Microsoft has done many shady things in its many years of existence. It's a big company with many tentacles and there have been plenty of dick moves, shoddy dea

Microsoft has done many shady things in its many years of existence. It's a big company with many tentacles and there have been plenty of dick moves, shoddy deals and intimidation. However, qualifying every interest that MS has in tools or languages with the 3E scare is like crying wolf: people will simply stop listening to you and take you seriously. History should not be ignored but people and companies change, especially if they want to stay relevant. Last I heard, Java was still pretty popular on every platform and the scandalous birth of .Net has been a boon to everyone interested in programming for Windows. So much so that almost every aspect of .Net is getting open sourced and its cross-platform story is really shaping up to something decent. Browser wars were in the 90s... how far back do we have to hate? Netscape didn't deserve to down that way, but don't forget that the Netscape Navigator was not free. MS forced it free and made Netscape disappear in the process. Good thing or bad thing? We can speculate on what could-have been but no-one is paying for their browser today and yet there are at least 5 or 6 good ones to choose from. We can also argue browsers may still be closed source today if Netscape had been profitable and if Netscape (the company) still had its way with the various standards that underpin the web. MS was punished for their strong-arm tactics. Not punished in a particularly effective way, but it still cost them quite a bit and tarnished their reputation even further. Javascript is a standard and as such all those people creating the standard represent their own interests. It happens on every single standard in the world and it's certainly not limited to those of our industry. I don't like it, it's not always done in the interest of those implementing those standards, but I don't think singling-out MS is entirely fair, especially considering that they do have the right to participate since they still provide some of the most used browsers (even if it's by default). TypeScript is good. It changes nothing to JavaScript, it's open source and there are plenty of people who use it to great advantage. I really don't understand what MS is supposed to do here? Nothing? TypeScript is so good the Angular guys at Google have switched to it. Why? Because you can build lots of interesting tooling around it and have a whole classes of issues statically checked, something plain old JS doesn't really provide. Lots of people have forked Node. The Node people have forked Node. It's Open Source, that's the nature of the game. It's good, Node will improve and if what MS does is rubbish then no-one will use it because no-one is forced to. There is no reason for MS to invest in these technologies to see them fail (the extinguish part of 3E). MS is heavily invested in them and need them to work well on their platform and services because programmers of today use Open Source by default and expect a good experience. There has been a huge shift in mentality at MS over the years. Open Source won, we should be happy that the majority of the web is built on it, even MS is aware of that. It's not the nineties any more. Doesn't say we shouldn't be vigilant, but but not every decision out of MS is to be viewed with paranoid suspicions, there are lots of very great and very respectable folks who work there and take pride in what they do, we should give them a little credit.