I have trouble seeing that as irony in a world where "embrace, extend, extinguish" exists.

Agreed. It would be ironic if it wasn't literally the exact same arc that every single company in this industry goes through.

* Scrappy upstart catches the industry off guard * Wild success and growth * Becomes bloated, unable to innovate, and addicted to its cash cow * Begins turning the screws on its users to appease shareholders

It's all just a natural part of the enshittification progression.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis.... We could also start calling it Embrace, Extend, and Enshittificate

Extinguish is fine.

Once the love of "Microsoft Loves FOSS Again" fades away as they aim to enter the next phase, some other company (Cloudflare? Tailscale?) will receive all the developer love until yet again, people realize that for-profit companies don't actually have their best interest at heart.

Rinse and repeat forever...

The only one who has your best interests at heart is you. And you sometimes get it wrong.

It is very common the case that someone else will do something that aligns with your best interest. (love for example) In fact it is often in your best interest to do something that helps someone else and appears to harm you. (giving money to the poor at first glance appears to harm you and thus be illogical - but there are a number of secondary results of this that make it in your best interest anyway)

I was convinced at the time--and I'm still convinced--that there was a TON of astroturfing on places like Reddit and even here when Nadella became CEO of Microsoft and there was that whole "Microsoft hearts Open Source" campaign. Every other comment was "You're just stuck in the past. You're as bad as the conspiracy theorists. It's not even the same people running the company anymore. Blah blah blah."

And now they own Github and they're training their AI models on you and your code and forcing that crap into a bunch of PCs. They were about to push out a "feature" to Windows that periodically took screenshots of what you were doing and used AI to analyze what you were doing. Then they sprinkle some glitter for the easily-distracted and tell you that it's actually a feature for you. Last I heard, they shelved the idea for now because of the backlash, but we all know they'll circle back around.

But, yeah, I'm a tinfoil hat weirdo who's just a "hater."

The lesson here is that there's no such thing as Big Tech that is not hostile towards the people. They will say whatever people want to hear on their way to market dominance, but once there, they will mercilessly fuck those same people for every cent they can get.

(I would actually extend this to all large businesses in general, but we can start with tech.)