Comment by zyang
7 years ago
I interned at Microsoft in late 2000's. The sales engineers had an "anti oss" budget. Many of these guys still work at Microsoft today, now "hearts" open source and linux...
7 years ago
I interned at Microsoft in late 2000's. The sales engineers had an "anti oss" budget. Many of these guys still work at Microsoft today, now "hearts" open source and linux...
Microsoft did try to hijack LinuxFest Northwest a few years ago, taking over half the event space, sponsoring the event and providing the afterparties (which were tightly controlled, compared to prior/following years where any LFNW attendee could just show up).
Multiple people I know stopped attending LFNW that year, and will not return. Hopefully other conferences like SeaGL don't fall for the Microsoft embrace scam, as it injured LFNW pretty badly.
They have no choice, Linux already won big time on the server, so the only way was to embrace it in a way that would bring them money. And they succeeded big time. Now most young developers don't remember all the dirty tactics used year after year by MS to kill all competition, whether commercial or open source.
Also consider the amount of people leaving and joining Microsoft since than as well as the possibility that lots of the old people a) didn't like everything Microsoft did back then and b) are capable of changing and developing over the years.