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Can we trust Microsoft with Open Source? (2021)

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Re: Can we trust Microsoft with Open Source? (2021)

#81

Post by ocodo »

HKH2 wrote: post #69
resource_waste wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"yOu cAn cHaNgE sEtTinGs" I watched my computer reinstall edge, reinstall/hijack my drives with onedrive, re-add ads... But I left Windows for Fedora. I felt offended that I didn't know about Fedora before. Like, there was some hatred toward Microsoft and Canonical for hiding a 10/10 OS. Angry at M$ for bribing schools. Angry at Canonical for free CD marketing that made crappy Debian-family the standard for 10+ years…

What makes Fedora better (apart from having more recent packages)?

bookmarked for the response.

Re: Can we trust Microsoft with Open Source? (2021)

#82

Post by burningChrome »

resource_waste wrote: post #27
ho_schi wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230315200925/http://antitrust.... What did changed since Microsoft used ACPI as tool against Linux? Enforced Auto-Updates, Ads, Cloud Account enforcement, Blocking Firefox partially in Teams [1], Setting Teams as Browser (Edge?), WSL (intent is not compatibility, it is to prevent migrations to Linux), Azure is a giant security problem and finally the deal with Qualcomm (hinder Linux on A…

"yOu cAn cHaNgE sEtTinGs" I watched my computer reinstall edge, reinstall/hijack my drives with onedrive, re-add ads... But I left Windows for Fedora. I felt offended that I didn't know about Fedora before. Like, there was some hatred toward Microsoft and Canonical for hiding a 10/10 OS. Angry at M$ for bribing schools. Angry at Canonical for free CD marketing that made crappy Debian-family the standard for 10+ years…

>> I watched my computer reinstall edge, reinstall/hijack my drives with onedrive, re-add ads... But I left Windows for Fedora.

Had something similar happen when I finally relented to all the constant pestering to upgrade to Win11. I did so reluctantly. Suddenly, I needed to link everything to my onedrive account. Oh, you have an MS365 account? We need that too to set up your onedrive. Oh, you should use teams, let me make Edge your default browser and connect all your accounts to your edge account.

I didn't have any of this on Win10 and now it was just hijacking all my stuff, setting every MS program as the default and after I switched it, it would hijack them all back when I ran the updates. I purposefully keep all my stuff siloed for security reasons and here it was forcing them all together without my permission.

The last time it reset Edge and Teams and forced me to use my MS365 for Teams, that was it. I uninstalled it and then installed MX Linux (Debian based) and have been much happier since. I still have a Win10 desktop and I'm not surrendering that until I absolutely have to now.

Re: Can we trust Microsoft with Open Source? (2021)

#84

Post by User23 »

eviks wrote: post #80
AlexandrB wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FOSS existed and worked fine before Github and even before Git itself. It's certainly a convenient tool, but not irreplaceable. Git is also well suited to being used in a decentralized way (with no centrally hosted master) compared to older VCSs like SVN. Again, less convenient but not the end of the world.

Git is not well suited since it lacks one of the most important part of collaboration - communication

Git was designed to be used with email, which adequately solved for communication and decentralization (at the time at least).

Re: Can we trust Microsoft with Open Source? (2021)

#85

Post by skeledrew »

HKH2 wrote: post #71
pipeline_peak wrote: post #53

Microsoft still gets shat on for their 90s reputation, yet I rarely hear open source people complain about Google or Apple…

Google still distributes AOSP. The Android ecosystem is quite diverse and healthy. They've done a great job IMO I wouldn't trust Apple with anything open source, but Apple's not trying to look like an open-source-friendly company. Microsoft is.

Google has been slowly poisoning AOSP for years, ensuring the antidote is to include their services. AOSP now is mostly just a shell. This was reinforced just a few days ago when I downloaded and setup Android Studio for the first time in years: the default AVD with their APIs integrated works really well out of the box, but when I tried creating a couple AVDs without them, they wouldn't even boot (AVDs in my old setup still work fine, but that's on my previous computer).

Re: Can we trust Microsoft with Open Source? (2021)

#86

Post by sqeaky »

HKH2 wrote: post #69
resource_waste wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"yOu cAn cHaNgE sEtTinGs" I watched my computer reinstall edge, reinstall/hijack my drives with onedrive, re-add ads... But I left Windows for Fedora. I felt offended that I didn't know about Fedora before. Like, there was some hatred toward Microsoft and Canonical for hiding a 10/10 OS. Angry at M$ for bribing schools. Angry at Canonical for free CD marketing that made crappy Debian-family the standard for 10+ years…

What makes Fedora better (apart from having more recent packages)?

No snaps, better reliability during upgrades, more trustworthy devs.

That was enough for me to switch some of my machines.

Re: Can we trust Microsoft with Open Source? (2021)

#87

Post by sqeaky »

User23 wrote: post #84
eviks wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Git is not well suited since it lacks one of the most important part of collaboration - communication

Git was designed to be used with email, which adequately solved for communication and decentralization (at the time at least).

And even if it doesn't wouldn't to Dedicated communication tool solve communication better than a dedicated revision control system?

What happened to using multiple applications each best suited for their domain?

Re: Can we trust Microsoft with Open Source? (2021)

#88

Post by mroche »

lenerdenator wrote: post #55

Given some of IBM RedHat's shenanigans, I'd say they can probably be trusted as much as anyone else at this point.

Any particular shenanigans from IBM and Red Hat aside from the EOL and transition of CentOS that was widely viewed internally within Red Hat as an absolute train wreck? For an open source and free software steward, I would side with Red Hat over Microsoft in most (if not all) situations.

That's not to say Red Hat is infallible. The internal organization of things does create misalignments around approach, path, and incentives. But it's not drastically different conceptually from any other business. There's just an inherit foundational hurdle of needing to convince potential customers that their products provide enough value over the upstream projects they derive from to agree to pay money for something they could, in essence, obtain at no-cost.^ Almost everything Red Hat does in the FOSS projects they contribute to can be a double edged sword.

^ No-cost can be a very, very loaded term. What you save on subscription costs may come back to bite you when trying to assemble or use something complex and rapidly developing. Your cost/risk tradeoff becomes staff with expertise, upstream communication, and operational reliability.

Re: Can we trust Microsoft with Open Source? (2021)

#89

Post by shiroiushi »

HKH2 wrote: post #71
pipeline_peak wrote: post #53

Microsoft still gets shat on for their 90s reputation, yet I rarely hear open source people complain about Google or Apple…

Google still distributes AOSP. The Android ecosystem is quite diverse and healthy. They've done a great job IMO I wouldn't trust Apple with anything open source, but Apple's not trying to look like an open-source-friendly company. Microsoft is.

It's more than that. Google started out as an open-source-friendly company. Furthermore, their business model has never been to sell proprietary software to end-users, so supporting or opposing FOSS has never been an existential issue for them.

Apple has never tried to look like an open-source-friendly company, but has never really been actively opposed to it either. Their whole business model, for a long time now, has been to sell overpriced iDevices to users. Anything that supports that goal is OK by them. More recently, they've been making money with online services: Apple Music, Apple+ streaming TV, etc., but these aren't really affected by FOSS.

Microsoft is different from both of these. Their business model for ages was to sell packaged (or preloaded) proprietary software to end-users, and to control the OS that all users used. They've moved more into the cloud services realm in recent years, but they're still pushing Windows and Office. They were actively hostile to FOSS for many years: "Linux is cancer", "pacman-like", etc. Don't forget the Halloween documents. They've been trying to project a nicer, friendlier-to-FOSS image in recent years, but a tiger can't change its stripes.

Re: Can we trust Microsoft with Open Source? (2021)

#90

Post by MrJohz »

elviejo wrote: post #65
avidseeker wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I've always thought of Open Source... until I found out Open Source projects that are not in the spirit of Open Source. Signal is a big example of that. It's hostile to forks, didn't publish its source code for a year and doesn't have a good documentation. Same thing for Nvidia, big browser projects like Chromium, and Android. Many Chromium forks died because they couldn't keep up with upstream, except fo…

That is why Free(dom) software is better than "open source". Free software is committed to sharing values.

This is untrue. Both "free" and "open" licenses do the same thing in this context: they are legal documents that tell you what different parties are able to do with the code, but none of the licenses mandate how you run your project: whether you must accept contributions from others, whether you provide a bug tracker, or anything else like that.

Hell, you could have a GPL project that is developed entirely behind closed doors, as long as you always give users a copy of the source code when you release a new version.

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