So instead of having 1000 developers on one codebase we have 100 on ten different DE, windowing system, etc.

Rather than having one sound system we have a dozen... It doesn't work on PulseAudio, try OpenSound, no wait OSSBlasterMaster...

>s that each on their own couldn't compare to more or less monolith language like C/C++ or Java.

Good joke. On C++, Boost. Try to compile older C++ code from 2006 today, it may fail spectacularly.

A lot of older C++ games from 2006 will be damn difficult to compile today.

On Java, heh. Different and incompatible JRE's. Software tied to a single JRE where it crashes on the newer ones.

Should I go on?

Meanwhile, 20 yo Elisp code still runs today as-is.

> De Icasa is not a saint either by pushing Mono on GNOME and Linux

Eh, I think interoperability is good, and reverse-engineering Windows frameworks/technology has a long history in the open-source world (WINE & Samba being two prominent examples). I was disappointed when they sold Xamarin to MS, though. That felt like selling out, even though I'm sure it made sense at the time.

Eh, they have a dedicated team for enabling WSL/Ubuntu desktop in Canonical. They're fueling the effort.

> Eh, I think interoperability is good, and reverse-engineering Windows frameworks/technology has a long history in the open-source world (WINE & Samba being two prominent examples).

IIRC, De Icaza left GNOME, joined Microsoft, developed Mono on open specs, founded Xamarin and sold it back to Microsoft.

His joint venture with MS what turned everything sour for many people, incl. me. However, we all love Wine, esp. when they implement things bug-by-bug without knowing it (and without help from Microsoft). The cursor (or Icon or WMF) exploit was a great laugh. We all love SMB too, because it's done despite Microsoft.

The language on this page is loaded (in a way I don't like), but it keeps a good roster of the events: http://techrights.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Icaza

Why did it turn things sour for you? I mean, ever since the Xamarin acquisition, MS .NET has become open + cross plattform and Xamarin which was a commercial/paid-for product is open too. VSCode is a first class citizen for free C#/.NET development on macOS and Linux. Not saying all of this is related to de Icaza getting bought by MS, but just saying ever since the ecosystem has become completely open.

On the other hand. Consider a prominent member one of the biggest open source projects leaves the project, joins Microsoft, and praises Microsoft and pushes semi-closed Microsoft technologies on every project, claiming Linux is dead without Microsoft, and we need to compromise by allowing these non-free technologies and porting almost everything to it.

All is done when Microsoft tried to copy LibreOffice (then OpenOffice) formats, created OOXML family of semi-open formats, and push them as ISO standards to bolster their file formats to kill other office applications for good.

DeIcaza (knowingly or unknowingly) was a part of an concentrated and coordinated effort to EEE Linux, and the open frameworks around it.

I never used and won't use any Mono based application in my personal systems and servers I solely install and manage.

On the other hand, VSCode is not free or open source. This makes it null and void in my radar, because I want my whole toolchain to be open and free, because when I left a project alone, someone should be able to get the whole toolchain and continue development. I don't like the idea of source code being locked in a proprietary development environment and hence suffocated on a whim with a choice of an external party.

The only person who does not know this is Icaza itself.

I don't buy into this "All tools associated with an ecosystem must be free software". That is not even true in Java/C++/Python land, where there is a plentheora of commercial and succesful developer tools (i.e. IntelliJ, CodeWarrior etc.)

As in beer only [0]. This license [1] states otherwise for free as in speech perspective.

> and also used a lot outside .NET development (TypeScript). It is extension based, and not all extensions every written for it are free software.

I know, and some of the non-free extensions are just the essentials, so they're what make VSCode, VSCode. So it's open-core, and it's not completely open source, and definitely not free.

> And VSCode is not essential in any way for .NET development,

I don't develop C#, but I know there are other tools and IDEs.

> I don't buy into this "All tools associated with an ecosystem must be free software". That is not even true in Java/C++/Python land, where there is a plentheora of commercial and succesful developer tools (i.e. IntelliJ, CodeWarrior etc.)

It may not be a necessity for you, and it's definitely not a necessity for closed source software or tools. However, I license all my code with GPLv3, and want my project to be buildable by anyone, regardless of anything. So I prefer a free and open toolchain (GCC/Eclipse/GNU libc) and libraries in my codebases.

If I was writing a commercial application, I may make different choices IDE/Library wise, but I'll still continue to use GCC family.

You don't have to buy into this. I'm not selling anything. This is my stance and a recommendation, but not an insistence.

[0]: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/supporting/faq#_is-vs-cod...

[1]: https://code.visualstudio.com/license

The most important thing is, De Icaza is with Microsoft for much longer than people remember (or want to accept), and the events I remember (albeit a bit blurry), when I was a grad student were actually happened.

I think it definitely made sense. Xamarin was conceived in a world of many mobile platforms, and so it was the only way to develop cross-platform apps. Now there are basically two, and it's a much closer call.

They're spending up the wazoo on Xbox, still, to battle PlayStation. They were supposed to have conquered that market over 15 years ago and are still throwing money at it.

Windows is hurting as a retail business. License costs have been driven down by Chromebooks and resurgent Macs, and with all the free upgrades they get very little revenue from gaming PCs anymore (which is one of their biggest markets) while also battling Proton and Vulkan to keep users on the platform.

That leaves Azure and Office as the big cash cows. Azure is struggling to compete with AWS, and the big draw of Azure is the deep integration between it and Visual Studio (which, to be fair, is unrivalled anywhere else).

That's the bind. Microsoft needs the open-source community to embrace Visual Studio Code, and they have, but they also need to protect Azure's hegemony with .NET developers.

Can you build and deploy .NET on other clouds currently? Of course. Do you lose a lot of features by doing that? yes. Ones you may miss, or (if you've never been on Azure to become familiar with them), ones that may draw you to migrate later.

> MS under Satya really does want to be a good corporate citizen

... followed by...

> [a bunch of reasons why MS won't be a good corporate citizen]

Wanting is great, but actions speak louder. Maybe instead of doing sketchy things to try to lock people into your cloud platform (and make using your framework on other platforms more difficult), they could, I dunno, maybe focus on Azure itself, and making it better than AWS? The world would be a better place if companies were incentivized to compete on product features, and not through shady practices and backroom dealing.

Steering something like that is not even analogous to captaining a single large ship, it's more like trying to steer a flotilla where each captain hates the other bunch and they are all continuously pulling in different directions.

Satya may be doing his very best to improve the culture, but management has to change or be replaced on multiple levels below him to make things stick. He has to do this in a way that doesn't unite the leaders of the sub-groups against him in mutiny.

Again, I'm not trying to excuse MS's behavior in any measure, just highlight that even with the best of intentions it may take decades to change firm like MS to give up it's old ways.

I'm sure this is a constant struggle even within the dotnet umbrella. Remember the whole hot reload mess?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28972431

I don't get it. Why can't they simply open source the common code between visual studio and visual studio code? Who cares if Visual Studio makes an extra million dollars in revenue? Talk about being penny wise and pound foolish. Spending all these resources to get developer mindshare and constantly tripping over themselves because oh we must protect visual studio revenue.

Have a read of their actual results and maybe re-think your hypothesis a bit. Microsoft’s revenue went up by 18%. I think they’ll be fine without some .NET extension,

But this extension, by its very nature, is for the VS Code. So, in this case, VS Code isn't being neutered to make a paid product more appealing. The only thing I can think of is that they want to keep the "secret sauce" away from JetBrains to give Visual Studio an advantage over Rider. Its really perplexing when you consider that they created LSP and DAP. And C# was one of the first languages to have an implementation for both standards which opened up the door to potential C# feature parity between Visual Studio and non-Visual Studio editors.

I just don't understand why anyone working on .NET tooling would think that this decision would go over better than the hot reloading one. Once you open the FOSS genie, you cannot put it back in the bottle without stirring controversy. Is protecting some small percentage of VS license revenue worth all of this bad PR they seem to be willing to subject themselves too?

It's not. Everyone's darling, Google, is. So are IBM, Oracle, Alibaba.

Azure is the only true threat to AWS and the only actual peer.

> Windows is hurting as a retail business.

> License costs have been driven down by Chromebooks and resurgent Macs

> That leaves Azure and Office as the big cash cows.

Where are you pulling all this data from? And I don't mean coarse data from various articles, anectodal evidence or personal observations, I mean actual evidence that microsoft's revenue share is dominated by office and azure? Microsoft sells a lot of stuff to a lot of entities, I'm not convinced you can sum up their revenue so neatly without opening their books.

2002 - Rare - $375 million

2005 - Lionhead - ???

2014 - Mojang - $4 billion

2014 - Gears of War - ???

2018 - Compulsion - ???

2018 - inXile - ???

2018 - Obsidian - ???

2018 - Ninja Theory - ???

2018 - Playground - ???

2018 - Undead Labs - ???

Sept 2020 - Zenimax / Bethesda - $7.5 billion

January 2022 - Activision Blizzard - $69 billion

This is just acquisitions, so it isn't exhaustive as it doesn't include first party costs and development expenditure, or Halo expenses / 343, as it assumes they essentially paid nothing to Bungie (or their costs were negative) after that split happened.

Microsoft don't publish extensive separate numbers for the Xbox division, but their Q1 2022 filing nonetheless states $3.6 billion - which is up 8%. They've also been open that they still, 21 years later, make at most break-even on their hardware sales.

That's a lot of expenditure relative to income. To state the utterly obvious: they're not getting nothing for that money, so it's not like they are sunk costs, but I'm not sure what standard would meet "spending up the wazoo" if not 20 times revenue (at minimum, as it only includes spending on acquisitions for which the amount paid is made public).

.. and they’re spending up the wazoo to do it!

These investment need not return profit in excess of the sticker price but increase the valuation of MS proportionally. If MS tries to offload Mojang it will get an impressive ROI.

I wonder if this is specific to particular spaces, like very large enterprises maybe?

In the SME space, Azure is significantly more dominant in my experience.

All those companies where "Can't get fired for buying Microsoft" applies, went to Azure.

Last year, Azure was the 2nd biggest player in cloud computing, being "only" 2/3 of AWS' market share, but still having more than 3x the market share of the next biggest competitor (Google).

Indeed hardly something I'd call "struggling".

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1202770/hyperscaler-iaas...

[0] https://news.microsoft.com/2021/07/27/microsoft-cloud-streng...

The revenue chart looks more favourable for Microsoft (e.g. 20% share for Azure vs. 30% share for AWS), so maybe that's the data you have in mind?

Microsofts decision to release all of their new XBox games on PC was kinda bizarre to me. It basically guarantees the XBox as a gaming console is going to lose market share to the PlayStation and eventually die out because the core gaming market is going to pick PC + PS5 + Switch (or some subset of those) as the sensible combo to be able to play all the games on.

XBox as just a game publishing brand can never be as big of a deal as being one of the three major consoles.

Meanwhile the Switch totally justifies it's existence with cool hardware decisions and good exclusives. And the PS5 with kinda unique hardware decisions (the really fast SSD actually enables cool stuff, the dualsense triggers feel a bit more of a gimmick to me) but mostly good exclusives.

But hey, maybe I'm missing something here.

I get that some suits have decided PC isn’t a threat to Playstation’s business model, but they’re just wrong.

A gaming PC will play PC/Xbox/Playstation/Switch exclusives now. That really is compelling for someone in the market.

Most consumers want appliances. Having to debug software and hardware issues that frequently come up on PC gives them zero satisfaction.

For example, most people want a toaster when they want toast, instead of a more versatile fire

For Microsoft the Xbox hardware was always intended to be "aspirational" for PC owners and push developers to build better PC games. Even the name choice from "DirectX-Box" has always come from that relationship back to the PC (even with the brief side jump in the Xbox 360 era away from traditional PC hardware).

Just as the Surface line of hardware isn't designed to "replace" the PC but encourage innovation in PC hardware design.

For a really good example since you already brought it up: "the really fast SSD enables cool stuff" you mention with respect to the PS5 is a big part of the Xbox Series X/S hardware too. They are only sold with really fast SSDs and even the expansion slots only support those kinds of SSDs. (Some gamers have been upset by this that they can't just plug in any USB drive like on the Xbox One.) But also Microsoft also added a lot of that exact same "cool stuff" to Windows and PC games can use "DirectStorage" APIs to get some of those exact same benefits when PCs are built with really fast SSDs that support DirectStorage. But right now the easiest (and cheapest) to find "PCs" with all that hardware and configured correctly to use it "fresh out of the box" are: the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S. (Even despite the supply chain issues.)

That's an interesting circle around the hardware: the Xbox hardware pushes PC standards that are aspirationally available sooner and easier on Xbox hardware. Xbox hardware puts "high performance gaming PCs" in living rooms in homes that might now otherwise consider a "high performance gaming PCs" while also giving those that love building their own "high performance gaming PCs" performance goals to shoot for and a baseline hardware standard to judge their gaming PCs by (is your gaming PC at least as good as an Xbox One X? do you have the RTX and NVMe SSD with DirectStorage support to hit Xbox Series X fidelity in Xbox Series X optimized games? etc).

Surface doesn't want to be the only PC hardware, it wants to be PC hardware that gives ideas to the other PC hardware companies. That sets benchmarks even for home PC builders to measure themselves. Xbox as a console seems to want to do the same thing: it isn't designed to be the last or only gaming PC in a household: it's designed to be the "first", it's designed to be easily accessible for those that wouldn't otherwise buy a gaming PC, it's designed to be the measuring stick for what a "gaming PC" means and give ideas to PC manufacturers of things they can also be doing. (And it is designed to keep Windows as the most innovative OS for gaming. Microsoft "wins" either way if you buy an Xbox or a gaming PC so long as it still includes Windows.)

(Personally, I tend to own a gaming PC for 7+ years and watch it slowly grow out of date with new releases, because a PC is also a lot of other things and stability is great. When I choose to play "keeping up with the Gamer Joneses", I do it by following Xbox cycles. The Xbox Series X does outclass my gaming PC on quite a few specs and I'm happy with that arrangement. I also like the fluidity that I often buy the games only once and can run them on my PC in the other room, at my discretion. Some games you want "latest and greatest looks on the couch" and some games you want the freedom to jump over to the other room and "slightly dated graphics fidelity but I just need to hop on the game from my desktop where I'm multitasking a TV show and a Discord chat in my PC chair".)

I have a lot more questions for what Sony's strategy is with current PC releases of games and that the PS5 is again back on "ordinary" PC hardware. They certainly don't "win" anywhere near as much by making their PC games available on Windows.

You almost imply that we can expect better corporate citizenship (whatever that means) from corporates with comfortable monopolies. I think 90s Microsoft is probably sufficient rebuttal of that.

I kinda disagree with that, based on things that MS people straight-up say out loud. MS changed that "wholly-proprietary, Windows-only technology" thinking for other reasons.

VS and .NET are not the profit centres any more. Azure is. Even #2 spot in cloud computing is vastly profitable (1) and strategic.

Is Azure "struggling" eh, it depends. Sure they want to have more users than AWS, and they're struggling to do that. Struggling to be successful, big, profitable etc, no not at all, Azure is all of those things.

MS wants you to run it on Azure. For just about any "it". They'll even prioritize enticing you to Azure over enticing you to Windows servers. Therefor, there should be a good "it runs on Linux on Azure" story for any popular dev tool. Doubly so for the MS developer base.

1) https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-cloud-revenue-at-23-...

Certainly SOAP isn't everywhere the way it used to be (thankfully), but it's out there and isn't going away any time soon.

Funny you think that. That's one of the major complaints about .NET 5+ is that WCF was dropped as an officially supported library and .NET is pushing people to REST and/or gRPC. (I think gRPC will suffer many of the same SOAP problems eventually, but it's the current hotness, thanks Google.) Every .NET HN article is full of complaints that WCF is dead and they have SOAP services to maintain and .NET is telling them to go away and do something new. There's a community project named CoreWCF trying to make the transition easier and even they are not trying to implement all of WS-* and SOAP madness and trying to make the transitions easier to REST or gRPC if you like that Google-branded SOAP smell better.

In .NET 5+ SOAP is already dead and good riddance. It's probably going to live forever on .NET Framework 4.x servers for legacy apps, but the message seems to be loud enough: "those are legacy apps now".

Import a WSDL into Visual Studio and you've got your client code automatically generated & documented (if the API was written properly), works pretty nicely to be fair. Even easier than using something like Nswag to generate JSON clients from Swagger/OpenAPI specs.

> (if the API was written properly)

A very important caveat! I remember we hired some consultants from a world-renowned tech company - let's call them Big Red for now - and their big integration deliverable was a SOAP API with... one method. It accepted a string, and returned a string. And what was that one string? ...A SOAP request! The best code-generator in the world wouldn't have helped.

To this day I wonder if we actually ended up paying for that. I sure hope we didn't.

Like I have a Java app I am struggling with currently and not a fan of, but its on Java 8 so I don’t consider it representative of whatever I might find in modern Java despite the fact that I am working with it in modern times

One trick MS never thought of was "use mountain of cash to buy up all the manufacturing capacity"

Anyway, a group of them discussed lobbying the US government to charge Linus Torvalds and Eric Raymond for securities fraud, alleging that people promoting open source software were actually engaged in a pump-and-dump scheme for companies like VA Linux (a dot com company that crashed and burned)

To me this perfectly encapsulates Microsoft’s attitude of that era. It’s all there right in a bunch of early aughts blogs.

As far as .Net being Windows only. MS doesn’t care about Windows anymore. It cares more about Azure, services, Office etc. There are more Linux instances on Azure than Windows instances.

Surely RMS told him this exact thing would happen when he left gnome for ms.

https://github.com/omnisharp/omnisharp-vscode/issues/5276#is...

I think this is no longer true following the pandemic and his vaccine work. And his Epstein connections. In retrospect to this, it's hard for me personally to take his philanthropy into account. I went from childhood, disliking Bill Gates for his anticompetitive Microsoft stuff, to college age, admiring him for his philanthropy, and now back to harboring a strong distrust of the man.