this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
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Jeezus. Microsoft can't do anything without people talking crap about them π
It's almost like they have a terrible track history and hold the gold medal for antitrust and enshitification.
To be fair, there is a young up and comer in that space. They could challenge the enshittification GOAT.
If someone evades billions in taxes but one day donates 50 dollars it doesn't absolve their wrongdoings whatsoever. This is just an attempt at trying to improve their image.
It doesn't mean there is some evil plan either π
You'll find that developers in these companies tend not to care so much about politics either.
Like I used to sell apple gear. The sales people were political. When I went to a developer conference, the developers were absolutely upfront about everything and normal people
In my experience, generally the most vocal contribute the least lol
These corpos are very vocal in arguing to maintain their low tax contributions so perhaps you're right.
Again, you do realise Mono was started by the same guy who founded Gnome right?
No corpos does something for the good of the people. It just so happen that this particular thing does.
Behind every move, there is a price tag attached to it.
By doing that, Microsoft is trying to get good PR.
You're not wrong, but if we want companies to keep doing things for good PR, we need to reward them for it.
They're basically giant badly trained dogs that happen to control every aspect of our lives.
I agree actually. They're not giving ANYONE incentive to donate to open source, and that mirrors my own experience where the community were asses to me too for my own project (which got lots of publicity including international print media, frontpage slashdot, etc. But after putting up with trolls telling me to do it a different way and calling it crap I dumped it. Fortunately a major distro had a similar idea at the same time and implemented. And thats a distro these same guys have also shat on honestly over the years.
People turned on Redhat too fairly quickly, and they donated a metric ton of code. And my experience in a lot of open source projects honestly is that on most of them, the community contributes next-to-nothing. Canonical too.. SystemD? Constantly getting attacked.
it's why I personally stopped creating my own projects.
If the community stopped using code from these companies they constantly crap on, I think they would be surprised just how little of linux is left (like Wayland is by a Redhat Developer, and Keith Packard from Xorg worked at HP).
And somehow, there is always some weird conspiracy too. Like even releasing Windows 1.0 source code would be something Microsoft does to try to trick linux users or whatever lol
Do you think they're going to ask for this one back? π
Whatever it is, it benefits the community.
What price tag do you think is attached to this one?
Things can be beneficial to both parties.... Not everything corporations do need to screw someone else π
Microsoft primary motivation was not to benefit the community, but to gain good PR in that case. It just so happen that this move also benefits the community as well.
And that's my point. Sometimes, corpos' decisions benefit the community, but this is only a side effect, not the intended purpose.
The guy who started mono also started gnome you realize.
More likely he influenced this decision
People have experience.
Nobody forced them to be ruthless monsters and monopolize computers for 40 years.
Because they're crap. Pretty obvious right?
How does this help open source?
I'm not sure how the community has grown to be so toxic recently that it becomes risky to release a product as open source, and we're losing opportunities. This has huge benefits to projects like wine
Are you guys suggesting they should retract the offer and close source everything?
All I said was MS is crap. I stand behind my statement. Looks like their PR team is working overtime here.
Mate. I don't even use Windows anymore lol
And I started a few open source projects and contributed to a lot of them.
This is why Linux still isn't gaining market share because for 25 years I've been watching the community scare off developers and treat them like crap. It happens constantly.
You're not giving anyone any incentive to assist
In all likelihood they donated this code because it doesn't benefit them anymore or became a burden. The developers aren't sitting there thinking "mmm, this is gonna make us so popular".
Did you know the guy who stayed mono is actually the guy who started gnome? They got acquired by Microsoft.
They have burned their good will and trust long ago. When someone untrustworthy suddenly does something nice, you look for hidden hooks and definitely dont just take them for their word. If they actually did something nice then good for them, maybe if they keep it up they could eventually clean their reputation a little.
As the great philosopher and poet, George Bush, said:
Fool me once can't get fooled again!
This made me look up the wikipedia page on Bushism and I must say it's beautiful! Thanks :)
It's embarrassing at times, much like it was almost two decades ago when Slashdot used to shit on "Micro$oft" for everything. Lemmy also has a tendency to be emotional to tech news rather than factual, so there's that too.
Pretty much every tech company is shit in some way, but it's not productive to call it out everywhere. This is a good thing.
What people don't realize, is that Miguel de Icaza actually started gnome and mono.
Xamarin got acquired by Microsoft.
I'm so tired of watching the community crap on every company which donates open source (I've been watching for 25 years at least now). Even Redhat which basically is a major factor to the survival of Linux is getting crapped on. Systemd developers, etc.
If people are genuinely interested in Linux growing, they need a positive community. Because developers like myself mostly stopped providing free code (as a hobbyist developer) because whilst finding help is difficult, it's not hard to find people willing to abuse you and your projects unfortunately
Even the VLC developers can't escape the abuse