On the contrary, HN is great because most users stick to the subject of discussions rather than devolving into ad-hominem attacks.
It's curious that your account was created exactly one minute after this post was posted, for precisely one insulting comment.
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MS has a long long history, any animosity they receive is well-earned. E.g.:
> "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE),[1] also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate",[2] is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found[3] that was used internally by Microsoft[4] to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
> The strategy and phrase "embrace and extend" were first described outside Microsoft in a 1996 article in The New York Times titled "Tomorrow, the World Wide Web! Microsoft, the PC King, Wants to Reign Over the Internet",[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
It's now 2023; 27 years later.
Name a single thing Microsoft has EEE'd in the last 20 years. There isn't one. All the examples from the Wikipedia page are from the 90s or early 2000s at best (and most of those seem to be about lawsuits for things that happened a few years earlier). The only recent mention is about "Windows Subsystem for Linux", and those fears turned out to be entirely unwarranted.
Do I like Microsoft? Not especially; it's a large corporation that acts in its own self-interest in an a-moral way. But it's also no longer the Microsoft of the 90s. In fact, almost everything is different: leadership, employees, revenue stream, business model.
The laptop would not let me start to use it until I had activated Wi-Fi and connected a Microsoft account! It literally would not leave the init wizard until I had "phoned home" to the corporate cloud.
> Name a single thing Microsoft has EEE'd in the last 20 years.
See above.
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In reply to nfinished sib comment:
> "Ask HN: GitHub just added a feature I don't like to GitHub" is a conversation worth having?
So why are you?
Aside: I just have a Windows VM for testing, but I bypassed the account "requirement" for that by disconnecting from the internet when installing Windows.
Well then I don't know what to tell you. From my POV as a "Free" software fanatic* it all seems "of a piece": VS Code is a Trojan Horse, GitHub is insidious, etc.
(* I'm one of those who sees the "Open Source" movement as a distraction from the main point of the "Free" software movement, although I have to admit that most people haven't heard of either of them, and of those who have, most can't or don't distinguish them.)
I just don't see how "need Microsoft account to log in to Windows" even remotely fits that. I don't know of anything Microsoft has done in the last 20 or so years that fits that. I can tell you of specific things Microsoft has done in the last 20 years that I don't like, but that doesn't make it embrace, extend, and extinguish.
I think especially if you want to promote Free Software it's very important to keep a cool head and not get too clouded by past grievances. IMHO people are fighting yesterday's war with all of this to the detriment of today's war.
That sure sounds like gh vs git to me (the thing this thread is about.)
> I just don't see how "need Microsoft account to log in to Windows" even remotely fits that.
The have embraced and extinguished the very idea of owning your own computer. These laptops come configured as dumb terminals for their corporate cloud. They EEE'd the Dynabook yo!?
> I don't know of anything Microsoft has done in the last 20 or so years that fits that.
I'm sure there are examples of MS following their playbook over the last three decades, I'm not going to "google it for you", there are probably lists kept by people who care more than I do.
> I can tell you of specific things Microsoft has done in the last 20 years that I don't like, but that doesn't make it embrace, extend, and extinguish.
I feel like you're missing the forest for the trees. The EEE thing is a strategy or tactic to achieve the overall goal: getting between people and their hardware and "extracting rent". That's their whole thing, yeah?
GitHub acquisition, VS Code, etc. Everything they do is EEE, whether it looks like a sheep or a wolf, it's a wolf.
Incidentally, that's why I don't accept the "Ship of Theseus" idea that MS has turned over in the last few decades. The ship is still a ship.
> I think especially if you want to promote Free Software it's very important to keep a cool head and not get too clouded by past grievances.
That's what I'm saying: the very idea that these grievances are past is exactly what I have a problem with, because they're not past. If anything, MS is succeeding.
> IMHO people are fighting yesterday's war with all of this to the detriment of today's war.
Following the war metaphor, I think we (the Free software folks) have clearly lost completely. We have been roundly defeated. Most people have never heard of us, let alone know what we're even about.
The closest thing to a front in the "War of General Purpose Computing" is the farmers fighting the tractor companies for the right to repair their tractors now that they have computers in them.
In any event, well met. Cheers! :)
On at least three topics I've consistently found this to not be the case: Google, Microsoft, Cryptocurrency (also: Richard Stallman, suckless, but those come up less often).
I find that these threads often devolve pretty fast away from "the subject". I actually dislike all three of those things as well; I use none of their products save for GitHub and haven't for years. But that doesn't mean that everything these companies do is part of a sinister machiavellian plot to take over the world. And not everyone involved in crypto is a sociopathic scammer looking to steal your money, either, even though I think crypto overall is a net negative.
> It's curious that your account was created exactly one minute after this post was posted, for precisely one insulting comment.
I'm really not trying to "gotcha" here, but you're kind of proving my point with this remark.
I've been using GH at work and personally for a while now and i never wanted/needed to use the GH CLI/GUI, the IDE will cover you if you need it to.
If they really removed the easy to use copy button it would be annoying but calling it "extinguish" is definetly some HN warrior attitude. They didn't remove it though, just moved it a bit and OP is being a bit dramatic