A cooperation is never reputable. It is easier to reason with a dog than with a cooperation.

However, me thinks this relates to the times before Github became an offering by Microsoft. But the deal was just too hard to miss, getting this massive army of minion coders who all pray to the octocat and now do the Balmers dance.

Oh so much fun, now it turns out, that all feed the new AI overlords.

Developers developers developers developers

That misspelling of "corporation" severely breaks the meaning you almost certainly intended.

oh snap, too late to edit ... you are absolutely right.

I think 90s Microsoft could have something of a claim.

It made a lot of sharp business choices in that decade, but it also left a LOT of money on the table for developers, as part of a strategic goal to grow the platform.

Then the 00s came, platform growth slowed (because they were already running on everything desktop), and the "vs linux" decisions started coming.

Eh, I wouldn't say the say they handled the whole DR-DOS saga very reputably. And in 2001 they came to within an inch of their life in US v. Microsoft, a litigation mainly based on anticompetitive practices from the 90s.

Microsoft was disreputable in the 90s to the point they were almost broken up several times.

Microsoft's battle against Netscape (which is also part of the show Valley of the Boom), and the Halloween documents, are two more examples.

It bleeds over into ethics at some point.

Microsoft in the DOS days was still fighting hard for market. Microsoft in the Netscape days? Eh... less of a competitive claim. Post ~2005? No claim.

For me, the definition of "reputable" changes when you're a competitor among equals vs when you're a monopoly.

They were a monopoly since the '90s.

Okay, maybe 90s MS could've, but I have a feeling that's 30 years ago.

GitHub wasn't always owned by Microsoft.

Please note I am not attempting to address the reputability of GitHub pre-acquisition. That is a separate matter.

>I'm sorry but when was Microsoft ever reputable?

They went on an open source charm offensive a few years ago. "Oh, we've turned over a new leaf" etc.

A lot of people believed that they'd had a legitimate change in heart because of the change in strategy.

More realistically, Linux had driven them into near irrelevance in the server market and just pushed them from "extinguish" or "extend" to "embrace".

Their dubious anti-Linux tactics via leaning on OEMs in the desktop market remained more or less unchanged.

> More realistically, Linux had driven them into near irrelevance in the server market and just pushed them from "extinguish" or "extend" to "embrace".

and with vscode, copilot, and wsl2 they're doing a terrifyingly good job :-/

I really hope people don't let their guard down.

Define reputable.

They're still probably the most indirectly trusted company on the earth

Why? because almost all enterprises do run some non-trivial amount of MS code

Either Windows, Azure / Azure AD or AD at all, Teams/Outlook, VS Code, or anything else.

And please, let's do not start arguing that some startup made of 30 people uses Macs only.

Anybody who was a programmer through the 1980's knows the anti-competitive practices that MS used to destroy many up-and-comers. They essentially were a dam on technological progress by coercing the world to use a non-protected single-tasking OS when we could have easily been using pre-emptive multitasking OSes on the hardware of the day.

GP said: Thats the main reason i moved my code away from github and am advising clients to follow suit. It boggles the mind that we have to actively police against ip theft by formerly reputable corporations but here we are.

you said: I'm sorry but when was Microsoft ever reputable?

nobody said Microsoft had ever been reputable.

GitHub is the formerly reputable corporation here.

GP comment doesn't even make sense without that.