Comment by martin-t
19 hours ago
I couldn't believe the number of people who were saying that "Microsoft are the good guys now" or "Microsoft loves open source now".
Microsoft stopped openly attacking open source at a time when open source was clearly winning:
- most servers were running linux
- most phones and tablets were running android
- people were buying tablets instead of desktops
- Google was openly promoting open source through GSOC
- large corporations were regularly releasing their tools as open source
Most importantly, developers openly hated Microsoft for holding the industry back (remember IE6?).
So they did what any good corporations does - they went along with the winning side.
And now they they have positive emotional connotations in devs' minds, or at least organizational buy-in again, they can do what corporations do best - making money by abusing their position with barely any competition.
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The lesson here are: - Corporations should simply not have this amount of power. - Corporations are amoral, they don't have values, views or beliefs. They are systems designed for optimizing goals. You can never _trust_ a corporation - not because they are untrustworthy but because trust is a human-to-human level concept, it does not have any meaning in human-to-system interaction.
I think big corporations are not amoral, they are immoral. There is no wealth that has been built obeying morality or showing emphaty. Once them two become obstacles for profits, they will be thrown out.
The people in charge or corporations certainly are very often immoral.
I don't think ascribing morality to a system is useful when it's comprised of many people who can be replaced at any time.
But, I also think that top down hierarchical power structures are fundamentally harmful, abusive and exploitative so you do have a point. Cooperatives are much healthier structures.