For example, if OSX was an OEM offering, companies would disable services and make unsavory modifications.
The reality, is like Lenovo, we have a bad vendor here and probably think twice before buying PCs from Samsung.
I'm aware that Microsoft is a giant corporation and there are many different people employed. The amount of people who support Open Source most likely increased in the last years. But as long as they're doing the public "we love Linux and Open Source" and try to lobby Open Source away in the background, I have no reason to trust them.
No joke but this sort of stuff makes a mockery of the positive things they have done recently. Ao much positive spin hiding the same asshattery.
However, it says in the article: A Microsoft spokesperson said: “We have looked into the nearly decade-old matter and we don’t recognise these claims. Fundamentally, it is not how we operate as a business. We have an honest and open engagement with the government and this is how we will continue to work with it.”
I think microsoft has make many good moves recently because the public interest and its business interest are converging. Microsoft is in a hard fight to avoid becoming irrelevant. It has to lobby governments for commercial interests and at the same time, it has to seduce developpers by open sourcing (and leading technical innovation).
> It has to lobby governments for commercial interests and at the same time, it has to seduce developpers by open sourcing (and leading technical innovation).
Well, that's the very problem for me. As long as it is only PR to catch devs, I don't care. Opening .NET was great, but honestly I'm accustomed to open languages (or open compilers), such as Go, Rust and C (including the whole GObject ecosystem). It didn't make .NET better, it made it equal to things I'm used to. And in contrast to .NET, these languages are truly governed / developed by a multitude of developers.
To me it's more important to stop ambushing Open Source / Free Software (like the blackmailing I linked above). If Microsoft's products are better, they won't have to fear Open Source at all. Fair play is all I want.
http://techrights.org/2015/05/29/microsoft-vs-india/
Their recent "good moves" (open sourcing .NET, etc.) are simply an attempt to maintain relevance in the face of declining market share. If it results in regained market-share, they will likely bait and switch, and of course, they might as well get some good PR out of it.
Second, Why is Microsoft lobbying for non-restrictive purchasing standards bad?
It's very clear to me that this has little to do with weather the competition is FOSS - and more to do if the competition can only be indian made software. Buy $country First laws have long been recognized as anti-competitive, protectionist and generally a cause of increasing acquisition costs.
FOSS of more often then not superior on its merits alone, why does it need a protectionist anti-competitive law to help it compete?
Because people generally don't choose the superior product?
If proprietary software is more often then not superior on its merits alone, why does it need a protectionist anti-competitive law (Intellectual property, reverse engineering forbidden by EULAs) to help it compete?
I wouldn't expect Microsoft to not lobby because I don't believe their PR that says that they've "changed" and are now "pro open source".
>It's very clear to me that this has little to do with weather the competition is FOSS
So which part of the Indian policy that (briefly) favored open source was not about favoring open source software?
>FOSS of more often then not superior on its merits alone, why does it need a protectionist anti-competitive law to help it compete?
This should be made policy because this is a long-term strategy to prevent lock in, and because it's much harder to bribe a high level official than it is a low level official.
The old New MSFT made some good moves too. Then they went back to being the Bad MSFT. I hope that the company has figured out how to break the cycle of abuse, but I'm not going to be holding my breath.
or have they just let the open source folks continue to talk and talk about "YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP" while releasing software that is different combinations of buggy, ugly, or a terrible UX.
according to what I hear year after year again ('still not the year of desktop linux') they even succeeded. lol.
By users I mean the core market of Windows - the business desktop. How often did linux outreach staff come to a large business and listen to the concerns of the customers? Never (in my experience). How often did Microsoft do this? Often (again in my experience).
The only distributions that can do that are the enterprise paid ones, and those are mostly meant for the server side. AFAIK there isn't really an enterprise desktop distribution of Linux really intended for that kind of use. Linux on the desktop is what it is -- it's an option for those who want it. Market share is not a big consideration at all.
MS has in the past bent over backward to maintain binary compatibility.
Some of the same attitude is present in the kernel mantra of not breaking userspace, but userspace devs seems all to happy to break stuff at the drop of a hat.
Microsoft has spent so much time abusing their market dominance, trying to cripple linux on the desktop that it's kind of funny for once to see a company which they can't strong-arm doing the same thing back to them.