llewellen wrote:Of course, Microsoft's motives are entirely altruistic and the expression of its deep sense of corporate and civic responsibiity for the benefit of all human kind. MS wouild never, ever set out to undermine or destroy a perceived competitor threat. That whole Netscape thing was a big fake news event. Anyway, it's not personal: it's just business. Bottom line: if MS said it, it is by definition (to put it most charitably) disingenuous.
Say, can I interest you in some oceanfront land in Nebraska?
Has anyone seen Swapnil Bhartia's video on Youtube about this? His argument is that a lot of Linux enthusiasts haven't ever written a line of code and aren't involved in the business, so they don't have a fully-informed opinion about open-source. Secondly, he says the EEE paradigm is outdated and irrelevant: MS has embraced open-source because it's 'the future' and the best way to proceed. It can't, and doesn't have the ability, to 'extinguish' open-source.
Now, that's all very well as a theory, but would it not be pertinent to look at things historically? I echo this comment from hasufell on Canonical/Ubuntu which I think applies:
Ubuntu is a corporation driven distribution and does not care about the free software or open-source community (Greg K-H: “Ubuntu does not give back to the community“ on a kernel talk at google). While that alone is not a bad thing it completes the picture of Ubuntus goals (see bug #1 on ubuntu launchpad).
IMO, over the last few years Canonical has followed the exact same strategy of Microsoft: EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish). That has shown in various ways where ubuntu has pushed technologies or created extensions (such as unity). The next step will be things like API war and might already start with the deal they have made with Valve.
Well, of course that is only guessing and I might be completely wrong.
But what is a fact is this: ubuntu has already betrayed it‘s users through their spying features and is clearly not aiming at full transparency and freedom as in free. Because of this fact people should really think if this will remain the only occurence of nastyness. History has taught us and is telling us again right now that companies with that power and attitude will not stop at such a point, but just become more subtle. Free software for them is merely a utility to build up to their own goals.
How can you trust someone who has already lied to you? What happened in Ubuntu is a very good reason to never trust them again as a whole, not just disregard a few features they provide. That would be inconsistent for people who appreciate free software and want control over what‘s happening on their computer.
https://github.com/nylira/prism-break/issues/334
Furthermore, there has been a long-term concern that MS would do this. At least as far back as 18 years ago, anyway. Eric Raymond said the following in his paper Revenge of the Hackers:
One of the threats we faced was the possibility that the term `open source' would be ``embraced and extended'' by Microsoft or other large vendors, corrupting it and losing our message. It is for this reason the Bruce Perens and I decided early on to register the term as a certification mark and tie it to the Open Source Definition (a copy of the Debian Free Software Guidelines). This would allow us to scare off potential abusers with the threat of legal action.
It eventually developed that the U.S. Patent and Trademark office would not issue a trademark for such a descriptive phrase. Fortunately, by the time we had to write off the effort to formally trademark "Open Source" a year later, the term had acquired its own momentum in the press and elsewhere. The sorts of serious abuse we feared have not (at least, not yet as of November 2000) actually materialized.
http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homest ... 01s05.html
So no, I don't live in a basement and yes, I have only written a meagre amount of code in my time, but does that make my opinion, and people's like mine, invalid? Devs are pulling their work off Github left, right and centre. Not only this, a lot of MS's buy-out ventures have either tanked or ended up in a deterioration of quality. Of course MS want to develop, hence their interest in open-source, but it's not about extinguishing open-source but the competition. Like I said earlier, I think it's too early to call why MS have done this, but I think it's advisable, and realistic, to be cautious of their motives.