17 ms·

An immensly powerful and useful tool. Can't live without it. Hopefully the situation resolves soon. What is it with MS these past few months? It's like they're

An immensly powerful and useful tool. Can't live without it. Hopefully the situation resolves soon. What is it with MS these past few months? It's like they're trying to throw away the little community goodwill they managed to build up over the years.

beermonster 5y ago
> What is it with MS these past few months? I was thinking the same. It's not been a good few weeks for them. They're quickly losing trust which was hard to acquire in the first place given their history. Maybe a timely reminder to mention Halloween [1] ? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents
- southerntofu 5y ago
  They've always been acting as a strong monopolistic corporation with a "fuck you" attitude. Here's a summary of Microsoft attitude these part 5 years: - rebrand as open-source friendly, only open-source whatever narrow side-projects they barely care about but could be run on other systems (VSCode, Powershell); distribute official packages with spyware - monopolize the education system by offering bribes including gratis hardware devices to whoever in State education will work with them to pretend Microsoft loves kids and kids need computers (with Microsoft software, obviously) to learn anything in the 21st century - force manufacturers to deploy "TPM v2.0" on their new machines so they can run Windows 11, continuing the push so that people have 0 understanding and control over the machines they own (instead are controlled by the machines), and don't have a choice of system because "SecureBoot" [0] - love Linux! let them integrate all your POSIX/Linux APIs in a VM on their system, so that you never have to use anything else than Windows ever again (embrace...) ; it's just like reverse-Wine (execute Windows program on free systems) except they have an army of developers with $$$$ and don't have to waste time reverse-engineering anything because they have the source code to both systems... how convenient! - viruses are such a huge problem, if only we had some sort of digital signatures for software, and trustworthy places to get it from?! sure let's have a Microsoft market where you can buy adware/spyware signed by Microsoft, with two key advantages: 1) it's super faster because signed software is not inspected real-time by Windows defender 2) noone else can make their own "appstore" repository with their own signature keys (like we do with Flatpak/APT/nix/guix) ; very soon they can start to hide how to run programs unapproved by Microsoft like Android or MacOS [1] have been doing... and it's all for security, right? because app-store monopoly has definitely stopped malware (oooh that's a nice flashlight app you got there Google Play) without harming FLOSS/hobbyist devs (yeah sure) It's just *washing (openwashing here) straight out of marketing textbooks. If you know/learn anything about capitalism and public relations, you won't be tricked next time! [0] Briefly touched upon in this bigger article about how Microsoft is still evil, why Secure Boot has nothing to do with security, and why hardware manufacturers happily play along: https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/mmu_man/2021-10-04_ok_lenovo_we_need_to_talk/ https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/mmu_man/2021-10-04_ok_lenovo_w... [1] There was even this worrying story at some point that MacOS would refuse to open applications (whether signed or not) because their centralized server could not be reached: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959 <-- Soon coming to your Windows setup
  - pas 5y ago
    Ah, I don't really care about telemetry, but their amazing outlook.com SMTP service rejects mail from small senders, and there's no way to successfully appeal. Yeey, brave new megacorp world!
    - op00to 5y ago
      What’s the difference between a small sender and a spam host?
      - southerntofu 5y ago
        The difference is decided by decent spam filters: - is the exact same message being sent to many users? - does it look like previous spam? - are messages from this host being reported as spam by users? We have plenty of techniques to filter out spam (those above and technical ones like DKIM to enable host reputation systems) and they mostly work great. What Google/Microsoft are doing is just monopolistic attitude and has nothing to do with spam filtering. Spam from big email servers is still common, but legit emails from smaller servers will not reach intended recipients, and will not produce any indication of that on either side of the communication. It's just silently going in the trash. If there was at least a decent way to get allowlisted on their side, we could give them the benefit of the doubt and accept that email ecosystem has turned to an opt-in federation model. But the way they do it and prevent recourse is a clear abuse of dominant position to crush the competition.
      - Lex-2008 5y ago
        do you mean you never received spam from @gmail.com? Lucky you!
        oynqr 5y ago
        With a proper rspamd setup, gmail is the only source of delivered spam for me.
      - roblabla 5y ago
- JeremyNT 5y ago
  Are they losing trust though? Many young developers don't remember the height of the EEE days in the 90s and 00s when MS was trying very hard to extinguish free software. These are just stories to them. Now, MS runs the world's largest source code sharing service and many of these young developers launch proprietary MS code editing tools daily. We old timers always knew what the end game was, but young people lack the context and so many are already hooked on MS now. It's not obvious to me that they will ever care enough to switch no matter how hostile MS behaves.
  - dpbriggs 5y ago
    Young free software advocates exist - I'm one. I know about EEE and agree we're in a sorry state. I have a feeling MS will continue to dominate due to network effects and vscode/wsl being a nice enough experience. It'll take them resting on their laurels or some great act of user hostility to change this status quo.
  - flatiron 5y ago
    I remember. It’s also hard to turn down WSL and VSC. They are wonderful products and I’m fairly certain I’m sadly contributing to all this nonsense but I also need to get my day job done and pay the bills. One day large corporations I hope will allow Linux. But at least mine it’s windows or macOS and apple is far behind the wsl/vsc curve right now and apparently doesn’t have any motivation to catch up. They rely on “you have to use Xcode” right now which is unfortunate.
  - Shared404 5y ago
    > young people lack the context and so many are already hooked on MS now. It's not obvious to me that they will ever care enough to switch no matter how hostile MS behaves. Not all of us. I had just barely started being willing to trust Microsoft again, and they've repeatedly shown themselves to be hostile since the initial "Github is cool! And WSL! And VSCode!", enough is enough. I've read the Halloween documents, I know where this goes.
Gargyle 5y ago
Where did they actually do nice things? VSCode is still not entirely open source and the official builds have spyware included.
- lordofgibbons 5y ago
  Thank you for saying this. For those who don't know about the open-source release of VSCode, check out https://vscodium.com/ https://vscodium.com/
  - alias_neo 5y ago
    I use VSCodium every day, and recommend it over VSCode to everyone, however, due to microsoft's locked down plugins, particulary the ones related to remote development and debug, there are certain things which can be done with VSCode and not VSCodium. It's worth bearing in mind for those considering switching.
    - rzzzt 5y ago
      SSH FS, a third-party extension seems to work well with VSCodium: https://github.com/SchoofsKelvin/vscode-sshfs https://github.com/SchoofsKelvin/vscode-sshfs
      - pedro2 5y ago
        They mean Microsoft's plugins -- they just work with VSCode on purpose.
        rzzzt 5y ago
        This one is an alternative to the remote development tooling which doesn't work on VSCodium. It is certainly not a full replacement, but you get to poke around the files on the remote system and run commands over SSH.
      - alias_neo 5y ago
        Yes, but unfortunately if you want to use something like Okteto[0] it requires the microsoft plugin. There are other third party plugins and tools tightly bound to the Microsoft ones making them unfortunately unusable. [0]https://okteto.com/ https://okteto.com/
forgotmypw17 5y ago
The motivation seems pretty obvious to me: They want to obscure as much as possible what's going on inside OS.
dTal 5y ago
Quite a lot of community goodwill, unfairly granted. I've lost count of how many times I've read on this very forum, "calling it Micro$oft is childish, they're a changed company, Nadella is better than Ballmer, etc". They are as hostile to free software as they ever were. Why wouldn't they be? It's antithetical to their business model. The only thing that's changed is how sneaky they are about their time-honored tactic - embrace, extend, extinguish.
- maccolgan 5y ago
  EEE isn't obsolete, very far from obsolete in fact, they are just playing it (very) long.
- fyzix 5y ago
  Microsoft took the same approach as Bill Gates. Gate's ruthlessness made the public hate him(remember the milkshaking?). He took public relations serious and put on the nice guy public facing image while still being as devious and wretched as he was back then. The Microsoft leaders saw how well this worked him and used the same tactic.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  I lived through the dark days, they are definitely not as hostile as they used to be. However, that could change at any point with a change in leadership or a bad quarter.
pmontra 5y ago
Trusting a company with the history of Microsoft (and its size) is at least naive. Not one of the mistakes I did in my life.
tata71 5y ago
Shareholders are getting anxious.
- fortran77 5y ago
  I don't think so. https://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/price https://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/price
  - emptyparadise 5y ago
    Some nth derivative growth metric is slowing down, so the company is actually doomed unless it does some shady shit.
e0a74c 5y ago
What goodwill?

beermonster 5y ago

> What is it with MS these past few months? I was thinking the same. It's not been a good few weeks for them. They're quickly losing trust which was hard to acquire in the first place given their history. Maybe a timely reminder to mention Halloween [1] ? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents

southerntofu 5y ago
They've always been acting as a strong monopolistic corporation with a "fuck you" attitude. Here's a summary of Microsoft attitude these part 5 years: - rebrand as open-source friendly, only open-source whatever narrow side-projects they barely care about but could be run on other systems (VSCode, Powershell); distribute official packages with spyware - monopolize the education system by offering bribes including gratis hardware devices to whoever in State education will work with them to pretend Microsoft loves kids and kids need computers (with Microsoft software, obviously) to learn anything in the 21st century - force manufacturers to deploy "TPM v2.0" on their new machines so they can run Windows 11, continuing the push so that people have 0 understanding and control over the machines they own (instead are controlled by the machines), and don't have a choice of system because "SecureBoot" [0] - love Linux! let them integrate all your POSIX/Linux APIs in a VM on their system, so that you never have to use anything else than Windows ever again (embrace...) ; it's just like reverse-Wine (execute Windows program on free systems) except they have an army of developers with $$$$ and don't have to waste time reverse-engineering anything because they have the source code to both systems... how convenient! - viruses are such a huge problem, if only we had some sort of digital signatures for software, and trustworthy places to get it from?! sure let's have a Microsoft market where you can buy adware/spyware signed by Microsoft, with two key advantages: 1) it's super faster because signed software is not inspected real-time by Windows defender 2) noone else can make their own "appstore" repository with their own signature keys (like we do with Flatpak/APT/nix/guix) ; very soon they can start to hide how to run programs unapproved by Microsoft like Android or MacOS [1] have been doing... and it's all for security, right? because app-store monopoly has definitely stopped malware (oooh that's a nice flashlight app you got there Google Play) without harming FLOSS/hobbyist devs (yeah sure) It's just *washing (openwashing here) straight out of marketing textbooks. If you know/learn anything about capitalism and public relations, you won't be tricked next time! [0] Briefly touched upon in this bigger article about how Microsoft is still evil, why Secure Boot has nothing to do with security, and why hardware manufacturers happily play along: https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/mmu_man/2021-10-04_ok_lenovo_we_need_to_talk/ https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/mmu_man/2021-10-04_ok_lenovo_w... [1] There was even this worrying story at some point that MacOS would refuse to open applications (whether signed or not) because their centralized server could not be reached: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959 <-- Soon coming to your Windows setup
- pas 5y ago
  Ah, I don't really care about telemetry, but their amazing outlook.com SMTP service rejects mail from small senders, and there's no way to successfully appeal. Yeey, brave new megacorp world!
  - op00to 5y ago
    What’s the difference between a small sender and a spam host?
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      The difference is decided by decent spam filters: - is the exact same message being sent to many users? - does it look like previous spam? - are messages from this host being reported as spam by users? We have plenty of techniques to filter out spam (those above and technical ones like DKIM to enable host reputation systems) and they mostly work great. What Google/Microsoft are doing is just monopolistic attitude and has nothing to do with spam filtering. Spam from big email servers is still common, but legit emails from smaller servers will not reach intended recipients, and will not produce any indication of that on either side of the communication. It's just silently going in the trash. If there was at least a decent way to get allowlisted on their side, we could give them the benefit of the doubt and accept that email ecosystem has turned to an opt-in federation model. But the way they do it and prevent recourse is a clear abuse of dominant position to crush the competition.
    - Lex-2008 5y ago
      do you mean you never received spam from @gmail.com? Lucky you!
      - oynqr 5y ago
        With a proper rspamd setup, gmail is the only source of delivered spam for me.
    - roblabla 5y ago
JeremyNT 5y ago
Are they losing trust though? Many young developers don't remember the height of the EEE days in the 90s and 00s when MS was trying very hard to extinguish free software. These are just stories to them. Now, MS runs the world's largest source code sharing service and many of these young developers launch proprietary MS code editing tools daily. We old timers always knew what the end game was, but young people lack the context and so many are already hooked on MS now. It's not obvious to me that they will ever care enough to switch no matter how hostile MS behaves.
- dpbriggs 5y ago
  Young free software advocates exist - I'm one. I know about EEE and agree we're in a sorry state. I have a feeling MS will continue to dominate due to network effects and vscode/wsl being a nice enough experience. It'll take them resting on their laurels or some great act of user hostility to change this status quo.
- flatiron 5y ago
  I remember. It’s also hard to turn down WSL and VSC. They are wonderful products and I’m fairly certain I’m sadly contributing to all this nonsense but I also need to get my day job done and pay the bills. One day large corporations I hope will allow Linux. But at least mine it’s windows or macOS and apple is far behind the wsl/vsc curve right now and apparently doesn’t have any motivation to catch up. They rely on “you have to use Xcode” right now which is unfortunate.
- Shared404 5y ago
  > young people lack the context and so many are already hooked on MS now. It's not obvious to me that they will ever care enough to switch no matter how hostile MS behaves. Not all of us. I had just barely started being willing to trust Microsoft again, and they've repeatedly shown themselves to be hostile since the initial "Github is cool! And WSL! And VSCode!", enough is enough. I've read the Halloween documents, I know where this goes.

Gargyle 5y ago

Where did they actually do nice things? VSCode is still not entirely open source and the official builds have spyware included.

lordofgibbons 5y ago
Thank you for saying this. For those who don't know about the open-source release of VSCode, check out https://vscodium.com/ https://vscodium.com/
- alias_neo 5y ago
  I use VSCodium every day, and recommend it over VSCode to everyone, however, due to microsoft's locked down plugins, particulary the ones related to remote development and debug, there are certain things which can be done with VSCode and not VSCodium. It's worth bearing in mind for those considering switching.
  - rzzzt 5y ago
    SSH FS, a third-party extension seems to work well with VSCodium: https://github.com/SchoofsKelvin/vscode-sshfs https://github.com/SchoofsKelvin/vscode-sshfs
    - pedro2 5y ago
      They mean Microsoft's plugins -- they just work with VSCode on purpose.
      - rzzzt 5y ago
        This one is an alternative to the remote development tooling which doesn't work on VSCodium. It is certainly not a full replacement, but you get to poke around the files on the remote system and run commands over SSH.
    - alias_neo 5y ago
      Yes, but unfortunately if you want to use something like Okteto[0] it requires the microsoft plugin. There are other third party plugins and tools tightly bound to the Microsoft ones making them unfortunately unusable. [0]https://okteto.com/ https://okteto.com/

forgotmypw17 5y ago

The motivation seems pretty obvious to me: They want to obscure as much as possible what's going on inside OS.

dTal 5y ago

Quite a lot of community goodwill, unfairly granted. I've lost count of how many times I've read on this very forum, "calling it Micro$oft is childish, they're a changed company, Nadella is better than Ballmer, etc". They are as hostile to free software as they ever were. Why wouldn't they be? It's antithetical to their business model. The only thing that's changed is how sneaky they are about their time-honored tactic - embrace, extend, extinguish.

maccolgan 5y ago
EEE isn't obsolete, very far from obsolete in fact, they are just playing it (very) long.
fyzix 5y ago
Microsoft took the same approach as Bill Gates. Gate's ruthlessness made the public hate him(remember the milkshaking?). He took public relations serious and put on the nice guy public facing image while still being as devious and wretched as he was back then. The Microsoft leaders saw how well this worked him and used the same tactic.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
I lived through the dark days, they are definitely not as hostile as they used to be. However, that could change at any point with a change in leadership or a bad quarter.

pmontra 5y ago

Trusting a company with the history of Microsoft (and its size) is at least naive. Not one of the mistakes I did in my life.

tata71 5y ago

Shareholders are getting anxious.

fortran77 5y ago
I don't think so. https://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/price https://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/price
- emptyparadise 5y ago
  Some nth derivative growth metric is slowing down, so the company is actually doomed unless it does some shady shit.

e0a74c 5y ago

What goodwill?