15 ms·

Microsoft Becomes Sponsor of Open Source Initiative

230 points by Dinux 9y ago

tyfon 9y ago
This is all fine and good. I hope their efforts are sincere. All money and support to free software is most likely good. However, I've been part of the open source community for 25 years, and I remember the brutal marketing against the "cancer" of open source. It will take a lot to convince me that there is not some underlying goal here that is not beneficial to free software. How much has Microsoft really changed? I have windows on my gaming PC, and every day i have to ALT+F4 a stupid message to "review my privacy settings". There is no option for full privacy so i keep ALT+F4'ing the message and block all the telemetry stuff in my openbsd firewall. I have a powershell script called deleteapps that removes all the apps that is reinstalled everytime there is an update. It also appears to be impossible to uninstall the xbox app. Onedrive keeps turning on even if I choose that I do not want to sync during the installation, set the option in onedrive to not start at launch. Why fight the user to this level? Have they really turned "good"?
- gear54rus 9y ago
  You have a lot more patience that I do, frankly. That's the point people keep missing. These a-holes are seizing control over our computing primarily through Windows and while this stuff (described above) continues, it doesn't really matter if they open-source a lot of shit that doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things or throw a few bucks here and there because all in all it's Windows that has become a huge problem.
  - tyfon 9y ago
    The patience is becoming more and more an experiment to see how far they will go to control my usage in the operating system as a thanks for my 1000 NOK purchase of a license. Just what does it take to actually be able to use a new Windows without getting shafted? My gaming is almost completely moved to the PS4, Switch and Linux, even though neither Sony nor Nintendo are paragons of virtue in any sense, they are smaller companies that depend on happy customers. Neither of them are shoving the horrible GAAS (Games as a service), that is loot boxes and other shady tactics, into their games like Microsoft is doing. There is no forced online. You can just pop in a disk/cart and play without registering 1000 accounts on the internet. The experience is much better imho than fighting windows.
    - lou1306 9y ago
      > like Microsoft is doing I thought it was, you know, game developers and publishers? How many games are actually published by Microsoft, outside of Halo, Minecraft, Age of Empires, and Gears of War?
      - tyfon 9y ago
        These are the ones I am talking about. Halo, GoW and Minecraft have been GAASified. We have to see about Forza 7. Meanwhile, 1st party games like Horizon Zero Dawn from Sony or Mario vs Rabbids from Nintendo are free of such. In 3rd party games, all bets are off of course (see Destiny 2 for a good example)
- voltooid 9y ago
  I just spent a few minutes this morning trying to figure out how to turn off Cortana on my windows 10 virtual machine. I don't want to have to spend 45 minutes of my morning trying to figure out the ins and outs of elevated power shell to just turn one freaking app off on an operating system that I bought and therefore should have control over. In my view, this is very obviously tailored to deter most people from removing apps. I would say, this is not my idea of "good".
  - cjsuk 9y ago
    Add to that the clearly missing quality control and it's just eye poke after eye poke for me. I rebuilt my daughter's laptop a couple of weeks back after her MS account got hosed due to an unresolvable billing problem that just threw errors galore and MS support is like talking to Cortana now. It took me 3 hours to get it into a workable, secure and privacy respecting state with a local account. And it's still unreliable with random stupid failures like the start menu not responding to keyboard without a reboot, the wallpaper disappearing etc. And them I'm greeted with an advert for Cortana as a notification. And when I installed it, at the start, the entire installer uses Cortana now and shouts at you at full volume. And at every step it wants me to sign in to a Microsoft account over and over again or half the OS decides it's not going to work. What the fuck? It's a mess. A total undeniable crapfest which just needs to walk itself off a cliff. I'm a recent switcher to macOS after dabbling for a decade on a second machine. There just isn't this shit to deal with on the platform. It mostly just works and is incredibly boring. Which is what I want from a tool. Yes I sign in with an Apple Account but in the decade I've had one, I have had zero problems. MS account ownership is hell from billing problems, xbox live sign in problems, data loss, crazy authentication fragmentation, the lot.
    - czechdeveloper 9y ago
      Good thing is, that a the good stuff they do (C#, TypeScript, Visual Studio Code) is not limited to Windows use.
      - cjsuk 9y ago
- bad_user 9y ago
  Also Microsoft has been threatening Android companies with patents, engaging in racketeering, milking more money out of Android than they made with their Windows phones. As they say, if you can't innovate, litigate, Microsoft having the potential to become the biggest patents troll ever. And I expect replies to this comment saying that this is how the game works, that others are also doing it, bla, bla. Stop trying to normalize the usage of patents for non-defensive purposes folks. These companies are playing the system, earning money on the hard work of others by using abusive monopolies granted by the government.
- z3t4 9y ago
  Their new strategy might be to join open source communities and kill them from the inside. Although they probably just mean well and everything bad is just coincidence of incompetence. Btw, you can play a lot of games on Linux!
  - kakarot 9y ago
    Btw, you can play a lot of games on Linux! Depends on what your tastes are. If you have a soft spot for SkiFree or bland, cookie-cutter shooters then maybe gaming on GNU/Linux is enough for you. But most of the games available for GNU/Linux are candy, games for games sake, and don't have much intellectual value. Wine helps a bit but a lot of things still break especially with modern titles. My solution is running Windows 7 in KVM with GPU passthrough to an external monitor. Best of both worlds.
    - wjoe 9y ago
      Don't agree with that at all. I have over 300 Linux games on Steam, and there's a wide variety of games. Sure, it's lacking the big AAA releases that make the headlines, but in my opinion, those are the 'cookie-cutter' type games that don't have much intellectual value. There are many indie and small developers creating interesting games, and with Unity and other big engines supporting Linux now, it's a relatively small hurdle for them to release their games on Linux, and there are many of them. I also had a GPU passthrough VM setup, but the only time I used it in the last year was to play Overwatch - a cookie-cutter shooter. I play the occasional game in Wine, but there's no shortage of engaging native Linux games.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
        But if you're going to spend a bunch of money on a gaming rig, because you're that kind of gamer as opposed to someone who just casually sometimes plays some games when they work, then it seems incredibly silly to jump through the hoops of wine and VMs with GPU passthrough and still not be able to play everything.
    - justinclift 9y ago
- clhodapp 9y ago
  It really is amazing: Microsoft have fixed so many long-standing problems in Windows 10 and made something that is very close to offering a wonderful, refined user experience. However, they have also doubled down on undisableable focus-stealing and sound-making popups and forced interactions with their latest HCI "innovations" with the net result being that Windows 10 manages to feel as user-hostile as any version of Windows ever has...
  - JustSomeNobody 9y ago
    They also haven't figured out how to tell a laptop is a laptop and there are times when it should NOT be installing the latest patches.
- cjsuk 9y ago
  They haven't changed a bit. Open Source is merely a marketing tag for them to gain credibility. They are not very good in the open source community; most of their github OSS releases other than a few high profile ones are unmaintained crap with zero response. If you want to fire up Linux in SCVMM for example, the tooling is open source now, but full of bugs and no way to ship it with working tools. Nothing is ever responded to, PRs, defects or anything. But it's OSS, look we're OSS! It's a joke. Then when you do raise something on a high profile project like .Net Core which actively has buggy untested tracking enabled in the command line build tools, which violates security policies of a lot of their clients, you get told in nearly as few words to fuck off when you want it turned off by default. On top of that They still don't listen to customers, preferring to shout loudly over them on endless blogs and marketing whilst crapping on them with increasing costs, decreasing quality, less privacy, ruinous products and more fragmentation. They're the Omni-Consumer-Products software company now.
  - Quarrelsome 9y ago
    > They haven't changed a bit. o_0. I remember when I had to use tools to disassemble their precious source that they kept withheld and locked up. Now they post their new tech to github and I can view all the source easily. Now they try to make their tech work on Linux. I'm all for fair criticism but your prose is not that, its dogma. If you think they're still the same company I can only imagine that you left your eyes behind in the 90's. The culture has shifted a lot towards the engineers and you need to appreciate the good things that happen in life otherwise all you'll see is gloom. They're by no means perfect but they are _different_.
    - cjsuk 9y ago
      They're not really different though. People's memory is short. I've had access to MSFT source code before under shared source apart from the CSPs suspiciously, I've had symbol server around for years and been able to pop into framework code, then there's stuff like this: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749640.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749640.aspx - not even counting the amount of source coming from MSR etc. My criticism is not dogma, it's the regression in all the other areas that's the big problem. I appreciate not having to wade through treacle to get my job done. This has got considerably worse in the last 3-4 years as the platform sort of falls to pieces on a regular basis. Do you remember when server, dev tools, OS and platform all dropped at the same time? That was peak quality. What we have now is the diametric opposite. We have no direction with .Net Core other than all over the place, unmaintained crap falling out everywhere. It's hell. It's really difficult to build and manage a medium to large sized project when someone is smashing all the pieces off the board once a month. And also when you have to raise a defect with one of their products it is closed, ignored or via partner support "here's a registry fix you have to deploy to 2000 disparate companies to fix our product because we removed a UI option" type outcomes. The good things in life are where I start a project and run it to completion and the tools and frameworks perform as intended. That's not there any more. Things like python, golang and even Java offer better proposition. Even the tooling quality, such as Visual Studio 2017, we have to unconfigure a lot of features to make it stable (like CodeLens for example). I wouldn't even consider picking it as a platform to build a new project on now because of the time, rewrite and cost risk. What you see is marketing and front. What I see and oversee is a large team of people fighting this every day.
- sydd 9y ago
  type "Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.XboxApp | Remove-AppxPackage" into powershell to remove the Xbox
- ekianjo 9y ago
  > All money and support to free software is most likely good. Open source is not the same thing as Free Software. From the website itself, in the history section: > The conferees believed the pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape to release their code illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community. The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label "free software." Brainstorming for this new label eventually converged on the term "open source", originally suggested by Christine Peterson. Open-source is used broadly to define a way of developing software, but it says nothing about the rights it gives users. In practice there are several projects called "open sources" that are not using licenses that empower users, hence the valid distinction with Free Software where the end goal is user freedom.
  - tyfon 9y ago
    Yes which is why I specifically wrote free software in two of my paragraphs, I should probably have clarified. I do not necessarily think supporting non-free open source software is good, and hope some of this goes to supporting actual free software.
  - hannob 9y ago
    > Open-source is used broadly to define a way of developing software, but it says nothing about the rights it gives users. That is totally wrong and a myth spread by people who like to call their products "Open Source" while they aren't. The Open Source Definition is very clear: https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd Practically there is no difference between Open Source licenses and Free Software licenses. The difference is merely a philosophical one - whether you emphasis the "freedom" aspect or the "openness of the code" aspect. Bruce Perens just wrote something about it: https://perens.com/blog/2017/09/26/on-usage-of-the-phrase-open-source/ https://perens.com/blog/2017/09/26/on-usage-of-the-phrase-op...
    - watwut 9y ago
      They are different. I have open source contributions and I am cool giving away code free (and use others code of course). E.g. open source as Apache license. I disagree with free software peoples opinions often and don't want much contact with that community (prefer less ideological communities and less my-way-is-the-only-way and if-you-want-something-different-then-me-you-are-stupid communities).
- csmattryder 9y ago
  Devil's advocate: You're supporting `n` billion devices around the world running your product, and the users are typically non-technical (from "I know how to open Word" to "Where's the 'Any' key?") You need to battle against your competitor's product that "just work" because they can target one specific hardware profile and you can't, so you put in telemetry to improve compatibility. Makes sense. It enrages us, the technically-minded and privacy conscious, but only serves to make Windows better for the non-techies and help MS stop haemorrhaging users to iOS.
  - notalaser 9y ago
    So put a big red scary "PRESS THIS BUTTON AND YOU'LL GET HACKED IN TEN MINUTES UNLESS YOUR COMPUTER DOES NOT CRASH BEFORE THAT" that turns telemetry off and let me press it.
    - nulagrithom 9y ago
      Ever worked the help desk? My users would push that button twice then call me in 5 minutes to tell me their computer has been hacked (just after it crashed of course). I hate the telematics and the "anti-user" stubbornness of Windows in general, but at the same time, I know all too well who they're targeting and why. More and more of my less technical users are requesting Macs, which are a PITA to admin but at the same time generate fewer tickets because they're really hard to fuck up. I don't like seeing Windows move this direction, but I get it.
  - tyfon 9y ago
    If they used the collected data only for compatibility improvements and discarded it when done. If they allowed me to opt-in and I could shut off _all_ other telemetry. If I trusted Microsoft. Then we could talk :)
    - bousaid 9y ago
      They actually have incredibly strict policies about user privacy. Everyone in the company recently had to watch a short movie (with actual actors and realistic scenarios) about appropriate data usage and permissions.
- ionised 9y ago
  Embrace, Extend, Extinguish I am under no illusions that they have changed at all. They have an agenda, and it won't be for the benefit of open-source.
- romanovcode 9y ago
  > Why fight the user to this level? Have they really turned "good"? Most of MS revenue comes from Azure so it makes perfect sense for them to invest in open source that is used on Azure servers.
  - ts330 9y ago
    Roughly 1/3 comes from Intelligent Cloud (i.e. Azure and friends)... although revenues increased 93% in FYQ3. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2017-Q3/press-release-webcast https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2017-Q3... [edit: fix Intelligent Cloud vs Azure specifically]
- twelvedogs 9y ago
  open source currently aligns with MS's business plan, they haven't turned good or bad they just see where developers want to go and think it's a good thing to go with them. it doesn't change any of their other business plans but currently it's great for open source software and luckily if they change direction again we have permissively licensed software out of it. they can't scoop that code back out of the pool so i don't really see a downside, except maybe having to fork projects and maintain them without the MS cash if they do change direction
- cup-of-tea 9y ago
  Of course they haven't turned good. "Open Source" is a buzzword in business right now and just like "cloud" the intended audience for the word has no idea what it actually means.
- miketery 9y ago
  Woah cool, can you share your scripts? Would love to have something like this.
  - tyfon 9y ago
    https://pastebin.com/5kXwZi9C https://pastebin.com/5kXwZi9C I added one of the lines for xbox last as this actually seem to work. I have tried many versions before. Anyway, just run this in an elevated powershell instance (after removing lines for apps you want)
- DonHopkins 9y ago
  I also remember the brutal marketing against the "cancer" of Microsoft.
  - tyfon 9y ago
    I was referring to an actual quote by Ballmer. I'm sure many on the open source side have had less than flattering words for Microsoft too, however Steve Ballmer said, and I quote: "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches" https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_cancer/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_...
- Provokator 9y ago
  You can Uninstall the XBOX app, actually. It takes like five seconds in Powershell. You should be able to find the method with a quick search, but give me a few hours and I can tell you what I used to do it.
  - rasz 9y ago
    sure, you can even turn off xbox service ... using registry editor, because its blocked in service management.
- ausjke 9y ago
  Same feeling here, MS used to call OSS as cancer and tried so hard to kill it, now it begins to "embrace" that old cancer, I hope it will not become the real tumor and damage the so-far-so-good OSS society from within. People learn history for a reason, I'm still very suspicious at this point.
- lookACamel 9y ago
  Microsoft is a large company made up of many people, and I don't find it that hard to believe that the demographics, both within and without the company, have shifted in favor of open source.
- language 9y ago
  I can't tell. If you remember they became a platinum member of the Linux Foundation last year too.
- X86BSD 9y ago
  To be accurate, it was not the cancer of "Open Source", it was the cancer of the GPL.
  - calcifer 9y ago
    Ballmer meant the GPL, but he literally [0] said "Linux is a cancer". [0] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_cancer/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_...
    - X86BSD 9y ago
      I do not see the difference since Linux is not synonymous with Open Source but IS synonymous with the GPL.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- msla 9y ago
  I remember when IBM was running ads on TV for Linux, and I don't remember them getting the kind of push-back Microsoft is. And IBM used to be seriously rapacious. More to the point: > Have they really turned "good"? "Good" and "bad" presume human morality, which groups don't have. Groups view the world as "good for the group" or "bad for the group", or "in line with policy" or "contrary to policy", or on some other axis which is not entirely parallel to the whole "good"/"bad" thing individuals mostly follow. Point being, Microsoft will do what it always does: Attempt to improve its next quarterly balance sheet. Same as IBM. We have to rely on the licenses to make sure it can't take over any projects. Same as IBM.
- Fnoord 9y ago
  > However, I've been part of the open source community for 25 years, and I remember the brutal marketing against the "cancer" of open source. 25 years, so that's since 1992. Do you also remember IBM? Did you hold it against IBM when they started to become actively part of the open source community? Microsoft is changing from a proprietary software company pur-sang to a more service-oriented (and, like Google & Facebook, privacy-invasive) company. We need to forgive Microsoft and move on not out of love for Microsoft but for our own sanity. New threats have arisen. What Microsoft did (see the Halloween documents for a peak into that), any other big, powerful company or monopoly could've (and has, see e.g. IBM or Intel) done in the past. As of now, the invasive privacy concerns en masse (by a plethora of corporations and governments) are a much bigger threat to our liberty than Microsoft.
  - bitmapbrother 9y ago
    I can't help but think of the irony of mentioning IBM in your comparison to Microsoft considering Microsoft indirectly bankrolled, via BayStar, the SCO lawsuit against IBM for the alleged violations of IBM's Unix licenses in the development of Linux code at IBM.
    - Fnoord 9y ago
      Yeah, that's irony. There's more. A former monopolist getting flak from a current monopolist who tricked IBM with MS-DOS [1]. If you want to be pedantic on the history of Microsoft, however, I'd like to remind you of the history of IBM [2]. Of particular relevance are the parts "IBM in Germany and Nazi Occupied Europe" and "1969: Antitrust, the Unbundling of software and services". Do we still (respectively ~75 and ~50 years later) hold this against IBM? No, we don't. Its longer ago than Microsoft's practices, so I understand people still hold a grudge (heck, I'm one of them, I still tend to avoid Microsoft products). It'll take some time. But that doesn't mean my grudge is still rational. [1] http://thisdayintechhistory.com/11/06/ibm-signs-a-deal-with-the-devil/ http://thisdayintechhistory.com/11/06/ibm-signs-a-deal-with-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM
- ovao 9y ago
  To be fair, the messaging about open source/free software/GPL/Linux being cancerous was Steve Ballmer's. Steve Ballmer is no longer member of Microsoft's board of directors and his past comments don't really speak to Microsoft's current leadership. With respect to additional OSI funding, I can't really hypothesize a bad outcome.
vog 9y ago
I would have preferred to see this money go to FSF instead of OSI, but of course sponsoring any of these organizations is better than not sponsoring.
hah-muh-rabbi 9y ago
I do mind the perception that OSI is some pristine and error-less patron of open source. They're not, they are a business and they will do anything to get more donations. OSI has been known to accept money from anyone. They took money from the company that's known to abuse open source. It’s a kind of “indulgence”, where you pay the church of open source to wash away your sins. OSI certainly doesn't care about anything other than publicity.
l0b0 9y ago
The obvious advantage for Microsoft is that they can now influence OSI. Even if they don't get voting rights immediately (which I would expect them to push hard for) there will now be the everlasting threat of pulling the funding to keep OSI in line. Organisations sponsored mostly by companies can't be expected to be bold about upholding users' rights and keeping the moral high ground, because most organisations are willing to compromise to keep themselves alive. Now it remains to be seen if this is a dark day for FOSS or just for OSI.
MikeTaylor 9y ago
From the press-release: "Microsoft's history with the OSI dates back to 2005 with the submission of the Microsoft Community License" Well, that is not exactly true. For those who have forgotten the history, or weren't around at the time, this leaked internal document from Microsoft was the proximate cause of OSI taking off: http://catb.org/~esr/halloween/halloween1.html http://catb.org/~esr/halloween/halloween1.html TLDR: Microsoft's loud opposition to, and deep fear of, open source software provided a catalyst and a point of unification for those who supported it.
rmrfrmrf 9y ago
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
- dozzie 9y ago
  As much as I hate Microsoft along with its products, I wouldn't call current Microsoft's actions the infamous EEE strategy. That strategy was meant for protocols and standards that had potential to threaten Microsoft's position, not for specific software.
  - cjbillington 9y ago
    Could not recent trends (not this one specifically) be construed that way? For example, you can now run bash on Windows. What if Microsoft introduces extensions to bash that bash script writers would be tempted to use if they were targeting Windows? And if they implement it in such a way that they are not obliged to publish the source (or, they publish the source, but it calls into new Windows syscalls and so is useless on other platforms)? Now you've got windows bash and standard bash. The new features are genuinely useful, and windows bash flourishes. Then, five years later, they start breaking backward compatibility. People have to choose a side, and maybe they decide not to be compatible with standard bash anymore. We might be at the point where Microsoft doesn't have the clout to do this, and for the moment I'm happy that you can run bash on Windows - but the millisecond that I see them introduce a single non-standard feature to bash that they don't contribute back under GPL or whatever, I will resume yelling loudly to anyone nearby about EEE.
- sctb 9y ago
  Please comment substantively here instead of this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
kelvin0 9y ago
If I had a crystal ball back in the 90's that would have predicted this, I would simply had thrown it away thinking it was broken. Simply astounding. MS went from the 'monopoly' everyone loved to hate to this. Bravo!
kemonocode 9y ago
So I hear it's been rather chilly in Hell as of lately, some report below-freezing temperatures. That being said, Embrace, Extend, Extinguish and all that. Besides, there's a market for free software now they've become a cloud computing company too. Fits perfectly into their long-term plans.
nepotism2018 9y ago
Don't large companies sponsor or become members of such initiatives or organizations just so they can have a say on its future?
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
What signs of change are you expecting? Microsoft is a huge organization and change comes slowly to different products. Here's the thing - if we see Microsoft making tangible changes to their behavior, and we reward that with more derision and distrust, then we aren't exactly incentivizing them - or anyone wathcing - to do more. I personally applaud Microsoft on their dramatically increased involvement in open source in the past couple of years and I encourage them to keep it up and explore other ways they can improve. Yes, Windows still sucks, and is getting worse. Keep putting their feet to the fire for it. But that doesn't mean we have to demean the legitimately good work they're doing - let them enjoy the success from that so they can apply it across the rest of the org!
- bad_user 9y ago
  > if we see Microsoft making tangible changes to their behavior, and we reward that with more derision and distrust, then we aren't exactly incentivizing them - or anyone wathcing - to do more Well, if we are speaking of incentives, then here's one ... Don't screw with open source or open standards or your legitimate competitors by unfair competition, because many people will never forget it, so don't be surprised if 10 years later you still have a negative image that lingers, in spite of your huge marketing department that keeps paying shills. This is much like in society really. If somebody screws me or my family, I'll probably cut all ties with that person forever. Being marginalized is a natural reaction. Why should companies have their cake and eat it too?
  - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
    Microsoft can't undo the past, and they aren't going away. Your choice boils down to a single question: do you want the Microsoft of tomorrow to be different from the Microsoft of yesterday? If so, then quit hating and start celebrating the victories.
    - vetinari 9y ago
      Their past makes their starting position now more difficult. They have to make up for their past deeds, after all. Someone, who didn't do thing like Microsoft did, has it easier now. It sounds only fair to me.
cJ0th 9y ago
Does anyone know what Microsoft's objectives are here?

230 points by Dinux 9y ago

This is all fine and good. I hope their efforts are sincere. All money and support to free software is most likely good. However, I've been part of the open source community for 25 years, and I remember the brutal marketing against the "cancer" of open source. It will take a lot to convince me that there is not some underlying goal here that is not beneficial to free software. How much has Microsoft really changed? I have windows on my gaming PC, and every day i have to ALT+F4 a stupid message to "review my privacy settings". There is no option for full privacy so i keep ALT+F4'ing the message and block all the telemetry stuff in my openbsd firewall. I have a powershell script called deleteapps that removes all the apps that is reinstalled everytime there is an update. It also appears to be impossible to uninstall the xbox app. Onedrive keeps turning on even if I choose that I do not want to sync during the installation, set the option in onedrive to not start at launch. Why fight the user to this level? Have they really turned "good"?

gear54rus 9y ago
You have a lot more patience that I do, frankly. That's the point people keep missing. These a-holes are seizing control over our computing primarily through Windows and while this stuff (described above) continues, it doesn't really matter if they open-source a lot of shit that doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things or throw a few bucks here and there because all in all it's Windows that has become a huge problem.
- tyfon 9y ago
  The patience is becoming more and more an experiment to see how far they will go to control my usage in the operating system as a thanks for my 1000 NOK purchase of a license. Just what does it take to actually be able to use a new Windows without getting shafted? My gaming is almost completely moved to the PS4, Switch and Linux, even though neither Sony nor Nintendo are paragons of virtue in any sense, they are smaller companies that depend on happy customers. Neither of them are shoving the horrible GAAS (Games as a service), that is loot boxes and other shady tactics, into their games like Microsoft is doing. There is no forced online. You can just pop in a disk/cart and play without registering 1000 accounts on the internet. The experience is much better imho than fighting windows.
  - lou1306 9y ago
    > like Microsoft is doing I thought it was, you know, game developers and publishers? How many games are actually published by Microsoft, outside of Halo, Minecraft, Age of Empires, and Gears of War?
    - tyfon 9y ago
      These are the ones I am talking about. Halo, GoW and Minecraft have been GAASified. We have to see about Forza 7. Meanwhile, 1st party games like Horizon Zero Dawn from Sony or Mario vs Rabbids from Nintendo are free of such. In 3rd party games, all bets are off of course (see Destiny 2 for a good example)
voltooid 9y ago
I just spent a few minutes this morning trying to figure out how to turn off Cortana on my windows 10 virtual machine. I don't want to have to spend 45 minutes of my morning trying to figure out the ins and outs of elevated power shell to just turn one freaking app off on an operating system that I bought and therefore should have control over. In my view, this is very obviously tailored to deter most people from removing apps. I would say, this is not my idea of "good".
- cjsuk 9y ago
  Add to that the clearly missing quality control and it's just eye poke after eye poke for me. I rebuilt my daughter's laptop a couple of weeks back after her MS account got hosed due to an unresolvable billing problem that just threw errors galore and MS support is like talking to Cortana now. It took me 3 hours to get it into a workable, secure and privacy respecting state with a local account. And it's still unreliable with random stupid failures like the start menu not responding to keyboard without a reboot, the wallpaper disappearing etc. And them I'm greeted with an advert for Cortana as a notification. And when I installed it, at the start, the entire installer uses Cortana now and shouts at you at full volume. And at every step it wants me to sign in to a Microsoft account over and over again or half the OS decides it's not going to work. What the fuck? It's a mess. A total undeniable crapfest which just needs to walk itself off a cliff. I'm a recent switcher to macOS after dabbling for a decade on a second machine. There just isn't this shit to deal with on the platform. It mostly just works and is incredibly boring. Which is what I want from a tool. Yes I sign in with an Apple Account but in the decade I've had one, I have had zero problems. MS account ownership is hell from billing problems, xbox live sign in problems, data loss, crazy authentication fragmentation, the lot.
  - czechdeveloper 9y ago
    Good thing is, that a the good stuff they do (C#, TypeScript, Visual Studio Code) is not limited to Windows use.
    - cjsuk 9y ago
bad_user 9y ago
Also Microsoft has been threatening Android companies with patents, engaging in racketeering, milking more money out of Android than they made with their Windows phones. As they say, if you can't innovate, litigate, Microsoft having the potential to become the biggest patents troll ever. And I expect replies to this comment saying that this is how the game works, that others are also doing it, bla, bla. Stop trying to normalize the usage of patents for non-defensive purposes folks. These companies are playing the system, earning money on the hard work of others by using abusive monopolies granted by the government.
z3t4 9y ago
Their new strategy might be to join open source communities and kill them from the inside. Although they probably just mean well and everything bad is just coincidence of incompetence. Btw, you can play a lot of games on Linux!
- kakarot 9y ago
  Btw, you can play a lot of games on Linux! Depends on what your tastes are. If you have a soft spot for SkiFree or bland, cookie-cutter shooters then maybe gaming on GNU/Linux is enough for you. But most of the games available for GNU/Linux are candy, games for games sake, and don't have much intellectual value. Wine helps a bit but a lot of things still break especially with modern titles. My solution is running Windows 7 in KVM with GPU passthrough to an external monitor. Best of both worlds.
  - wjoe 9y ago
    Don't agree with that at all. I have over 300 Linux games on Steam, and there's a wide variety of games. Sure, it's lacking the big AAA releases that make the headlines, but in my opinion, those are the 'cookie-cutter' type games that don't have much intellectual value. There are many indie and small developers creating interesting games, and with Unity and other big engines supporting Linux now, it's a relatively small hurdle for them to release their games on Linux, and there are many of them. I also had a GPU passthrough VM setup, but the only time I used it in the last year was to play Overwatch - a cookie-cutter shooter. I play the occasional game in Wine, but there's no shortage of engaging native Linux games.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
      But if you're going to spend a bunch of money on a gaming rig, because you're that kind of gamer as opposed to someone who just casually sometimes plays some games when they work, then it seems incredibly silly to jump through the hoops of wine and VMs with GPU passthrough and still not be able to play everything.
  - justinclift 9y ago
clhodapp 9y ago
It really is amazing: Microsoft have fixed so many long-standing problems in Windows 10 and made something that is very close to offering a wonderful, refined user experience. However, they have also doubled down on undisableable focus-stealing and sound-making popups and forced interactions with their latest HCI "innovations" with the net result being that Windows 10 manages to feel as user-hostile as any version of Windows ever has...
- JustSomeNobody 9y ago
  They also haven't figured out how to tell a laptop is a laptop and there are times when it should NOT be installing the latest patches.
cjsuk 9y ago
They haven't changed a bit. Open Source is merely a marketing tag for them to gain credibility. They are not very good in the open source community; most of their github OSS releases other than a few high profile ones are unmaintained crap with zero response. If you want to fire up Linux in SCVMM for example, the tooling is open source now, but full of bugs and no way to ship it with working tools. Nothing is ever responded to, PRs, defects or anything. But it's OSS, look we're OSS! It's a joke. Then when you do raise something on a high profile project like .Net Core which actively has buggy untested tracking enabled in the command line build tools, which violates security policies of a lot of their clients, you get told in nearly as few words to fuck off when you want it turned off by default. On top of that They still don't listen to customers, preferring to shout loudly over them on endless blogs and marketing whilst crapping on them with increasing costs, decreasing quality, less privacy, ruinous products and more fragmentation. They're the Omni-Consumer-Products software company now.
- Quarrelsome 9y ago
  > They haven't changed a bit. o_0. I remember when I had to use tools to disassemble their precious source that they kept withheld and locked up. Now they post their new tech to github and I can view all the source easily. Now they try to make their tech work on Linux. I'm all for fair criticism but your prose is not that, its dogma. If you think they're still the same company I can only imagine that you left your eyes behind in the 90's. The culture has shifted a lot towards the engineers and you need to appreciate the good things that happen in life otherwise all you'll see is gloom. They're by no means perfect but they are _different_.
  - cjsuk 9y ago
    They're not really different though. People's memory is short. I've had access to MSFT source code before under shared source apart from the CSPs suspiciously, I've had symbol server around for years and been able to pop into framework code, then there's stuff like this: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749640.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749640.aspx - not even counting the amount of source coming from MSR etc. My criticism is not dogma, it's the regression in all the other areas that's the big problem. I appreciate not having to wade through treacle to get my job done. This has got considerably worse in the last 3-4 years as the platform sort of falls to pieces on a regular basis. Do you remember when server, dev tools, OS and platform all dropped at the same time? That was peak quality. What we have now is the diametric opposite. We have no direction with .Net Core other than all over the place, unmaintained crap falling out everywhere. It's hell. It's really difficult to build and manage a medium to large sized project when someone is smashing all the pieces off the board once a month. And also when you have to raise a defect with one of their products it is closed, ignored or via partner support "here's a registry fix you have to deploy to 2000 disparate companies to fix our product because we removed a UI option" type outcomes. The good things in life are where I start a project and run it to completion and the tools and frameworks perform as intended. That's not there any more. Things like python, golang and even Java offer better proposition. Even the tooling quality, such as Visual Studio 2017, we have to unconfigure a lot of features to make it stable (like CodeLens for example). I wouldn't even consider picking it as a platform to build a new project on now because of the time, rewrite and cost risk. What you see is marketing and front. What I see and oversee is a large team of people fighting this every day.
sydd 9y ago
type "Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.XboxApp | Remove-AppxPackage" into powershell to remove the Xbox
ekianjo 9y ago
> All money and support to free software is most likely good. Open source is not the same thing as Free Software. From the website itself, in the history section: > The conferees believed the pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape to release their code illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community. The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label "free software." Brainstorming for this new label eventually converged on the term "open source", originally suggested by Christine Peterson. Open-source is used broadly to define a way of developing software, but it says nothing about the rights it gives users. In practice there are several projects called "open sources" that are not using licenses that empower users, hence the valid distinction with Free Software where the end goal is user freedom.
- tyfon 9y ago
  Yes which is why I specifically wrote free software in two of my paragraphs, I should probably have clarified. I do not necessarily think supporting non-free open source software is good, and hope some of this goes to supporting actual free software.
- hannob 9y ago
  > Open-source is used broadly to define a way of developing software, but it says nothing about the rights it gives users. That is totally wrong and a myth spread by people who like to call their products "Open Source" while they aren't. The Open Source Definition is very clear: https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd Practically there is no difference between Open Source licenses and Free Software licenses. The difference is merely a philosophical one - whether you emphasis the "freedom" aspect or the "openness of the code" aspect. Bruce Perens just wrote something about it: https://perens.com/blog/2017/09/26/on-usage-of-the-phrase-open-source/ https://perens.com/blog/2017/09/26/on-usage-of-the-phrase-op...
  - watwut 9y ago
    They are different. I have open source contributions and I am cool giving away code free (and use others code of course). E.g. open source as Apache license. I disagree with free software peoples opinions often and don't want much contact with that community (prefer less ideological communities and less my-way-is-the-only-way and if-you-want-something-different-then-me-you-are-stupid communities).
csmattryder 9y ago
Devil's advocate: You're supporting `n` billion devices around the world running your product, and the users are typically non-technical (from "I know how to open Word" to "Where's the 'Any' key?") You need to battle against your competitor's product that "just work" because they can target one specific hardware profile and you can't, so you put in telemetry to improve compatibility. Makes sense. It enrages us, the technically-minded and privacy conscious, but only serves to make Windows better for the non-techies and help MS stop haemorrhaging users to iOS.
- notalaser 9y ago
  So put a big red scary "PRESS THIS BUTTON AND YOU'LL GET HACKED IN TEN MINUTES UNLESS YOUR COMPUTER DOES NOT CRASH BEFORE THAT" that turns telemetry off and let me press it.
  - nulagrithom 9y ago
    Ever worked the help desk? My users would push that button twice then call me in 5 minutes to tell me their computer has been hacked (just after it crashed of course). I hate the telematics and the "anti-user" stubbornness of Windows in general, but at the same time, I know all too well who they're targeting and why. More and more of my less technical users are requesting Macs, which are a PITA to admin but at the same time generate fewer tickets because they're really hard to fuck up. I don't like seeing Windows move this direction, but I get it.
- tyfon 9y ago
  If they used the collected data only for compatibility improvements and discarded it when done. If they allowed me to opt-in and I could shut off _all_ other telemetry. If I trusted Microsoft. Then we could talk :)
  - bousaid 9y ago
    They actually have incredibly strict policies about user privacy. Everyone in the company recently had to watch a short movie (with actual actors and realistic scenarios) about appropriate data usage and permissions.
ionised 9y ago
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish I am under no illusions that they have changed at all. They have an agenda, and it won't be for the benefit of open-source.
romanovcode 9y ago
> Why fight the user to this level? Have they really turned "good"? Most of MS revenue comes from Azure so it makes perfect sense for them to invest in open source that is used on Azure servers.
- ts330 9y ago
  Roughly 1/3 comes from Intelligent Cloud (i.e. Azure and friends)... although revenues increased 93% in FYQ3. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2017-Q3/press-release-webcast https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2017-Q3... [edit: fix Intelligent Cloud vs Azure specifically]
twelvedogs 9y ago
open source currently aligns with MS's business plan, they haven't turned good or bad they just see where developers want to go and think it's a good thing to go with them. it doesn't change any of their other business plans but currently it's great for open source software and luckily if they change direction again we have permissively licensed software out of it. they can't scoop that code back out of the pool so i don't really see a downside, except maybe having to fork projects and maintain them without the MS cash if they do change direction
cup-of-tea 9y ago
Of course they haven't turned good. "Open Source" is a buzzword in business right now and just like "cloud" the intended audience for the word has no idea what it actually means.
miketery 9y ago
Woah cool, can you share your scripts? Would love to have something like this.
- tyfon 9y ago
  https://pastebin.com/5kXwZi9C https://pastebin.com/5kXwZi9C I added one of the lines for xbox last as this actually seem to work. I have tried many versions before. Anyway, just run this in an elevated powershell instance (after removing lines for apps you want)
DonHopkins 9y ago
I also remember the brutal marketing against the "cancer" of Microsoft.
- tyfon 9y ago
  I was referring to an actual quote by Ballmer. I'm sure many on the open source side have had less than flattering words for Microsoft too, however Steve Ballmer said, and I quote: "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches" https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_cancer/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_...
Provokator 9y ago
You can Uninstall the XBOX app, actually. It takes like five seconds in Powershell. You should be able to find the method with a quick search, but give me a few hours and I can tell you what I used to do it.
- rasz 9y ago
  sure, you can even turn off xbox service ... using registry editor, because its blocked in service management.
ausjke 9y ago
Same feeling here, MS used to call OSS as cancer and tried so hard to kill it, now it begins to "embrace" that old cancer, I hope it will not become the real tumor and damage the so-far-so-good OSS society from within. People learn history for a reason, I'm still very suspicious at this point.
lookACamel 9y ago
Microsoft is a large company made up of many people, and I don't find it that hard to believe that the demographics, both within and without the company, have shifted in favor of open source.
language 9y ago
I can't tell. If you remember they became a platinum member of the Linux Foundation last year too.
X86BSD 9y ago
To be accurate, it was not the cancer of "Open Source", it was the cancer of the GPL.
- calcifer 9y ago
  Ballmer meant the GPL, but he literally [0] said "Linux is a cancer". [0] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_cancer/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_...
  - X86BSD 9y ago
    I do not see the difference since Linux is not synonymous with Open Source but IS synonymous with the GPL.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
msla 9y ago
I remember when IBM was running ads on TV for Linux, and I don't remember them getting the kind of push-back Microsoft is. And IBM used to be seriously rapacious. More to the point: > Have they really turned "good"? "Good" and "bad" presume human morality, which groups don't have. Groups view the world as "good for the group" or "bad for the group", or "in line with policy" or "contrary to policy", or on some other axis which is not entirely parallel to the whole "good"/"bad" thing individuals mostly follow. Point being, Microsoft will do what it always does: Attempt to improve its next quarterly balance sheet. Same as IBM. We have to rely on the licenses to make sure it can't take over any projects. Same as IBM.
Fnoord 9y ago
> However, I've been part of the open source community for 25 years, and I remember the brutal marketing against the "cancer" of open source. 25 years, so that's since 1992. Do you also remember IBM? Did you hold it against IBM when they started to become actively part of the open source community? Microsoft is changing from a proprietary software company pur-sang to a more service-oriented (and, like Google & Facebook, privacy-invasive) company. We need to forgive Microsoft and move on not out of love for Microsoft but for our own sanity. New threats have arisen. What Microsoft did (see the Halloween documents for a peak into that), any other big, powerful company or monopoly could've (and has, see e.g. IBM or Intel) done in the past. As of now, the invasive privacy concerns en masse (by a plethora of corporations and governments) are a much bigger threat to our liberty than Microsoft.
- bitmapbrother 9y ago
  I can't help but think of the irony of mentioning IBM in your comparison to Microsoft considering Microsoft indirectly bankrolled, via BayStar, the SCO lawsuit against IBM for the alleged violations of IBM's Unix licenses in the development of Linux code at IBM.
  - Fnoord 9y ago
    Yeah, that's irony. There's more. A former monopolist getting flak from a current monopolist who tricked IBM with MS-DOS [1]. If you want to be pedantic on the history of Microsoft, however, I'd like to remind you of the history of IBM [2]. Of particular relevance are the parts "IBM in Germany and Nazi Occupied Europe" and "1969: Antitrust, the Unbundling of software and services". Do we still (respectively ~75 and ~50 years later) hold this against IBM? No, we don't. Its longer ago than Microsoft's practices, so I understand people still hold a grudge (heck, I'm one of them, I still tend to avoid Microsoft products). It'll take some time. But that doesn't mean my grudge is still rational. [1] http://thisdayintechhistory.com/11/06/ibm-signs-a-deal-with-the-devil/ http://thisdayintechhistory.com/11/06/ibm-signs-a-deal-with-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM
ovao 9y ago
To be fair, the messaging about open source/free software/GPL/Linux being cancerous was Steve Ballmer's. Steve Ballmer is no longer member of Microsoft's board of directors and his past comments don't really speak to Microsoft's current leadership. With respect to additional OSI funding, I can't really hypothesize a bad outcome.

vog 9y ago

I would have preferred to see this money go to FSF instead of OSI, but of course sponsoring any of these organizations is better than not sponsoring.

hah-muh-rabbi 9y ago

I do mind the perception that OSI is some pristine and error-less patron of open source. They're not, they are a business and they will do anything to get more donations. OSI has been known to accept money from anyone. They took money from the company that's known to abuse open source. It’s a kind of “indulgence”, where you pay the church of open source to wash away your sins. OSI certainly doesn't care about anything other than publicity.

l0b0 9y ago

The obvious advantage for Microsoft is that they can now influence OSI. Even if they don't get voting rights immediately (which I would expect them to push hard for) there will now be the everlasting threat of pulling the funding to keep OSI in line. Organisations sponsored mostly by companies can't be expected to be bold about upholding users' rights and keeping the moral high ground, because most organisations are willing to compromise to keep themselves alive. Now it remains to be seen if this is a dark day for FOSS or just for OSI.

MikeTaylor 9y ago

From the press-release: "Microsoft's history with the OSI dates back to 2005 with the submission of the Microsoft Community License" Well, that is not exactly true. For those who have forgotten the history, or weren't around at the time, this leaked internal document from Microsoft was the proximate cause of OSI taking off: http://catb.org/~esr/halloween/halloween1.html http://catb.org/~esr/halloween/halloween1.html TLDR: Microsoft's loud opposition to, and deep fear of, open source software provided a catalyst and a point of unification for those who supported it.

rmrfrmrf 9y ago

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

dozzie 9y ago
As much as I hate Microsoft along with its products, I wouldn't call current Microsoft's actions the infamous EEE strategy. That strategy was meant for protocols and standards that had potential to threaten Microsoft's position, not for specific software.
- cjbillington 9y ago
  Could not recent trends (not this one specifically) be construed that way? For example, you can now run bash on Windows. What if Microsoft introduces extensions to bash that bash script writers would be tempted to use if they were targeting Windows? And if they implement it in such a way that they are not obliged to publish the source (or, they publish the source, but it calls into new Windows syscalls and so is useless on other platforms)? Now you've got windows bash and standard bash. The new features are genuinely useful, and windows bash flourishes. Then, five years later, they start breaking backward compatibility. People have to choose a side, and maybe they decide not to be compatible with standard bash anymore. We might be at the point where Microsoft doesn't have the clout to do this, and for the moment I'm happy that you can run bash on Windows - but the millisecond that I see them introduce a single non-standard feature to bash that they don't contribute back under GPL or whatever, I will resume yelling loudly to anyone nearby about EEE.
sctb 9y ago
Please comment substantively here instead of this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

kelvin0 9y ago

If I had a crystal ball back in the 90's that would have predicted this, I would simply had thrown it away thinking it was broken. Simply astounding. MS went from the 'monopoly' everyone loved to hate to this. Bravo!

kemonocode 9y ago

So I hear it's been rather chilly in Hell as of lately, some report below-freezing temperatures. That being said, Embrace, Extend, Extinguish and all that. Besides, there's a market for free software now they've become a cloud computing company too. Fits perfectly into their long-term plans.

nepotism2018 9y ago

Don't large companies sponsor or become members of such initiatives or organizations just so they can have a say on its future?

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

What signs of change are you expecting? Microsoft is a huge organization and change comes slowly to different products. Here's the thing - if we see Microsoft making tangible changes to their behavior, and we reward that with more derision and distrust, then we aren't exactly incentivizing them - or anyone wathcing - to do more. I personally applaud Microsoft on their dramatically increased involvement in open source in the past couple of years and I encourage them to keep it up and explore other ways they can improve. Yes, Windows still sucks, and is getting worse. Keep putting their feet to the fire for it. But that doesn't mean we have to demean the legitimately good work they're doing - let them enjoy the success from that so they can apply it across the rest of the org!

bad_user 9y ago
> if we see Microsoft making tangible changes to their behavior, and we reward that with more derision and distrust, then we aren't exactly incentivizing them - or anyone wathcing - to do more Well, if we are speaking of incentives, then here's one ... Don't screw with open source or open standards or your legitimate competitors by unfair competition, because many people will never forget it, so don't be surprised if 10 years later you still have a negative image that lingers, in spite of your huge marketing department that keeps paying shills. This is much like in society really. If somebody screws me or my family, I'll probably cut all ties with that person forever. Being marginalized is a natural reaction. Why should companies have their cake and eat it too?
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  Microsoft can't undo the past, and they aren't going away. Your choice boils down to a single question: do you want the Microsoft of tomorrow to be different from the Microsoft of yesterday? If so, then quit hating and start celebrating the victories.
  - vetinari 9y ago
    Their past makes their starting position now more difficult. They have to make up for their past deeds, after all. Someone, who didn't do thing like Microsoft did, has it easier now. It sounds only fair to me.

cJ0th 9y ago

Does anyone know what Microsoft's objectives are here?