[shouldbworking]

He makes some good points, others seem like more of a conspiracy mindset. I agree with him that EEE tactics at MS are probably alive and well. We're seeing a friendlier facade because MS is losing it's dominant market position. However technology isn't inherently good or evil so I'll gladly enjoy things like Typescript until the day MS tries to make them proprietary again.

I think MS gave up selling software and wants to sell services like Amazon or Google.

[alexvoda]

Precisely. Microsoft is known to have various factions fighting for supremacy. Some factions are more willing to play fair in the open source world than others. The Windows faction and Office faction have long been known to engage in EEE tactics and still do when they can. On the other hand the .net team is much more open to releasing things as FLOSS.

As long as something is FLOSS, EEE tactics do not work and can not work, because as long as a project is FLOSS, the mindshare of the project does not belong to the author of the project.

The author should not be trusted to have good intentions even if the project is FLOSS. There have been various cases of FLOSS projects that were turned proprietary by the author having a CLA and nobody forking and maintaining the last version released as FLOSS. Should Microsoft or anybody else try to proprietar-ize a project, we as a community should absolutely fork the last FLOSS version and support that version instead. Trusting any author (not just Microsoft) not to do that is foolish. Google did it with components of Android and the community didn't do much. Oracle did it with ZFS and now everyone ignores the Oracle version of ZFS and only OpenZFS matters.

I do not see any reason to hate TypeScript, VSCode, or the recent .net work that was released as FLOSS. On the other hand I see no reason to oppose Flash and Silverlight differently. Neither is FLOSS and both have a lot of issues. Unless you have an interest in Flash, hating Silverlight when Flash is the alternative, is either hypocritical or simply doesn't make sense.

Note that while we benefit from Microsoft releasing FLOSS, the general trend of Microsoft/Oracle/Amazon/Google/others to move to selling services is more damaging to freedom in the long term than just proprietary software.