Comment by gmueckl
19 hours ago
This comment comes some 15 years late. Microsoft runs the biggest org on github and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses.
IE has been dead and buried for ages. Edge doesn't have even close to the same market share and is based on Chromium.
They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.
I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open. I probably have missed a few instances.
Long story short: MS isn't a saint. They are a business. And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.
You should be aware that Microsoft's idea of open source is very much at odds with everything open source before Microsoft boldly slapped a "Microsft <3 open source" right and left. They may have progressed beyond Ms-PL, but they have tried to coup and steal open source projects several times. But, altho understandable, the simple fact that their primary products, Visual Studio, Office, Windows, and even worse: former versions of any of these, are simply not open source in any way precisely contradicts the expression of loving open source.
Idk i can think of a long list of awful stuff coming out of ms that is modern. They put fing ads in an os among other atrocities.
I put them behind meta on the evilness meter but i think google is less evil which speaks volumes.
The only side of ms that i have any love for is xbox but that is also waning with all the studio acquisitions.
The fact you still only got bothered by studio acquisitions show you don't even noticed the studio closures...
MS fired thousands of gamedevs in the last few weeks, cancelled a lot of games, including games the execs liked to play the prototypes, cancelled publishing deals, and even closed entire studios, some of them literally successful that had just released profitable products.
In the profitable cases (and maybe just as open offer), why not just sell them back to their staff/former owner?
There's no point to keep the IP of games that are shuttered.
Maybe the offer was made and a bunch didn't take it?
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Amen. Also, forcing us to tie our local OS into their cloud nonsense is a travesty. Hearing that they will soon disallow updates to those of us that don't capitulate to their cloud-account ransom has kick-started my efforts in formally moving away from Windows. I'd rather lose most games than get a cloud account.
Excel single-handedly redeems Microsoft from being a pure drain on human existence, but I can’t see what the point of the company is beyond that. Enterprise something something maybe. And declining literacy makes Powerpoint unfortunately indispensable.
Microsoft are wielding the entire office suite as a weapon against free and interoperable formats…
It is the single biggest blocked against open computing.
If Microsoft were serious about open source like another poster claimed, they would let us run it on all platforms.
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> Excel single-handedly redeems Microsoft from being a pure drain on human existence
Debatable. Excel can't even open CSV files properly. You need to run the import wizard. But loads of people don't do this. They see a file on their desktop and double click it. Why can't double clicking a CSV file just open the import wizard!? (Because they want people to share xlsx files as a data format.)
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I just wish the Mac version wasn’t so painful
Interesting. I consider Excel the worst of Microsoft's misdeeds. Not that there's not an abundance to pick from, but Excel may very well top the list.
It's perhaps the single worst database in the world; with no type control, no relationship management, no data safety whatsoever to speak of (it even actively mangles your data), its interface is utter madness, and yet - it's the most used database in the world.
It's perhaps the single worst development and runtime environment in the world, obscuring code, making reasoning about code and relations between code almost impossible, using a very obscure macro language that even morphs between different computers, and yet - it's the most used development and runtime environment in the world.
It's perhaps the single worst protocol/data exchange format in the world, with dozens of intentionally obscure, undocumented versions, insane format with surprising limitation (did I mention it actively mangles your data? - it's worth repeating anyway), supremely inefficient, and yet - it's the most used protocol/data exchange format in the world.
I can't really think of anything in the computing world that has done as much damage as Excel.
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Lets not pretend like there wouldn't be dozen of quality and actually used software if it wasn't for microsoft existing.
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> And declining literacy makes Powerpoint unfortunately indispensable.
I'd argue the opposite: Powerpoint makes literacy decline.
"PowerPoint makes us stupid." – General James N. Mattis, USMC [source: https://paulgraham.com/quo.html ]
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Who invented the spreadsheet?
The victors truly get to write history, don't they?
Excel and Minesweeper. I'm still so angry about what they did to Minesweeper.
Don’t Apple and Ubuntu also advertise products in their OS also?
Apple barely does it and only for their products. I agree with you that that’s already too much and too annoying but that’s an order of magnitude less than Microsoft who advertise their products pretty aggressively AND ALSO are advertising for whoever gave them money too.
Ubuntu I didn’t use it for years, there are tons of other distributions that I prefer now but last time I checked, there was a removable default shortcut to amazon. That’s an awful symbol, if you ask me, to associate Ubuntu and its meaning to Amazon but it’s nothing when compared to Apple or Microsoft (dare I say Google) behaviors.
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I have yet to see a single ad on either the menus on Ubuntu or in OSX. Care to elaborate on what you mean by that?
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> Don’t Apple and Ubuntu also advertise products in their OS also?
I looks like Ubuntu was created just in order to be able to dismiss Linux as "also advertise products". It's just a single distribution out of a hundred, and far from the best, so it's completely wrong of course. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38300531.
Unlike with Apple, you have virtually unlimited choices of Linux distributions that are ad-free.
Your comment warrants a post in its own right: let's rank FAANG/M by evilness. Personally I've always been way more afraid of Google, because Microsoft's evil is just old-school capitalism, which is blatant, brash, and harder to ignore than to identify. Google feels like they are quietly and surreptitiously trying to pull the strings of the online economy in their favor, voraciously consuming the world's data behind the scenes, presenting to consumers a tiny little sliver of this massive digital beast lurking under the hood. They're always 15 years ahead of policy, so they get away with theft, copyright infringement, monopoly, and more, on a scale that I don't think we even fully understand.
My ranking from most evil to least would be:
1. Google
2. Meta
3. Microsoft
4. Amazon
5. Apple
6. Netflix
Ranking evil is hard, but I'd rank Amazon's control of global supply chains as more evil than at least Meta. While Meta got WhatsApp, which is big. (Escaping Facebook, Instagram etc is a lot simpler)
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Can we add Palantir at the top?
Can we get an honorable mention for Adobe? I'd put Adobe probably right under Apple.
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Does google collect more information than Apple, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Palantir etc?
I don't think so. Collecting data is a baseline for all those companies, you have to rank the evil they do with that data.
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> they get away with theft, copyright infringement, monopoly, and more
Citation needed. Did you forget that Google owns YouTube among other things? They don't need to torrent training data when people voluntarily upload an endless stream of it to their platform.
I think what's almost shocking about this is that Google seemed so great in the beginning. "Don't Be Evil" was even like an internal code of conduct slogan or something.
I never worked there and have no inside knowledge of what happened. Did they get taken over by MBAs who gained control of the company? Was it always evil and we were just misled the whole time? Something else?
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What's so evil about Netflix?
They use Cassandra and make cool series ever now and then, like Love Death Robots. :-)
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Don't forget their military and surveillance contributions
lol. Amerika Freedom ™
why do you think meta is more evil than google?
ah yes Google, the less evil company that manipulates search results to facilitate their desired election outcomes, lmao
> They put fing ads in an os among other atrocities.
As did Ubuntu.
>I put them behind meta on the evilness meter but i think google is less evil which speaks volumes.
Huh? The same google caught tracking your every move even if you opted out? The Google that seems to serve ads based on your conversations if anyone in the room has an Android phone? The Google that actively tries to kill any and all ad blockers?
They aren’t even close…
Ubuntu lost the spot as the default recommendation to newbies since then. Ads weren't the only reason for that but they are hardly a good excuse for Microsoft's behavior.
Windows normalized having ads in the OS.
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Having gotten tired of subjecting windows users to a phishing campaign to trick them to use edge under the auspices of it being chrome, they're now moving on to obsoleting all windows machines without a TPM so they can cryptographically secure their right to use their users' need to authenticate as an opportunity to sell data about that user to the third party.
They have no respect for the agency of their users. We're no different than cattle to them, an asset to be squeezed until no more money comes out of it.
>Microsoft runs the biggest org on github and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses.
It's so sad that this is all it takes for some of you lol. A collection of public relations code bases.
> They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.
That's not a cool guy thing
and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses.
That should be a good clue that it's not worth much to them anymore, and tjat they'd rather rely on random free labour from the "community" than their own developers.
They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.
Which is a horribly bloated pig that only helps forced obsolescence of hardware. It should be a very disturbing sign that Microsoft itself doesn't seem to know how to do native code anymore, as they invented Win32 and Windows.
I agree that Electron is an abomination.
As for open sourcing software. Is it even possible for them to do something that you would view favorably here? To me it seems like remain closed and they'll get criticized but open up at least some of it and ... they get criticized?
As far as I'm concerned, regardless of other factors the more source code that's out in the open the better off everyone is.
Businesses don't and shouldn't operate as charities, but Microsoft is the only big tech company that manages to be a negative in every way. The only thing they've ever innovated on is lock-in. Now exploring the frontier of how bad Windows can be without people leaving.
The open-source stuff is whatever, only a tiny part of the picture.
No, IE has not been dead and buried for ages. Not everyone's a US corporation.
A lot of (mostly non-US) orgs used locked-down managed IT and VMs where IE was still the only allowed browser, until the IE 11 shutdown in 2022, which is recent.
And just for reciprocity, here's Indian Defense Review (5/2025) "These People Never Moved On: They’re Stuck 24 Years in the Past and Have to Use Windows XP" : "Thousands of workers across the US and Europe still depend on a system from 2001. From hospitals to railways, entire operations run on technology long considered obsolete."
https://indiandefencereview.com/these-people-never-moved-on-...
> A lot of (mostly non-US) orgs used locked-down managed IT and VMs where IE was still the only allowed browser, until the IE 11 shutdown in 2022, which is recent.
That's hardly Microsoft's fault, isn't it?
I simply stated as a fact that IE has not been dead and buried for ages. The official 2022 shutdown is recent.
Regardless of who we each might consider to be responsible (and in what proportion), that fact is a fact. Agreed?
(and I've seen lots of end-of-life cycles in software and hardware, and gone through them as both user, customer and vendor)
They literally promoted the shitty web tech that companies built their shit on which obligated them to stick with an old OS or rewrite entirely.
Yeah, if you've done support in large MS corporate environments with MEM etc then you've come across crappy business apps that have crappy requirements stuck in the past.
On the one hand, longevity of a platform is nice and MS screwed up IE in so many ways.
On the other hand, at some time the business has to manage their software lifecycle - including the death of old systems - and you can't blame MS for that.
The problem was the Microsoft zealotry of technical people they invent non existent problems often repeated like a cargocult by MS consultants/partners. They loved IE as a default browser. This has nothing todo with the apps being hard to fix, because that turned out to be an actual easy technical problem and I did 10 internal apps.
The only thing that helped was MS taking responsibility and killing IE. The problem I had was that IE was becoming an support burden on our tools, no customers were using IE but the internal staff was forced to.
> Have to Use Windows XP
They're lucky, I have to use Win11.
> IE has been dead and buried for ages. Edge doesn't have even close to the same market share and is based on Chromium.
Because we remember the evil Microsoft. Many young people still follow advice from the elders.
> Because we remember the evil Microsoft. Many young people still follow advice from the elders.
I get the point you're making, but it really seems like we haven't remembered. We've worked ourselves back into one juggernaut owning most of the web browser space and then collectively acted surprised when they started flexing their muscles. I encounter sites that only run in Chrome the same way I had sites that only ran in IE 6. It seems to me we're doomed to repeat history as long as that path is easier or more profitable.
> I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open.
Try using VSCodium legally with the same functionality as VSCode; remote development, Python language server, C++ debugging, and so on.
People who think Microsoft is doing open source work for the good of their hearts are still in for a lesson in EEE.
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/extens...
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/extens...
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/wiki/Microsoft-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
These are extensions. No one is preventing OSS communities from developing their own remote dev, Python, and C++ extensions. The VSCode extension API allows it. There are actually some efforts being made to do it.
You’re describing the E in EEE
Ah, but coming hot on their heels are the embracions and extingushions!
You're moving the goalposts! I am responding to
> I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open.
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I think it's not about the extensions but the market place.
You can't use the MS extensions with VS Codium, you are forced to use VS Code.
Oh, I honestly didn't remember the VS Code extension shenanigans. Thanks for bringing that up.
As GP said:
> Long story short: MS isn't a saint. They are a business. And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.
They are a business. You seem to misunderstand that businesses cannot behave like charities.
Being a business implies being for-profit.
Nobody said open source had to be free as in free beer, it just had to be free as in freedom.
It's their prerogative to make the plugins marketplace to alternative editors or not. Servers cost money. It's a business.
Does Matt Mullenweg has to let WPEngine sap server resources? Arguably not; and this opinion comes from a guy (me) that strongly dislikes WordPress (and by extension: Matt and Automattic).
Man, more than two decades of open source and people still don't understand what free as I'm freedom means. It's depressing.
I am responding to this:
> I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open.
Matt Mullenweg did nothing wrong
VsCode is in a weird licensing limbo, or some of its microsoft plugins are anyway
No, it’s pretty clear. Some extensions are NOT open source. It’s not ambiguous, and there’s nothing wrong with that as long as these extensions don’t have superpowers (ie. access to unexposed VSCode APIs)
But they do. Microsoft extensions are the only ones whitelisted in the VS Code marketplace to request experimental ("proposed") APIs in their manifest. Remoting, notebooks and now Copilot have all been using experimental APIs, verboten to anyone else in the marketplace until they become stable a long time later.
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What's wrong is that those extensions don't work with VS Codium because VS Codium isn't allowed to access the VS Code marketplace. Why?
Imagine Google blocking Edge from using Chrome extensions.
> I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open
VS Code?
https://underjord.io/the-best-parts-of-visual-studio-code-ar...
> they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now
Windows has been going out of its way to be hostile to users for over a decade now.
I would add to your list that MSFT also makes decent hardware now - surface laptops and xbox have both done well
They've "always" made decent hardware, as far as I recall. The original XBox is 23 years old, and in the 90s they made great joysticks and other controllers for PCs. And their mice and keyboards have always been good.
Xbox has done so well that they ravaged the division that oversees it.
Also their HID hardware was usually excellent. It's a shame they closed that division.
With time, they will.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
> a lot of their own code under permissive licenses.
Simply releasing corporate projects under a permissive license is not what many people understand to be the fundament of "open source."
> to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open
What do you think their entire operating system is?
Not really. They still have the same sales tactic as they always have: make an inferior product that barely ticks the boxes, then manipulate everyone to ditch their competitors in all kinds of ways except for making a better product. These manipulative tactics are sometimes fair game, most are quite unethical and some even illegal.
You can make a product that pleases its users, or just cater to the interests of the ones with the buying decision, for enterprise users they are almost never the same. Microsoft, like Oracle, leans heavily on the second strategy. Their developer tools are often (not always) an exception to this principle. I think this is the true reason Microsoft is so disliked as a brand.
> And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.
Only if you have no soul or morals
I don't know why you are apologizing for them. Is it because extensive system telemetry might trace your comment back to you?
IE and it's embedded derivatives are still used in many US healthcare institutions. So dead and buried, not so much.
> And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.
Except that their macOS software still is non-parity with Windows for really no good reason other than anti-competitive. They’ve also had the opportunity to open-source Windows, but won’t go that far willingly, with the exception of those that did it without approval.
Literally the same leadership including the CEO who held a senior leadership position during prior malfeasance.
They aren't better people just bad people operating in an environment where better behavior is beneficial.
This comment could not be more actual. The tools changed, even the methods changed, but Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is still Microsoft's strategy.
> they have behaved relatively nicely
That is some damnably faint praise re: Windows 11, and any experienced m$ users know exactly what’s meant by that.
I intended that line to be ambiguous. My real point is that whatever their true motives, they have managed to shed a lot of the Evil Empire appearance and younger people weren't even around when the really bad behavior was at its peak. So it's understandable that there's a wide gulf in the perception of MS between older and younger IT guys.
> Microsoft runs the biggest org on github and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses.
two things can be true at the same time. MS doing some open sourcing and being truly evil too in many other ways. why do you need to settle on one or the other?
Holy shite what I just read. It's like telling people: mafioso people are not so bad, they keep the streets clean and there is discipline around the city. They only pickpocket the foreigners...
> They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.
you mean shit software like Teams that crash the whole time?