I experienced 2 different problems with .NET (back in 2.x/3.x days), and was able to have interaction with the actual MS developers on their Github issue page without any sort of bullshit overhead process.

Within days, I saw traction on my comments and within months I saw PRs that ultimately resolved the issue I presented. The following year, I was deploying framework code to my customers' instances which incorporated fixes to my concerns.

Perhaps I am unaware of just how much better it is with the other ecosystems, but for me this is enough interaction with my framework vendor.

Are we upset that we have to pay money for the privilege of using other peoples' intellectual property? Or are we asserting that Microsoft is stealing other peoples' IP? I am trying to find the actual crime here.

You want to know what's better than having actual MS developers interact with your issue on GH? Being able to submit a MR yourself and actually have that MR be merged in within days of it being good to go.

That's not just a dream, that's the standard way of operating for most large open source ecosystems. If you solve a known issue with a clear well considered merge request, and you've gone through all the prescribed steps your MR will get merged.

From personal experience I've landed MR's in the Ruby interpreter, in the Rust compiler and in the Rails framework. All as a complete outsider with no prior introductions to the team. Just be polite, follow the rules, solve something that's real with no architectural impact and it'll get merged (just mentioning these because they're ecosystems, I've had MR's merged in for dozens of smaller projects in the same manner).

Also personally the ideal situation for me is for someone who is getting paid to fix the issue to go fix it without me having to get my hands dirty.

It's not an exaggeration, but I don't know how it could be better done.

We are entirely free to fork the project, embed the change and compile our own binaries. You don't have to strongarm a change into upstream for that.

Personally, I'm ok with doing the work myself if I didn't pay for the product. It gives me a feeling we're all working together on a better software ecosystem, because Turing knows we need it to be better sometimes.

edit: sorry for moving the goal posts, it's definitely cool that you got MR's into Roslyn, it's an awesome project.

The Contributor License Agreement used on all MSFT open source projects doesn't ask you to transfer your copyright, though it does require submitters to agree to grant a permissive copyright and patent license. IANAL, but the copyright and patent clauses in Microsoft's CLA[0] do not look substantially different from the equivalent clauses in the Apache 2.0 license[1].

[0]: https://opensource.microsoft.com/pdf/microsoft-contribution-...

[1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/LICENSE-APACHE...

The purpose of open-source software is to be able to fix problems for your use case and continue using the improved software. OP could have just chosen not to upstream their changes (I'm assuming you'd be okay with that since Microsoft doesn't get their hand on the fix) but then they wouldn't be able to easily update their compiler.

I guess the only real option here is to use a community-developed language with no for-profit company behind it. Then write all the libraries that Microsoft wrote for C# and published for _free_. Hmm.

I wonder what percentage of popular languages / libraries out there have the level of reliability & support that C# and other open-source software with big corps behind them has.

If Microsoft was honest about equality and open source, they would have donated the whole platform to a non-profit foundation and removed its name from it.

.NET isn't your average hobby project - it's used everywhere. It's imperative that changes go through the proper due process here. It takes time to prepare design documents and review them, discuss the changes and different alternatives, review the code, implement the changes and test them properly.

If that's somehow a problem to you, I think your expectations need to be readjusted. This is not the kind of project that should hastily accept code.

All of this about dotnet not accepting PRs is unadulterated "Micro$uck FUD". The other critiques are valid, but not this one, not by a mile, it is complete bullshit.

So there's also not much designing and reviewing needed. The merge requests were assigned to very senior reviewers each time. The automated test suites made sure I didn't waste much of anyone's time with trivial errors. Of course the requirement is that you're actually at least proficient with the languages (C for Ruby and Rust for rustc) but beyond that I think anyone can do it with a couple of sunday afternoons spent diligently digging through the codebase.

And? The vast majority of the .NET ecosystem operates this way, and discounting that because MS still has proprietary closed-source projects is disingenuous.

People aren't using "open" in this thread as a euphemism for "nice" or "open to help." There are a lot of nice, friendly, helpful people who work on very proprietary, very closed, intentionally non-interoperable software. It's alright for you to like them personally and to think their products are great, but maybe it's not alright for them to have critical software in Linux distributions, or for people to base their own businesses on that software without being mindful that when you do that they become a defacto partner.

We are warning people to not consider this platform the same way they consider fully free ones, despite the obvious wish of MS that they do so.

This platform comes with invisible strings attached, some of them will likely turn into chains in the future.

And it's MS new marketting strat to say they are open now for everything, so it's only fair we point out that the player matters. You are not dealing with the LSF or the PSF, but with MS.

Can you go into more detail about this?

In this particular instance, MS has been pushing the "dev env in the cloud" commercial strategy for some times, using the openess of the VSCode ecosystem as on of the bait.

Don't get me wrong, I think VScode is a good product, and I can see the value of a dev env in the cloud that matches your local setup.

But given MS track record, I expect this to be likely a way to take control of your dev env: once it mostly resides on their server, you are locked in.

Parts of VSCode being not free are one of those little details I talked about. They hint at the direction MS is likely going to follow, as it used to do in the past.

Tim Heuer the guy who wrote the GitHub issue is a high ranking guy and was explicit protected by Miguel de Icaza as not being the evil one. ... Means the call was made so high up in the ranks that this is not about engineering, daily work, etc anymore. This is a decision made by people who are counting beans.

Microsoft has a stranglehold not just on the language, but the runtime, build tools, and even the most popular frameworks to do anything useful. And they have shown multiple times how management decisions from various business units at Microsoft can be applied unilaterally to their ecosystem.

I'm also confused by the "non-trivial ecosystem" goal posts here.

This really seems like the recurring bubble where posters on HN somehow things that a large majority of the industry is hitting F5 on HN while they are instead busy doing actual work.

Regardless, I think it is still fair to say that if any other language platform was withholding features like a debugger, nobody would consider those platforms particularly open.

> ... if any other language platform was withholding features like a debugger, ...

Except "withholding a debugger" is not the same as "a complex new feature that builds on top of the existing debugger will only be released on one platform to begin with" is it? Features in beta releases aren't guaranteed to in the final release, even if some users really liked it.

Visual Studio already had a lot of code relating to editing program state when the debugger is paused after hitting a breakpoint. Seems plausible that Hot Reload in VS would be able to leverage some of this code to reduce the amount of work required to build, test and deliver the feature on that platform. It would also mean getting feedback and issues more relevant to the core of the feature, because the integration and UX is an evolution of code that's been there pretty much since VS was first released.

That's freedom in action. Microsoft has a fork of two open projects which they are working on however they like. If you don't want to use their work, you can fork and develop .Net and VSCodium and OmniSharp however you like. Now look at the the top GitHub comment: "once LSP Tools Host gets full attention, OmniSharp will slowly die out (especially if the OmniSharp team is working on LSP Tools Host). Which is of course the last step, extinguish."

Which says: "I don't want to develop the thing I want to use, and if Microsoft doesn't develop it for me and give it to me for free, this is equivalent to Microsoft extinguishing it".

MIT License grants "rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software", and not "you can have what other people develop on this" or "the developers of this will never make non-free software in future". https://mit-license.org/

Windows is also not a requirement unless you are using old Windows-specific frameworks like WPF. ASP.NET, EFCore, IdentityServer, and everything else you need to build a web app works equally on Windows, Linux, and macOS.

I consider being cross platform a valuable feature of an IDE. Do you not?

>Windows is also not a requirement unless you are using old Windows-specific frameworks like WPF.

My day job includes a lot of this. Hell even winforms is still very much alive. And even if the likes of WPF or winui was old aren't they still the graphical subsystem for desktop being pushed? I suppose then there's Maui being worked on but I believe they decided to fuck over MauiKit with that one's naming.

I think the OP is talking about "open" in large part in terms of open source licenses, and intellectual property. They complain about "subvert[ing] an active open source project by ramming in a proprietary extension to continue to lockdown .NET" and "Over time, the .NET platform is becoming closed, to ensure it is only useful if you are a customer."

You are talking about "open" in terms of access to developers at Microsoft, who you can commicate with, and who then respond by getting fixes to your problems in.

These are actually pretty different things. You and OP can both be entirely right. .Net can be a platform where Microsoft is working to make sure that the platform is only useful if you are paying customer, and where you have access to communicate with developers who take your concerns seriously.

> Are we upset that we have to pay money for the privilege of using other peoples' intellectual property

Well, I mean... you know what open source is, right? Yes, it means you don't have to pay money for the privilege of using other people's intellectual property. That's literally what open source is.

That's fine if you don't care whether or not .Net is open source. That's fine if you think it's silly to be upset that something isn't open source when you think it should be.

But... .Net claims to be open source, right? So, yes, it is reasonable to expect you can use it without "paying for the privilege of using other peoples' intellectual property". That's literally what open source is?

However MS did. So people are dealing with the dissonance. Some people are being remembered how the strategy Embrace, Extend and Extinguish works.

TL;DR: the attitude MS is having is not open-source friendly.

NOTE: at least today they did state their plans from the start. Props to them.

I feel like with a _loooot_ of coordination it should be possible to have proper, open source LSP implementations that are very performant. Mainly a question of finding enough people willing to fund this work, because it's definitely work!

I personally also have gripes about ending up with some JS thing to do constant parsing and processing of files.... but I don't have anything to back it up.

And even very intelligent, competent AND benevolent MS employees downplay this: https://twitter.com/bitecode_dev/status/1537357261554733056

Steve cannot see how it will lead to attrition or vendor lock in.

It's not that there are no good people at MS, but the internal marketting is strong as well.

Making "the LSP sever that leverages pyright" closed source sucks but is far from the end of the world. If the complaint is that pyright could eventually become non-OSS well that's true of everything.

I then question the easy part by asking, tongue in chick, to tell me how I can do the same with FOSS easily. It's freedom I am talking about, not price. Indeed, the proprietary work in question is available without payment already.

His reaction is unexpected though -- after all this is the playbook FSF is always warning as a possible path. He must have been aware of the possible paths and the fear of them when Novell was trying to bring C# onto Linux / Gnome.

Google learnt their playbook from M$.

What you and others are seeing here is M$ at its best, playing like they always played, but without the "we love open-source" mask.

To be fair, pylance is orders of magnitude better with regards to performance. But I just don’t get what the reasoning was to make pylance closed source. It’s baffling.

I think data science also is best when it itself is open/open-source, and peer reviewed.

I can understand why Microsoft wants to make that a moat to protect expensive data science and ML research boundaries and it doesn't seem that baffling to me if that is indeed the reason why they closed source pylance, even as I question if it was the best choice.

> It’s baffling.

Vendor Lock in? Same reason you can't use the VSCode marketplace of mostly open source extensions on a non-Microsoft build of VSCode or any of the remote work features.

Lock in doesn’t make sense to me. The main competition is Pycharm which has its own set of tooling.

I can somewhat understand the remote extensions being closed source considering they need to interface with a server. It makes no sense for Python.

My guess is that Pylance is also used within Visual Studio proper, and the VS product owners are pushing for closed addons.

Contributing to open source means you don't wholly own the project you contributed to, and that constrains what you can do with it.

There isn't an Existing One, more like many existing ones with their own tradeoffs. Jedi is designed to infer the variable in your currently editing LOC. It can't type check and report issues on entire files/projects. It's also a one man project.

It would be nice if they were more transparent about the differences between the two and why Pylance is closed. There are a few github issues where Microsoft PMs basically stonewall the community with very little info.

It's interesting to see the generational difference here. Many of my somewhat-younger (even only by 7-10 years) programmer/techie friends just don't remember the Microsoft of the 80s and 90s, and see all the "good" they've been doing with the open source community in more recent times, and think MS is a pretty good corporate citizen in the tech world.

But in reality, MS has just done a great job whitewashing their image[1] in the past 15 years, especially in the past 8 years since Ballmer stepped down and Nadella took the reins. I do believe they're a better, less anti-competitive company than they used to be. But they're still the same company in many ways. I think a big part of their "play nice" strategy was born out of necessity, since they heavily dropped the ball in the late 90s/early 00s when the internet/WWW was really coming into its own, and then again in the early/mid 10s when Windows Phone failed miserably. They just lost the clout to do the anti-competitive bullshit they used to pull. But the desire to do all this stuff is still there.

[0] It was clear to me that MS intended .NET to be a wholly-proprietary, Windows-only technology until de Icaza and co. built Mono, when MS grudgingly embraced it. This proprietary extension feels like their standard follow-on of "extend and extinguish", though it's coming a bit later than we'd expect.

[1] Bill Gates has also done an amazing job rehabilitating his image through philanthropy. A lot of people forget how his actions at MS probably held back progress in the computing industry for at least a decade (or two?), through forced lock-in and anti-competitive behavior.

Any contribution that M$ (remember when people would sub the S for a dollar sign?) makes to open source or open standards is to support their own bottom line and we shouldn't expect anything else. The directors have a legal responsibility to the company and to boost the share price, not for the betterment of humanity. To this effect, companies will contribute to open standards when it's better for the share price, and will seek to screw open standards when it's better for the share price.

Public companies are inherently evil by default -- this is because the only goal of a public company is to strengthen the share price. I've said it before and I'll say it again: always assume bad faith when you're dealing with a company.

From this, it doesn't matter what people thought of Microsoft before, or what they think of them now. Microsoft like all companies has a single goal. If we can pressure these companies to coast in a certain direction then great. But we shouldn't ever believe that companies can 'turn over a new leaf' when they legally cannot. FAANG is the same. Ford is the same. Starbucks is the same.

Every company is exactly the same, but the larger they grow, the more visible and impactful these actions become. Microsoft has been in the spotlight for decades because it has been a juggernaut for decades. But it's hardly unique in what it does. Our real concerns should be why regulators were quick to put the smack down on Microsoft but have since turned into paper tigers and are allowing unhinged monopolization from FAANG in 2022.

Their ad and marketing budgets are basically to woo public opinion into belief billionaires should exist, however.

Look at the Coinbase story; employee and investor wealth gone. CEO wealth intact. And society gains little to nothing net new from enriching that fraud.

Billions locked up in deference to a handful of CEOs means less liquidity in the open market. Which is intentional, I understand; if dollar value collapses these guys might have to work to survive, and of course humans could no longer do the necessary trade of real things to stay alive and prosper if an arbitrary financier cannot claim an arbitrary % of economic activity thousands of miles away.

Human agency is coupled to wishful thinking still. Which is understandable; we only just crossed the threshold of <50% of adults believing in higher powers. Was still 80% around 2000.

People being laid off is not lost wealth.

Speculative value is not wealth.

"Billions locked up" requires an explanation. People with money generally invest it in assets or other companies. Who is locking up billions? Why? Is it a meaningful % of the total money supply?

Things have changed since sometime in the 1980s.

That's not the definition of a sociopath.

IBM created the playbook, Microsoft perfected it, FAANG copied it.

The extremism of this positon makes it hard to swallow the message. You might as well be right, but accepting it at face value would be a huge cognitive dissonance for many people working in public companies.

Basically, the “are we the baddies ?” answer would be “yes” for a huge chunk of us, and I don’t think that’s how we see it personally. Companies have to make money, but the evil label needs way more nuance.

To apply this to another context: I genuinely think that IKEA has had an outsized positive impact on our everyday life, even as they aim to make money (not the core “charity”, but the rest of the group), or as they make truely dirty legal and commercial decisions to trick the system in their favor. And they didn’t improve flatpacks by accident, it is their stated mission, and I’d be crazy proud of my job if I designed the Expedit series.

IKEA has been illegally logging forests in romania for decades.

The first public conpany was involved in slavery. Show me a large enough company and there will be a history of fraud, illegality and human rights abuses.

Also using tainted wood isn't the only thing IKEA has ever done, just as breaking the speed limit or parking illegally isn't he only thing I've ever done. If you were held to a "one strike and you're out" good/evil standard would you really stand up? I know I wouldn't.

There's also a trend to give big companies liability for their supply chains. Germany just enacted a supply chain law last year and there are talks about similar laws for the EU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_Chain_Act

The specificity of your comment (large enough company) is misleading. The flaws you call out are everywhere, not just large companies.

Humans are imperfect. Human organizations and institutions (companies of all sizes, governments of all types, schools, churches, and so on) are also imperfect.

I don't mean to say that we shouldn't set high goals, devise mechanisms to deal with imperfection and so on (checks and balances, regulations, etc), just that there isn't anything particularly unique about "large companies" in this regard.

As I see it though, what IKEA displaced wasn’t the family owned expert artisans manufacturing built to order furnitures.

It was piss poor, badly designed, actual shitty materials, poor country labor intensive flat packs.

When I was a kid my family bought cheap mass produced furniture from shopping malls, the looks were fine, it came from Vietnam or China [0], and the quality was laughably bad. Finished product would be slightly crooked. Screws slightly loose. Smell terrible. And people would have that “what did you expect for that price” grin. [1]

I can’t imagine employees were treated in a stellar way either, we heard scandals after scandals about third world factories, and the quality itself was a testament to how much humans were involved in all of that.

So, I see IKEA as a provider of somewhat decent furnitures instead of shitty ones, most other parameters staying the same (they don’t, I genuinely think they’re not worse than the 80s~90s post colonialist euro companies)

[0] how the table turned, quality wise…

[1] to address the obvious “why didn’t they buy more expensive furniture that could have lasted way longer instead”…the answer is simple: upfront money. The same reason people don’t buy 5 story apartment buildings even if that would bring them more money in the long term.

"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness."

If your country (cough-cough USA) had already descended into the "crap products globalisation stage" before IKEA came along, it will feel like a net positive.

If your country (cough-cough Sweden) got IKEA before that stage, I would say, yes, IKEA displaced quality furniture.

I'd say the overall problem is un-accounted for externalities. Cheap crap from China or Vietnam is just a symptom of the same illness.

Crappy products are okay, in a free market economy. But crappy products with huge environmental costs undercutting "kosher" crappy products, is not okay.

What use are even labour and environmental laws if one can skirt them by pushing the problem elsewhere?

If you want to go into Ikea and just buy long lasting solid wood products, go ahead! Indeed I'd argue Ikea has made new solid wood furniture more accessible, heck sometimes new Ikea wood furniture is cheaper than consignment store wood furniture!

I've seen (and own) some solid wood furniture from IKEA. I'm usually an IKEA defender (see another post I just made on this thread).

I would not describe their solid wood furniture as "nice". Given the way they tend to assemble even small members from multiple small scraps of wood glued together rather than single pieces, I think calling them "solid" is even a bit of a stretch, at least in some cases. They're also made out of fairly soft wood, usually, and barely finished, if at all.

A bit the same way so many corporations are “carbon neutral” through offset, even if it’s a scam under most of these.

IKEA using it’s position to do something could be a realistic solution, I just don’t know if there is much hope in that regard.

The coffee scene could be a exemple where traceability helps a lot to improve the market (as a consumer there are options to do the right thing for non crazy prices), while the global picture stays grim as the most sold coffee will always be the unmarked super market value pack.

Worker protection: same as for Amazon, I wish they rapidly advance their robotization programs. In the meantime I strongly support more regulation, and would like security and social policies baked into the prices, especially as I don’t think there would be that much actual impact. Just as wish more companies across the board get unions.

If we change the ecosystem, other companies would evolve to be the winners. (Or IKEA and Amazon would change.)

I say that as a sample of the population who deeply wants the bland, blank slate aesthetic in reaction to the rococo and non-modular furniture I had to deal with in other people’s home and surroundings.

Paradoxally, I am sure it will come back as a reaction to people like me, and next gnerations might want to get back to their roots and resurface diverse and culturally more anchored styles. When it does, I hope they’ll have small production tools (home grade cnc mills ?) to do so in small batches at low cost, and get crazy with the stuff they make.

It's usually most or all of: hideous; difficult to assemble (why people complain about IKEA when basically every other player in their market is far worse, I do not understand); worse-made than IKEA furniture; still, somehow, more expensive than the IKEA equivalent.

IKEA's about the best option out there for people who don't have a lot of money and also would rather not furnish their home with cheap antiques from the 1920s (go much newer, or much older, and it starts getting expensive), having to do a lot of DIY re-upholstering in the process if they want anything with cloth on it.

If you know that the system is broken and it is setup in a way that rewards bad behavior, what do you think is the best course of action: to expect that exceptional individuals will be always in charge to avoid the mistakes, or to fix the system so that even normal, fallible humans can be at helm and not having everyone else worried about potential abuses?

I assume normal and fallible humans are the ones who are going to setup this new system that will prevent abuse?

Still, we have set up memory safe practices and languages and standards, building standards and regulations, and food safety regulations that work quite well. Just because humans make mistakes and are fallible doesn't mean that humans are incapable of working to prevent mistakes and the consequences of human fallibility.

I'm not suggesting we shouldn't try, but it isn't really silver bullet.

An employee from a corporation benefits from a corporation that abuses their power. Ordinary citizens that vote for a corrupt politician do not, and have no invested interest in them.

I probably wasn't as clear as I should have been.

It's less about matter of eliminating abuse, and more about damage reduction. We can have systems that even if someone screws up, the consequences are not catastrophic.

The answer to this is that if it's nearly impossible to find a more ethical job (e.g. a non-profit medical research worker cooperative) when the system you're under doesn't economically incentivise ethical job creation. If your probability of finding one is incredibly slim, you're practically excused – you're just doing what's needed to have a normal life.

The structure is so deliberately conceived that I wouldn’t be surprised if it kept the same functioning even as a public entity. They’d make less money, but would probably still concentrate decision power into a few chosen hands and lock the whole from external influence.

Has that not been a critique of software engineers working at FAANGs? That they think they are working for a moral company while the “Don’t Be Evil” company mottos are replaced in the background with anti competitive practices and deals with authoritarian governments.

Tbh I think claiming that it’s an extremist opinion when there’s an entire century+ old political school of thought that views the entirety of capitalism as amoral, is either putting your head in the sand at the thought, or an equally extremist opinion on the good of companies

If something nearly half the world followed is considered a extremist then I do not believe the word has any meaning left

It's way too easy for people working at big companies to think "the company might be evil, but not me / my team". The Corporation gives everyone a moral shield that lets them rationalize all the shit that happens, but the money that pays their salary and the stock options they get all come from the same source.

See Better Off Ted for a great look at this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Off_Ted

Aren't they in fine the same thing?

If you believe that the logical consequence of a system is the emergence of amourphous amoral entities harming the greater good, aren't you actually fundamentaly against said system? I kind of get the opposite take-away from your line of thoughts: I believe that a lot of people who think of themselves as capitalist but actively distrust corporations are actually latent anti-capitalist.

You can have a market-oriented economy on small scales, and we can have independent professionals competing to see who provides the best services at the lowest prices, and we can use money and capital as the means of production just fine. The problem is when we take a system in one scale and think "bigger is better". This is when we get "amorphous amoral entities harming the greater good".

Mind you, if you think about it this also applies to other socio-political systems. Communism, per se, is not a problem. If the general idea of "communism" was just a bunch of hippies living however they wanted, there wouldn't be so much reason to be against it.

The problem is when you have people going full Trostky and actively work to make it a Global-scale system, effectively turning the State into an "amorphous amoral entity harming the greater good"

Once you deal with all edge cases. You end up with an OSS license.

I still recall people fawning over how Google was going to be "different" in 2006, and how it was going to save us from Microsoft. Nowadays, they are essentially what MS was in its' heyday. Blind faith in corporations is not the way forward.

I've always understood the hacker ethos to have strong tenets of working towards decentralized power structures through tech. Nowadays, that idea feels farther away even on a site like this one.

This is, first and foremost, about the business, not the people or the technology.

The further corporatisation of OSS through lobbying organizations like the CNCF is a sad state of affairs. But it is also the place where VCs are putting a lot of their money. That and until 2 weeks ago, Web3

Directors do not have a legal responsibility to boost their shareprice.

Companies do not have a single goal.

Public companies are not obliged to increase their share price.

Every company is different.

I'd also add that on top of all that, different countries have different corporate law.

And law indeed differs... But everywhere someone will be made responsible for not getting the best for their buck (the simplest case: being fired).

That applies to FAANGMxyz and also the rest of the top 500 shareholder companies.

(https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/15/oil-shell-directors-sued-for..., https://www.forbes.com/sites/timabansal/2021/05/27/big-oil-u...)

It will be a lot harder to argue that developing a closed-source component is, in the long run, bad for Microsoft, though.

That's an often-repeated maxim, but it's not universally agreed to be true.

Quoting https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/08/24/stakeholder-gover... for example:

"The fiduciary duty of the board is to promote the value of the corporation. In fulfilling that duty, directors must exercise their business judgment in considering and reconciling the interests of various stakeholders—including shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, the environment and communities—and the attendant risks and opportunities for the corporation.

Indeed, the board’s ability to consider other stakeholder interests is not only uncontroversial—it is a matter of basic common sense and a fundamental component of both risk management and strategic planning."

I read this Harvard text to basically say: "Don't cheat if the cheating will be coming to bite you later. Be generous if you expect additional profits to come from this generosity."

> Be generous if you expect additional <reward> to come from this generosity.

Options for reward could include (without being limited to): "profit", "platform adoption", "trust".. and those rewards often affect each other over time.

Google for something like "obligation to maximize shareholder value" if you want to find numerous articles debunking the myth. Here's a good one [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

Maximizing shareholder value is a management philosophy that became increasingly prevalent between 1975 and 2000. In both management ("What we should value and pursue") and case law ("What you will be sued and found guilty for not doing").

Why did it become popular? Because there were a huge number of inefficient companies at the time that were continuing business as usual under some guise of "We think this is best." While Japanese companies ate their lunches by working harder, faster, better, and smarter.

Holding management to shareholder value -- and sueing the heck out of them when they didn't focus on it -- was a more objective measurement of effectiveness.

After 2000, it became clear that the metric had become the target, and was now being pursued with a myopicness that was to the detriment of the company.

There are few absolutes in "high performance"

But nobody said they need to break the law, or hurt employees. Given the constraints of the law, they have a single mission of maximizing the share price. Which is exactly what Microsoft and other companies do every day. If the environment gets in the way of your business (i.e if you are an oil company) then you will only care about the environment to the extent that you are legally obligated to.

There are dissenting papers [2] mostly revolving upon Dodge v. Ford Motor Company, but there are many intractable problems when you assert such primacy. Over what duration? As compared to which company? Accounting for intangibles? Valuation of non-monetary factors? Accounting for market gyrations? Primacy by what percentage? That dissenting paper glosses over much of the nuance of Stout's thesis [3], as well as case law ever since that point to the problematic practicalities of courts deciding how companies should carry out the distribution of the benefits of organizing stakeholders together.

So many people who should know better keep repeating this canard. Shareholders can certainly mount a challenge through corporate governance channels for example, but they fare poorly when mounting a challenge through the courts.

[1] https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v...

[2] https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2022/04/26/why-we-should...

[3] https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...

Why does it matter? Well, because the higher valued your company is, the more investment you can get, and with more investment, the better you can beat the competition.

And if you don't do it (bad stuff), then your competition will do it and will ultimately will beat you.

So it is basically the only way to survive. That is, keep growing. Stop growing, and you are on path to demise. No public company have the luxury of saying "Well, we have grown enough. Let us just focus on sustaining what we have got".

The sales-force are bonus-pay-based on how much cloud they sell.

Some of the development groups are paid for delivering sustainable software that is also open-source.

It's not black and white. Many politics are being played.

I do believe Scott Guthrie and some of the other VP's are good folks that understands the need for being open and honest. Anders Hejlsberg too for example.

But is's not black or white.

Yes

> and to boost the share price

Not exactly. They have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders and must always act in their best interests. But the law allows a great degree of freedom in interpreting that. For example, actions that may depress the share price in the short-term can be argued as being good for the long-term health of the company and the courts are OK with that argument.

You should have felt free to say that it is utter stupidity for people to assume good faith for public companies. But sadly, the times we live does not allow pointing out stupidity in a harsh manner. Don't go easy on stupidity people. You will end up in a nice stupid world without joy or happiness.

> always assume bad faith when you're dealing with a company.

I think this is the biggest problem that humanity is facing right now, and a lot of currently accepted "mainstream" end of world problems derive from it.

And the issue is that these entities are locked in a process where not-the-fastest-growing means on the path to death. And to side step this, they have to do bad things without getting caught. The dominant player will be the one who does the baddest things without getting caught.

For example, In the world of pharmaceuticals, the dominant player would never be the one who play by the rules set by the authorities. But the one who has got authorities on the payroll.

If you are starting about "evidence that authorities are on a payroll", take a look at the above point regarding "not getting caught"...

Sadly, this does remove the higher bounds to what a company would do to secure its bottom line. Which is why I think this is the biggest danger that humanity faces right now. And this is going to get worse, because what ever higher bound we have right now, is going to be pushed higher and higher, in a world full of perpetually distracted people...

I think this is true for large organisations, the larger they are the more their behaviour seems to become dictated by the rules of the environment it operates within; whereas the smaller the organisation the more principled they can be as individuals have the power and will to override those rules.

Also with something as large as Microsoft there are so many departments that one can be actively working against the interests of another, i.e MS can and probably does simultaneously do good and bad faith activities for open-source - and yet we commonly anthropomorphise them as if they have the integrity and consistency of an individual... A human flaw i guess.

"There is a common belief that corporate directors have a legal duty to maximize corporate profits and “shareholder value” ... this belief is utterly false."

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/public_benefit_corporation

Agree with your arguments, but more generally companies are inherently evil by default, because their only goal is to maximize profits. You can only hope that they will behave correctly regarding their employees, their competitors, their neighborhood, and the environment.

Does Microsoft contribute financially to any social programs or other philanthropic projects? Are all those contributions done solely to support their bottom line?

Being anti-“M$” is one thing, but you it’s hard to disagree with their stance on philanthropy and environmental issues.

What?

However, there are several legal opinions that complicate this interpretation.

I recommend you read the case eBay v. Newmark that very much complicates this. Here is a nice summary:

https://www.litigationandtrial.com/2010/09/articles/series/s...

You might also look at Dodge v. Ford Motor Company one of the more in-famous cases supporting/complicating the shareholder value "requirement". In it's opinion, the Michigan Supreme Court in-famously states: "A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders."

Both cases deal with companies will very small numbers of shareholders where minority shareholders successfully litigated based on some argument that the majority had a responsibility to maximize their minority returns.

I've been consistently surprised by Microsoft doing non-evil things over the past decade, until I accepted that I no longer had reason to hate it.

Conversely, for a while, I was surprised by Google doing evil things, until I realized that the Google of 15 years ago no longer existed. The company has over 10x the employees of the old Google of "don't be evil" days. Even if no one had left, it's over 90% of people who don't know how to not be evil, and don't know they're not supposed to be evil. In practice, most non-evil people I knew at the old Google have long since left (although far from everyone, but enough that it's probably <1% pre-evil).

Microsoft was evil in the nineties. In 2022, it's not a saint, but it's pretty good.

Google was genuinely good in the early '00s. Today, it's pretty evil.

The same has happened to many of my non-profits. Open source was started to strip ethics out of free software, and many genuinely nasty organizations from back then now behave like the FSF of the nineties. Conversely, some of my favorite non-profits went woke, and stopped doing what they were created to do. A few of my favorite academic institutions turned into Enron, while others moved up. Etc.

Organizations are abstractions. Swap out the people and incentives, and it's a new thing under an old name.

This reminds me of an old story, might be fiction, that conveys the idea. five chimpanzees were put in a cage, bananas in the center everytime one tried to get a banana they would get cold water untill they simply stoped trying. Then one by one they replaced the chimpanzees do one one of the new ones, tried to take one of the bananas the old ones would stop him. Slowly they replaced all of them and none of the new chimpanzees, who had never received a cold shower, took the bananas.

The same with corporations.

Most software engineering and executives jobs have a tenure of three years, and I think culture is definitely preserved for longer than that. However, it's very rarely preserved over decades.

You're citing a classic joke. The experiment doesn't replicate when people tried to test it:

https://www.answers.com/Q/Did_the_monkey_banana_and_water_sp...

So if in the company the average tenure is 3 years, then the culture is what has been practiced in the last 9 years... Even if the company itself is 20 years old.

In another company with tenures of average 5 years then company culture is what has been going on the last 15 years.

What do you think? Does this idea mire closely match your experience?

I can't say I was intimately familiar, but at the level of reading books and trade press as good enough for the statements I'm making.

You don't need a lot of depth of knowledge to know when a culture completely changed. If you go outside and see a Toyota Camry and another Toyota Camry a week later, you can't tell whether the car is the same one. On the other hand, if one day, it's a Porsche, and the next week, and 18-wheeler, you can be pretty sure something changed....

I would agree for most companies and it's probably true for Microsoft but that doesn't really apply to Google. Google is 23 years old. 20 years ago the people who wanted to work at Google were looking for a young fast-growing company shaking things up with its search engine, a heavy focus in engineering and opportunites everywhere. Nowadays, the people who want to work at Google want to work for one of the most prestigious tech company. That tends to attract a completely different kind of person.

Also that last point probably only work if the punishment is incredibly big, and I doubt something like that exists for the scale MS operates at.

The Ship of Theseus is a question about the nature of identity, not an answer.

And according to you, the incentives of this new Microsoft are...?

They lost the server space, but they're retrying to seize desktop from Linux with WSL and invading the developer tools space and trying to isolate Desktop Linux as an "irrelevant layer which runs MS software and technologies, which is not visible and accessible as the laymen", and Linux server as a layer "which you don't need to think about" (i.e. make Linux irrelevant as a whole OS for developers at scale).

Canonical is helping them with this endeavor, because Ubuntu desktop doesn't make money. If they can piggyback the userspace to Windows and earn money from servers, they're kosher.

It's really ugly. However, De Icasa is not a saint either by pushing Mono on GNOME and Linux and allowing some borders to dissolve to allow Microsoft in, regardless of it's intended or not.

They're obviously doing that, but they don't really need to.

Desktop Linux is its own enemy. 2 major GUI toolkits, frequent upgrades to them, generally with breaking changes, multiple DEs, frequent upgrades to them, also with breaking changes, a full decades of bickering over a solution that solves actual end user and operator problems in a standardizing way (systemd), immature GUI software after decades (Gimp & co), chronic lack of funding because nobody can figure it out, etc.

I've been around Desktop Linux for more than 15 years. I still hear bad arguments I heard back in 2005.

Plus, the ship has sailed. Mobile devices outnumber desktops and laptops and will only continue to grow. The money surrounding mobile dwarfs desktop. And Linux lost on mobile, it was it best chance to become the primary platform somewhere. Android doesn't count. Android used a cheap and standard kernel with many drivers and plopped a million proprietary things on top that look nothing like Desktop Linux.

You'll say I'm wrong, yet I'm willing to bet $100 that this discussion will look the same way in 15 years.

I'm part of a community who does amazing things with all these fragmented parts and assemble unimaginable things while staying productive and inventing new ways of work.

The overall maturity of these small parts have not reversed the tide, but actually changed it a lot.

As a macOS and Linux user for 15 years, I see that both can work seamlessly without much effort, but Windows built on a completely different platform, can't talk this language of protocols and composability natively, or work as seamlessly.

Microsoft is right to feel threatened, because they're threatened by two sides.

People who assemble cars from scratch can accomplish things from that are amazing too, but only 0 1% of the population will ever want to do that.

Android is doing what every Linux embedded platform had been doing anyway. If anything, they're more open than the rest of the mobile/embedded space. It's not like e.g. OpenMoko looks more like Desktop Linux than Android does.

It is unfortunate though that some free competitors to commercial software still struggle a bit. GIMP has worked fine for my rather simple image editing needs though.

I think mobile is another beast, I'm not going there yet :D

Sorry, but take the horse blinders off.

If this kind of criticism coming from a long time user of Linux desktop (not as active nowadays because work is Windows, but most of my work is done in IDEs, browsers and through Cygwin anyway), FOSS supporter, etc is FUD, then boy, are you going to have a hard time fighting Microsoft's or Apple's marketing teams.

> 3) if you are not a beginner you should be able to maintain a desktop.

And therein lies the main rub :-)

Most people aren't able to "maintain a desktop". They don't really maintain either Windows, or MacOS. Most people are at best, "perpetual intermediates". Only a small fraction of users want or actually become power users. Most just trundle along trying their best to learn the least possible. And that's in every domain you can imagine.

This is the thing that will condemn Desktop Linux to being a niche product. That's fine, up to a point.

He offered the solution though. If you are not able to "maintain a desktop" (either because you don't know how to, just don't want to, or don't have the time to, etc) then use a stable distro and accept the choices that were made for you. Thats not much different than just installing Windows or buying a Mac and accepting whatever decisions Microsoft/Apple made regarding how the desktop experience should be.

There's a good number of large tech companies providing Linux desktops for both tech-savy and other employees and it just works.

> Sorry, but take the horse blinders off.

Horse blinders? Ironic given how you looked only at half a sentence and ignored the rest.

Let's see. I've added a reminder in my calendar with a link to this comment.

> Because they never choosed a DE...

But they created a Desktop Standard which allows every DE to behave the same where it matters. This unified a lot of things. So every DE is a shell and workflow with same underlying principles underside. Much like POSIX.

Sure. Except the end user won't care. As end user I don't see it implements DS.

I see that KDE has bug A and Gnome has bug B. Or KDE has feature C that Gnome doesn't have, and vice versa. All in all as user. No DE fits me because bugs and features are scattered around.

E.g. Haiku did it right. You don't get to choose. It's baked into the OS

This is a "grass is greener over the fence" perspective. You can install apps for missing functionality or report bugs for the things you don't like.

Except, Windows and macOS doesn't care about your bug reports, and some of the applications are not implemented on these systems because there's no financial incentive, and open source tools for these platforms are low quality.

On the other hand, this modularity and composability does wonders in the Linux side.

Linux DEs have feature levels. from LXDE to E17/XFCE to GNOME/KDE. People try, change, select and settle. Their most important settings are carried around. BTW, Qt/KDE guys allows amazing interoperability between GTK and Qt, regardless of your primary choice.

So, after some time it's borderline nitpicking IMHO.

Not really. Just because neighbors grass is greener, doesn't mean Linux grass isn't a black wilting mess.

> So, after some time it's borderline nitpicking IMHO.

Example of "nitpicking" I/colleagues ran into: Multi monitor support, HDR, DE bricking after update.

And due to Linux fractious nature even if one distro fixed it, another would still have that issue.

Stuff that never happened to me with Windows/MacOS.

Linux's grass was a much darker green in the past, but wasn't black, neither back then, nor now.

> Multi monitor support

Just plugged a secondary monitor into one of my colleagues Linux box a week ago, a second desktop appeared three seconds later. Used two monitors for 6 years, until 6 years ago. It was working fine, then.

> HDR

Don't have an HDR panel, can't say a word about it, but VLC handles HDR-SDR conversion just fine.

> DE bricking after update.

My current MacBook Pro bricked after an OS update, because of a bug in an OpenVPN client's OS integration. No, the tool is paid, and no, macOS has no OpenVPN client embedded in it. Maybe I shouldn't have installed a paid, premium OpenVPN client, who knows. Anyway, I wiped and reinstalled the thing as a result.

The symptom? A frozen progress bar under the Apple logo. No time remaining, no error, nothing. Can I have the logs please? "Haha, of course not, you peasant."

And I only wiped and re-installed a Linux distro once, 15 years ago, because I did something the tool warned me to not to do.

And Windows somehow succeeds to corrupt my older computer's BIOS after installing updates and reboots. Sometimes it hangs all fans blazing during the restart. No, it's not the battery. That also never happened with Linux.

So, I arguably have a much better experience with Linux w.r.t. macOS and Windows in the last 15 years.

Sure. And I had encountered it - from just not registering, it being "there" despite being unplugged. And it randomizing windows on plugging in.

Using Linux always feels like fighting uphill battle with gremlins.

> Don't have an HDR panel, can't say a word about it, but VLC handles HDR-SDR conversion just fine.

Pity, really.

Neither Weyland nor X.org support it. Amazing, another fork in the road.

> My current MacBook Pro bricked after an OS update, because of a bug in an OpenVPN

That's different. This was post install update. Clean machine.

I ran into similar issue that bit Linus from. Linus Tech Tips.

I updated pop_OS! on fresh install and bang! Welcome console my old friend.

I remember Linux 15 years ago and it was even worse. But just because it got better doesn't mean it's good.

Can exactly the same not be said for Windows or MacOS? The difference being that you're basically locked into your choice with Windows/MacOS.

But who is "they", Linux the OS doesn't exist as Linux is just a kernel. There are countless distributions that assemble operating systems from parts, throwing GNU userland on top of Linux kernel and other bits of software on top of the GNU userland and the kernel.

FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD are operating systems, the developers do both the kernel and the userland.

In the early days of PC BSD I've tried to kickstart a new DE, just for PC BSD to break free from the rest of open source operating systems, and to have an UI that only work on PC BSD, is consistent - the same way Windows and macOS have their UI layers. And I failed at it, because I am human and I need to earn a living.

People that wrote if not the original kernel. So l guess Linus and co.

If an OS is to "win" desktop, or mobile, or whatever, it needs to minimize forking between its libs. Go for one way to do it, rather than a muriad of related ways

I'm referring to Lisp Curse. http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html

In summary: Because Lisp was easy to fork, any time two nerds disagreed it was forked. And because they weren't working on same database you got Lisps with patchworks of functionality/bugs that each on their own couldn't compare to more or less monolith language like C/C++ or Java.

Same dynamic in Linux land.

So instead of having 1000 developers on one codebase we have 100 on ten different DE, windowing system, etc.

Rather than having one sound system we have a dozen... It doesn't work on PulseAudio, try OpenSound, no wait OSSBlasterMaster...

>s that each on their own couldn't compare to more or less monolith language like C/C++ or Java.

Good joke. On C++, Boost. Try to compile older C++ code from 2006 today, it may fail spectacularly.

A lot of older C++ games from 2006 will be damn difficult to compile today.

On Java, heh. Different and incompatible JRE's. Software tied to a single JRE where it crashes on the newer ones.

Should I go on?

Meanwhile, 20 yo Elisp code still runs today as-is.

> De Icasa is not a saint either by pushing Mono on GNOME and Linux

Eh, I think interoperability is good, and reverse-engineering Windows frameworks/technology has a long history in the open-source world (WINE & Samba being two prominent examples). I was disappointed when they sold Xamarin to MS, though. That felt like selling out, even though I'm sure it made sense at the time.

Eh, they have a dedicated team for enabling WSL/Ubuntu desktop in Canonical. They're fueling the effort.

> Eh, I think interoperability is good, and reverse-engineering Windows frameworks/technology has a long history in the open-source world (WINE & Samba being two prominent examples).

IIRC, De Icaza left GNOME, joined Microsoft, developed Mono on open specs, founded Xamarin and sold it back to Microsoft.

His joint venture with MS what turned everything sour for many people, incl. me. However, we all love Wine, esp. when they implement things bug-by-bug without knowing it (and without help from Microsoft). The cursor (or Icon or WMF) exploit was a great laugh. We all love SMB too, because it's done despite Microsoft.

The language on this page is loaded (in a way I don't like), but it keeps a good roster of the events: http://techrights.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Icaza

Why did it turn things sour for you? I mean, ever since the Xamarin acquisition, MS .NET has become open + cross plattform and Xamarin which was a commercial/paid-for product is open too. VSCode is a first class citizen for free C#/.NET development on macOS and Linux. Not saying all of this is related to de Icaza getting bought by MS, but just saying ever since the ecosystem has become completely open.

On the other hand. Consider a prominent member one of the biggest open source projects leaves the project, joins Microsoft, and praises Microsoft and pushes semi-closed Microsoft technologies on every project, claiming Linux is dead without Microsoft, and we need to compromise by allowing these non-free technologies and porting almost everything to it.

All is done when Microsoft tried to copy LibreOffice (then OpenOffice) formats, created OOXML family of semi-open formats, and push them as ISO standards to bolster their file formats to kill other office applications for good.

DeIcaza (knowingly or unknowingly) was a part of an concentrated and coordinated effort to EEE Linux, and the open frameworks around it.

I never used and won't use any Mono based application in my personal systems and servers I solely install and manage.

On the other hand, VSCode is not free or open source. This makes it null and void in my radar, because I want my whole toolchain to be open and free, because when I left a project alone, someone should be able to get the whole toolchain and continue development. I don't like the idea of source code being locked in a proprietary development environment and hence suffocated on a whim with a choice of an external party.

The only person who does not know this is Icaza itself.