3 ms·

Adding to what others said, slashdot.org was the water-cooler news site back then and the icon for Microsoft was a borgified Bill Gates. Microsoft did everythi

Adding to what others said, slashdot.org was the water-cooler news site back then and the icon for Microsoft was a borgified Bill Gates. Microsoft did everything it could to destroy openness in the software world. They wrote that the GPL was a virus, hired prominent heads of open source projects like Miguel de Icaza and the name of the Gentoo guy who I forget, and nothing really became of those projects afterwards. And of course there was Netscape and IE up through IE8, IE6 being the most infamous. Yeah... Microsoft was the bad guy on the block. (edit: misspelled Gentoo)

flukus 10y ago
It was depressing seeing how MS treated OSS on their own ecosystem (.net). For every good project MS would release there own inferior clone and the whole ecosystem was left worse off.
- lambdasquirrel 10y ago
  Microsoft ate their own platform is what it was and then people stopped developing for them. That was one really big reason why the web became a thing. Everything used to run on the desktop. Microsoft quashed that, and then Google came along, made search, maps and mail work. Firefox and Opera (and yes, Safari) circumvented IE; Google pretty much funded Mozilla for Firefox until it came out with Chrome, basing off of Apple's webkit. It's remarkable that those of us in the Linux world spent so much time trying to unseat Microsoft from the desktop, and what did it in the end was Google and Apple simply working around the Microsoft/Intel (i.e. "Wintel") monopoly.
  - hga 10y ago
    But the way they quashed it is instructive: every few years they'd come up with some New, Improved way of doing it, and depreciating the old. People got sick and tired of learning the latest arcane, hard to program, generally with some degree of buggyness, poorly documented approach, only to have that become obsolete, and put what they'd created in jeopardy.
aorloff 10y ago
Well summed up. Somehow though, the GPL won in the end.
hga 10y ago
And funded the SCO Group v. The World lawsuit. On the other hand, in the early days IE beat Netscape fair and square in the technical domain, by engineering a vastly better browser, I think it was faster, and it was definitely a lot more stable. And let's not forget how they got AJAX started. One of the "secrets" of Microsoft's success in those days was their ability to consistently write software that basically worked, something that allowed the dominance of their Office suite when all their competitors but WordPerfect completely failed to get a working Windows version of their software, and WordPerfect didn't crash but had intolerable bugs, like your figures and tables repeatedly moving themselves to the bottom of your document (as reported by a lawyer co-worker and friend who had been a big fan of it on MS-DOS).

flukus 10y ago

It was depressing seeing how MS treated OSS on their own ecosystem (.net). For every good project MS would release there own inferior clone and the whole ecosystem was left worse off.

lambdasquirrel 10y ago
Microsoft ate their own platform is what it was and then people stopped developing for them. That was one really big reason why the web became a thing. Everything used to run on the desktop. Microsoft quashed that, and then Google came along, made search, maps and mail work. Firefox and Opera (and yes, Safari) circumvented IE; Google pretty much funded Mozilla for Firefox until it came out with Chrome, basing off of Apple's webkit. It's remarkable that those of us in the Linux world spent so much time trying to unseat Microsoft from the desktop, and what did it in the end was Google and Apple simply working around the Microsoft/Intel (i.e. "Wintel") monopoly.
- hga 10y ago
  But the way they quashed it is instructive: every few years they'd come up with some New, Improved way of doing it, and depreciating the old. People got sick and tired of learning the latest arcane, hard to program, generally with some degree of buggyness, poorly documented approach, only to have that become obsolete, and put what they'd created in jeopardy.

aorloff 10y ago

Well summed up. Somehow though, the GPL won in the end.

hga 10y ago

And funded the SCO Group v. The World lawsuit. On the other hand, in the early days IE beat Netscape fair and square in the technical domain, by engineering a vastly better browser, I think it was faster, and it was definitely a lot more stable. And let's not forget how they got AJAX started. One of the "secrets" of Microsoft's success in those days was their ability to consistently write software that basically worked, something that allowed the dominance of their Office suite when all their competitors but WordPerfect completely failed to get a working Windows version of their software, and WordPerfect didn't crash but had intolerable bugs, like your figures and tables repeatedly moving themselves to the bottom of your document (as reported by a lawyer co-worker and friend who had been a big fan of it on MS-DOS).