Microsoft Becomes Sponsor of Open Source Initiative

I think it's safe to assume any large corp can pull these types of tricks. Even if the current leadership strongly feels such strategies are ultimately destructive, the winds of change in the board and estaff can turn that around in a month.

The real question in my mind is: what are the risks with any particular relationship. If you're worried about corporate sponsors co-opting organizations, you probably shouldn't allow large corporate sponsors.

I feel the same. Once you lose trust, it doesn't come back easily. That's why it's often better to ensure you hold onto every bit of it you can from day one.

But the projects you mention?

Kernel work in Azure? Pure self-interest. Now you can run Linux on Windows clouds. Do they do the same they other way? There are some Linux patches for HyperV support but I'm not sure there's parity there. In a world of virtual machines, it doesn't matter if it's the hypervisor or the VM that's Windows, you're still getting licence fees.

Bash into Windows? That's pretty much always been possible, but they have kind of half-assed the implementation again. Maybe that's because of genuine differences between the OS but it seems not to be that simple. Again, captures Linux users onto Windows but does it actually give anything back (i.e. are there bash patches to make it work, are they useful, are they fed back to the repository, etc.).

SQL has CAL-based licencing. They earn money whatever it's running on. But the SQL Server is slightly crippled and has no real advantages to deploy on Linux. It's all pretty closed-up again, should we really be celebrating "closed-source binary runs on Linux"? Isn't that pretty much expected and it's just been decades in the making? When Microsoft Office for Linux comes out, are we really going to be cheering there as any kind of significant technical advance, or just a long-overdue port?

It seems to me that these are all ways to focus on the cash-cows (applications) running on a cheaper OS, at a time when Windows 10 is being "given away" to users. I can't imagine that the sales of the OS make them money for much longer, they already make much more from Office etc. as it is, and surely the OS is the largest, hardest part to make and maintain.

It seems to me to be freeloading, while maintaining their closed eco-system. No suggestion of, say, a MySQL ODBC interface coming into Windows by default, but we'll happily give you a chopped-up SQL for you to pay for and run on an OS we barely support.

I think MS has changed, but only to reflect their own failures. Where they aren't profitable, they're putting out to pasture and taking less care. Where they are, they are pushing to expand. They're not the industry monolith they once were, sure, but I think if they wanted to actually support the venture, there's MUCH more they could be doing. And it's quite obvious stuff. Instead, we get the niche stuff that only really profits them. Closed-source SQL Server, for a single architecture, without the high-end features, running in a boxed-in "Windows emulation"-like environment. Linux running on Windows. An open-source shell running in a Windows environment.

I don't see that they've "given" much there, rather than "taken" bits of "us" and put it in to provide value to their users who could pretty much - and always previously have been left to - find their own alternatives anyway.

I think it's more because the fundamental purpose of computing has moved from empowering individuals through computational tools (the PC) to extracting personal data for marketing purposes. With this change the tech. industry has shifted from an industry driven by its consumers, to an industry driven by its sponsors, and the power dynamic has shifted from the individuals using the device to the corporations that extract and analyze the data. It's more like the tech. industry has become a puppet of the advertising industry and is being played like a fiddle.

They're still pulling underhanded tricks. Windows 10 likes to reset the default browser to Edge on any pretext whatsoever, and sometimes none at all. At other times it pops up notifications telling you your non-Edge browser sucks and you should use Edge. https://www.cnet.com/how-to/turn-off-windows-10s-pushy-ed...

What's really changed is that Microsoft has accepted that Windows has lost on mobile, and will not win in the cloud. They accept that to be successful their products have to work well with non-Windows clients and servers. The old scorched-earth tactics are no longer in their interest.

But if a dirty trick is in their interest, they'll still do it; see above. Then again, their competitors aren't much better. (I tend to think Google is a bit better, if you consider what they *could* do (and probably get away with) if they went full evil.)

Are they still running the patent protection racket against Linux?