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by ggambetta 2669 days ago
While I applaud this, and I'm generally positive about Microsoft's new stance regarding open source, I wonder whether they ever have, or ever will, apologise for having made remarks like "Linux is communism". They caused a lot of damage. It feels a bit disingenuous to just pretend now that nothing happened.
3 comments
Teknoman117 2669 days ago
They will not. I can't find the link at the moment but I read an article about 6 months or so ago where, iirc, Steve Balmer and Satya Nadella where talking about Microsoft's open source plans and some of the history and made a remark that fighting open source "was the correct business choice at the time."
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gruez 2669 days ago
>having made remarks like "Linux is communism".

what?

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ggambetta 2669 days ago
Communism: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/07/31/ms_ballmer_linux_is...

Cancer: https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/ballmer-i-may-have-...

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kilo_bravo_3 2669 days ago
I don't know what a single sentence, said in 2000 by a person who has not been at an organization since 2014 has to do with said organization in 2019.

Kind of like the people who comment "embrace, extend, extinguish" on every Micro$oft article, forgetting that the one person to who the phrase has been directly attributed (by a third party who was paraphrasing) resigned from Microsoft 19 years ago and when obliquely referenced (like during lawsuits) the documents used as exhibits in the lawsuits all date from the mid-90s.

It kind of makes me roll my eyes, like people ask "did you know coca cola used to have COCAINE in it?"

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ggambetta 2668 days ago
In the 50s, Alan Turing was convicted for being gay. Much later, in 2013, the UK government issued a posthumous pardon [0]. I'm pretty sure nobody in the 2013 government was in the government in 1950, but AFAIK this was widely seen as a good thing, an admission that what the institution that is the UK government, although not the same people, had made a mistake.

I think this applies in exactly the same way to the wrongs of corporations. Out of decency, if not out of being consistent with the idea of treating them as legal persons.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25495315

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