IMO the right way to deal with that is to reject the instinct of considering a corporation to be a person, just rationally look at whether their recent actions, look for potential conflicts of interest, and make sure any deals are guaranteed to be in in your interest.
For instance, Microsoft has been known in the past for screwing people over in creative ways. Famously they screwed over Spyglass by buying the code that became IE with a royalty deal, and then giving it out for free, ensuring that Spyglass got percentages of $0, which it seems they definitely didn't expect. So there it would make perfect sense to take a look at any deals that could be subverted creatively with a very critical eye.
On the other hand if they just give you a donation because they want PR or some such with no strings attached, then there's unlikely to be a problem.
And it's important to note that big companies are full of individuals trying to make their own careers.
For a less contentious example, I imagine top-level leadership recognizes that the immediate financial gains that come from bloating their flagship operating system with ads to the point where it feels like a mid-2000s filesharing app is short-sighted, but there are thousands of VPs who get promotions if they can point to a number and say "look at that revenue, I created it"
Why should we think they have turned over a new leaf? They have gotten worse, not better
> they are now pursuing a locked down AppStore model with windows S
Isn't Windows S Mode pretty much dead? I thought Microsoft gave up on it a few years ago and I don't believe there's any new hardware being shipped with it. Also, those that do have S Mode enabled by default can do a one-way switch out of it in the settings.
It seems like it's still supported though.
Why speak about it in terms of something cleaning its name? There's no reason to consider any corporation as "on your side", just something you can use the inputs from today and probably not tomorrow.
I have no special hate for microsoft, but it's like praising the wind for blowing - it's going to change direction again, trust me.
They can't change, as nearly every other (successful) company can't. They're built for profit, but human related values such as morals, honesty, sincerity, and generally being good to others etc. have no place in business: those are obstacles that soon or later must be removed to maximize profits. I expect pretty much every company to act in a benevolent way when they're young and still in need to establish a good public image, but as soon as their business allows them, they become evil, I mean not in a superhero comic baddie way ("muhaha! I'll conquer the world"), but rather in a very cold "we don't need to be nice anymore" way. It's just how they're created, and the environment they "live" in that shapes them: if you dwell in a sea full of sharks, you better learn to behave as a shark, especially if being a shark guarantees more rights and less obligations than most humans.
I don't believe it's "as soon as their business allows them", but as soon as the owners decide they don't care. You can have a company that runs at low margins and does some good if that's what the founder wanted. The problem is that the founder will eventually die, and someone else will own the company. That could be due to going public, taking on other private investors, or just leaving the company to family. New owners are so often driven by money that they will abandon being nice or supporting a cause.
Lets all follow Mark Cuban's pharmacy company as an example. He's offering drugs at a 15 percent markup. Great cause - making meds affordable to people. It will eventually be co-opted by greed, but lets see how long it takes and who actually gets greedy.
Corporations make changes that suit them first, users second. Microsoft "loves" open source now, as they own one of the biggest dev-centric social media platforms.
> What will it take for you to actually believe that they may genuinely be changing?
They are changing into what makes more money in the long run.
You can do both, at least as a user. Take advantage of the positive resources (github, etc) while being aware of or even supporting alternatives as well (god help us if we ever lose GCC and CLang becomes a monopoly).
There are still many bad things they do, like pressure schools into teaching only about MS products in "computer" classes.
I came out of a dotnet post-secondary school but I'm now currently working on a React/Node/GraphQL team, I don't see it as a negative in the way you're portraying it here. I think C# is a great starting language both because of the great tool support and the sort of medium level of abstraction.
Microsoft will gladly ditch open-source in the future, if it becomes the best option for survival.
well, them not not doing stuff like this for instance: https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/35
1) They immediately turned of all telemetry and made it opt-in, clearly explaining what they are gathering, when, and politely asked people to turn it on.
2) They immediately stopped forcing people to create online accounts and misleading them in all possible ways so that they have to disconnect their network etc. in order to use their system without this bs.
3) Instead of boasting on their Hyper-V-related work in the Linux kernel, they would work on interoperability with Ext4, and develop an equivalent to bootcamp so that other OS-es could gracefully coexist with Windows (last time I checked Windows installer completely ignores Linux and makes the existing system unbootable).
4) They would collaborate with the Wine project in order to make the newest version of Office work smoothly on Wine.
I could go on forever. They won't make any of these, because it is against their best interests. Linux and macOS are still competing products. MS is making tons of money off Linux running on Azure, but they need to be careful about the desktop aspect. That's why you see what can be perceived as inconsistency: they want to attract people to them, but at the same time they want to exploit their customers as much as possible.
Aligned incentives.
First of all, for-profit companies optimize for profit, not truthfulness.
> Or you will always prefer to remember the dark times of CEOs past and a workforce that is probably half gone from those days?
Second, Microsoft has a 45-years long history of making false promises, paying large bribes and attacking open source.
And endless use of EEE. And palladium / trusted computing / secure boot.
And adversarial interoperability. And forced obsolescence.
It hasn't changed.
> You want them to change their name, open source Windows?
Nobody expects Microsoft to be consistent with their own claims.
Open sourcing windows would be a good start!
I would settle for them not polluting their flagship open source project VSCode with proprietary extensions, though.
Microsoft can't open source Windows since it's full of third party code they licensed and don't have the rights to open source. Probably also why apple couldn't open source MacOS.
Microsoft Office for Linux would be a nice start. Contributions to the WINE project would be even nicer.
Not forcing me to have a Microsoft account to install my paid copy of Windows 11 Home.
Very user-hostile but there is a way.
Open sourcing Windows would be a good start.
At best they get praised for doing things in a way where they benefit or are forced to face a worse alternative without control or a hook. Whenever they seem to do something selfless the control, hook or incentive to taking in some patent comes along with it.
I don't expect to put .net stuff and the like in the same category as GNU tools anytime soon.
Is it something of CEO's past? I remember the ODF debacle, the MAUI naming , the numerous anticompetitive business practices, etc all not being far off. Hell even OEM bundling court cases are not a thing of the past
What will it take for you to actually believe that they may genuinely be changing? Or you will always prefer to remember the dark times of CEOs past and a workforce that is probably half gone from those days? You want them to change their name, open source Windows?
Just because their path to cleaning their name has not yet passed through your preferred Open Source project does not mean they do not mean any good. The mere fact that such a large behemoth which you admit was blatantly against OSS but is now embracing and even backing some projects should tell you that entities can change, in either direction, good and bad.