It’s not just EEE, though. They have a history of getting devs all in on a thing and then killing it with corporate-grade ADHD. They bought Visual FoxPro, got bored with it, and told everyone to rewrite into Visual Basic (which they then killed). Then the future was Silverlight, until it wasn’t. There are a thousand of these things that weren’t deliberately evil in the EEE, but defined the word rugpull before we called it that.
So even without EEE, I think it’s supremely risky to hitch your wagon to their tech or services (unless you’re writing primarily for Windows, which is what they’d love to help you migrate to). And I can’t be convinced the GitHub acquisition wasn’t some combination of these dark patterns.
Step 1: Get a plurality of the world’s FOSS into one place.
Step 2: Feed it into a LLM and then embed it in a popular free editor so that everyone can use GPL code without actually having to abide the license.
Step 3: Make it increasingly hard to use for FOSS development by starting to add barriers a little at a time. <= we are here
As a developer, they’ve done nothing substantial to earn my trust. I think a lot of Microsoft employees are good people who don’t subscribe to all this and who want to do the right thing, but corporate culture just won’t let that be.
Note I wasn’t the one who said EEE upstream. I was just replying to the thread.
Hanlon’s razor is a thing, and I generally follow it. It’s just that I’ve seen Microsoft make so many “oops, our bad!” mistakes over the years that purely coincidentally gave them an edge up over their competition, that I tend to distrust such claims from them.
I don’t feel that way about all corps. Oracle doesn’t make little mistakes that accidentally harm the competition while helping themselves. No, they’ll look you in the eye and explain that they’re mugging you while they take your wallet. It’s kind of refreshingly honest in its own way.
> Oracle doesn’t make little mistakes that accidentally harm the competition while helping themselves. No, they’ll look you in the eye and explain that they’re mugging you while they take your wallet. It’s kind of refreshingly honest in its own way.
Sabotaging forks is scummy, but the forks were extending MS functionality, not the other way around.
GitHub was a private company before it was bought by MS. Rate limiting is.... not great, but certainly not an extinguish play.
EEE refers to the subversion of open standards or independent free software projects. It does not apply to any of the above.
MS are still scummy but at least attack them on their own demerits, and don't parrot some schtick from decades ago.