Comment by aries1980
9 years ago
AFAIK Angular is part of Google.
But a quite decent improvement from the era when the company bribed government officials to purchase bulk licences for pupils and govn't, distorting the job market. This is a less harmful Microsoft than it was 5-10-20 years ago.
> a quite decent improvement from the era when
Or the era of "Linux is a cancer"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_c...
Yeah, now they're just engaging in racketeering against Linux and Android using their patents.
The "Scroogled" era wasn't that long ago either. Unbelievably embarrassing.
Nor the stealing of Google's search results.
I'm not ready to bless Microsoft yet.
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Or, asserting their legal right to protect their investment in R&D that latecomers like Linux and Android simply ripped off. Just a matter of perspective, really. Is just that given open source is the dominant religion around these parts, that perspective is in the minority.
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Are they presently making any legal moves against Linux? Or just Android?
This isn't 2001.
Most Microsoft shops in my area are now at least 25% Linux these days on Azure.
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Well, to be fair, he was trying to refer to the fact that GPL is viral (turning other licenses into its own). That is a valid critique of GPL (it reduces developer freedom) and that is why it has been in steady decline compared to more liberal licenses (as a percent of FOSS licenses).
No he wasn't. He was trying to disparage and insult a perceived threat. "Cancer" is an inflammatory and negative thing to call something no matter how you spin it.
Ballmer wasn't stupid he could have been nuanced and precise if he wanted, he certainly knew the difference between a kernel and a license. He wanted to convince people to not use a given technology stack because he was invested in another. If that is not convincing enough at the time there was already a more accurate but still negative sounding phrase "The GPL is Viral", but that wasn't offensive enough and didn't attack the perceived enemy OS.
It's in decline because it's based on an absolutist philosophy, rather than being another tool in the toolbox.
And it's an invaluable tool. For the indie dev that can't hire a team of lawyers copyleft can be a powerful legal strategy as relates to their IP. It has built entire communities.
The GPL reduces developer freedom
Does it?
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while gpl does spread. It also protect the owner. With a more permissive license a bigger player can steal your work, user base and make it proparitary closed source. Why do u think M chose MIT instead of GPL ?
It still has split personality, unfortunately. You can't turn such a huge company 100% around in such a short time.
that's no different from any company with more than 10K employees, one group won't necessarily be aligned to all the others... The developer and azure areas of MS have definitely been leaning in the pro-floss side of things... Windows and Office, not so much, who knows wrt XBox, they seem to flip-flop on indee support.
>But a quite decent improvement from the era when the company bribed government officials to purchase bulk licences for pupils and govn't, distorting the job market
IIRC they're still doing that. In India I think?
>This is a less harmful Microsoft than it was 5-10-20 years ago.
The key to that is Microsoft being far less powerful than it was 5-10 years ago. Where MS can throw it's weight around, it still does.
The aftermath of the DOJ case is probably as much as responsible for that as the competition which ended up marginalizing them.
> IIRC they're still doing that. In India I think?
They still do this in France and they are being sued for this. Actually this is in today's French headlines.
>>But a quite decent improvement from the era when the company bribed government officials to purchase bulk licences for pupils and govn't, distorting the job market > IIRC they're still doing that. In India I think?
I wasn't aware of this. At least the IT textbooks in my home country write about “text processor” and “spreadsheet tool” and not explicitly MS Word or Excel. The programming classes don't require MS Visual Studio project files to be submitted either.
In 2008 Hungary paid $162M for the “Clean Software Programme” for 3 years. In 2011 it became $54M for an other 3 years, in 2014 it was reduced to $2.8M. I don't hear stories any more about their legal bullying team called BSA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSA_(The_Software_Alliance) which with members of the local police they appeared time to time at business offices asking the for proof of purchase. Even they had no search warrant, they used a psychological terror with the presence of the police to threaten the businesses.
This is one of their ads from the past http://img.index.hu/cikkepek/0101/tech/bsaplakat2.jpg It says: “Don't use illegal software! _Users_ of illegal software can sentenced to 2-5 years. _Have you been inspected today?_