[Zhyl]

>Publicly take back Microsoft's attacks on copyleft made in the 2000s. Ballmer called the GPL a "cancer". Allchin called it "un-American".

(from the "Suggestions I gave to Microsoft" section)

This is something I agree with. I don't think that Microsoft are likely to apologise for EEE [1] as that is likely just considered 'business' and part of the zeitgeist; neither do I think that Microsoft necessarily needs to endorse or support GPL as they are definitely unlikely to be using it for any products for the foreseeable.

They should, however, be a bit more repentant about starting a McCarthy-esque red scare against all things open source. I don't think those things were appropriate at the time and they really should at the very least be acknowledged as part of the "Microsoft heart Linux" initiative.

Part of me, though, thinks that Microsoft's recent adventures in Linux have been more 'Black Friday' than 'Good Friday'.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend%2C_and_extin...

[richard_todd]

Earlier he had said that we shouldn’t keep old grudges, so I was surprised he then turned around and asked for them to renounce statements from 20+ years ago, made by people that aren’t even there anymore.

In my mind, .net core and vs code and countless smaller projects are a complete renunciation of their previous public statements. Maybe Stallman can’t see that because they MIT license those things, but why ask for more talk when you are already getting action?

Edit: here’s Ballmer turning around in public on the cancer thing. https://www.zdnet.com/article/ballmer-i-may-have-called-linu... so I really don’t see what more Stallman wants.

[jacquesm]

Ballmer is an opportunist, pure and simple. When it suited him Linux was a cancer, and when it no longer suited him he 'loved Linux'. If the wind should ever change Linux will for sure be a cancer again.

[vezycash]

> Ballmer is an opportunist, pure and simple.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Ballmer is not a Devil. Open source was costing him billions in lost Windows revenue from Google, Amazon and many other companies. Right now, with hindsight bias, we feel that the path to capitalizing on open source was OBVIOUS - it wasn't. Cloud computing wasn't a thing when Ballmer was in power - an existential crisis for the Microsoft.

The new guy Nadella is no Saint or Altruist. Right now, it's obvious business sense to embrace open source - particularly because of Azure unlike 20 years ago.

People talk about Saint Nadella and forget that Nadella's just taking the glory for Money makers that were started & financed by Ballmer - Xbox, Azure, Office 365, Hololens, Surface Pro, Windows 10...

Google which built its business on open source, embraced open source much early with Chrome & Android. However, they are doing a tactical retreat - butchering those two money makers and making key parts of them proprietary.

If Jobs were still running the show at Apple when he built NextStep, he wouldn't have embraced Unix. At that time, only broke people did open source but now big companies can go broke trying to build everything by themselves.

Just follow the money and most people are easy to understand. Google won't stop spying on people because of money. And Apple will join the fray once the financial guys can prove that they'll make more money selling customer's data.

[marmaduke]

> Apple will join the fray once the financial guys can prove that they'll make more money selling

Could it be (I'm not an apple fanboi though I like my 2015 MBP) that Apple's financial predictions suggested that a lone company not selling customer data might be able to flip that to their advantage in the marketing or minds of its users? Apple privacy is a recurrent même so it seems they succeeded intentionally or otherwise

[jacquesm]

I very much do not think Nadella is a saint, for one thing he was there when Ballmer did his stuff, if he was a man of principle he'd have left MS long before he made it to the top so I'm going on the assumption that he was A-Ok with those strategies as long as it benefited him.

[ThrowawayR2]

> Ballmer is an opportunist, pure and simple.

You say that as if it were a condemnation. Everybody who runs a business is an opportunist, pure and simple.

[asveikau]

Everyone who runs a business, just like everyone in any other life circumstance, must balance multiple concerns at the same time. So, the need to make money, and the need not to be a jerk. They can and should overlap in the same individual.

We've gone through periods in our culture where we glorify greed and self-interest. (Commentary like yours makes me think of Reaganites or Ayn Rand.) We've gone through other periods where we acknowledge the need to band together. (Think 1960s hippies.) A functioning person probably needs both types of influence at various times of their lives. I get really tired of how many people glorify or worship the former and neglect the latter.

[jacquesm]

To a coarse approximation, yes. But very few people would go to the lengths that Ballmer was prepared to go to. In a more just society these guys would be behind bars rather than pretending to be philanthropists.

[ThrowawayR2]

> But very few people would go to the lengths that Ballmer was prepared to go to.

Larry Ellison? Scott McNealy? I'm sure I could think of others if I had the time. Ballmer was merely the most visible because MS was at the top of the food chain at the time.

[jacquesm]

Good point about Ellison and McNealy, Jobs figures in there somewhere as well given how he treated his business partner.

[fortran77]

That would be fine if he didn't pretend to be a man of "principles" built on a foundation that can not be shaken.

[tutfbhuf]

Ballmer says Linux instead of GNU/Linux. That's just another mistake.

[deskamess]

Your point about 'action' vs 'talk' is valid.

In this case what is being asked is not a grudge that needs to be addressed. Keep in mind the underlying context of the suggestions => "what can Microsoft do". So this is, in my eyes, more of something that Microsoft can choose to do for themselves - admit that they said things in the past that were not exactly true. A self initiated internal cleaning of the air as they continue to engage the public community. This is not something that they have to do to address a grudge. It should be mostly symbolic to the external world. So, is there value in Microsoft actually coming out and saying it? Well, that's for Microsoft to decide.

[rerx]

Quoted for its WTF-factor:

> Perhaps his new-found peace with Linux is linked to yoga, a practice he said he has taken up after leaving Microsoft in 2014.

[dhruvmittal]

> They should, however, be a bit more repentant about starting a McCarthy-esque red scare against all things open source.

Especially since we're still suffering from it. There are enough project & program managers who see the words "open source" on an engineering document & send us back to build or buy some alternative.

[swebs]

You sure that's not just for GPL? I worked at a place that had a strict no-GPL policy due to the legal risks of non-compliance. LGPL and MIT software was fine though.

[AnthonyMouse]

"The legal risks of non-compliance" are the exact FUD the old Microsoft spread. If someone doesn't follow the GPL then they don't have a right to reproduce the software and can be liable for copyright infringement, which is the same as any software license proprietary or otherwise.

That someone wouldn't be liable if they distribute the source for their modifications doesn't increase the risk, it decreases it by providing an alternative to paying damages for infringement that they otherwise wouldn't have, since the GPL author will typically accept compliance in lieu of monetary damages.

[thomasz]

It is way, way, way easier to ensure that you follow a commercial license.

[AnthonyMouse]

Commercial licenses are long and frequently contain terms that are unintuitive or ambiguous which are trivial to violate when most of the employees using the software aren't aware they exist.

And the easiest way to violate them is simply to have installed more copies than you're licensed for, which is an issue the GPL doesn't have.

[PeterStuer]

Trying to figure out exactly which production licenses were needed to be in compliance used to be a recurring nightmare back in the day when I did B2B bespoke system rollouts. A licensing guide, not the license itself but the document trying to explain which licenses have to be acquired under which circumstances, could run well over 100 pages. Microsoft had licensing specialists that the channel could call for help, but if you called them twice or more for the same case you would never get the same answer twice. It was that complex, their own specialists couldn't make heads from tales on it.

[NullPrefix]

>Microsoft had licensing specialists that the channel could call for help, but if you called them twice or more for the same case you would never get the same answer twice.

Do they preface with a "I'm not a lawyer" disclaimer and claim that anything they say is non binding?

[jacquesm]

And that service only exists as leadgen.

[organsnyder]

Unless it's with Oracle.

[jki275]

It's not open source so much as it is GPL. In industry, GPL software is essentially anathema. MIT/BSD and other licenses are far easier to get approval to use.

[cameronbrown]

I can understand their perspective, especially if they're non technical. Much of the time they see open source as some ragtag community project that has no real support so they believe in terms of risk, it can seem lower to build or buy.

[jupp0r]

If they don’t even know enough about open source (and are resistent to being enlightened), they shouldn’t be making this decision.

[falcolas]

Devil’s Advocate - it’s not their job to educate themselves about the vagrancies of open source, it’s the developer’s (or more accurately tech lead’s) job to educate them about the particulars of a project, to prove that the project is healthy with good support today and will be healthy with good support tomorrow.

Without those assurances, and without investigating the project myself, I’d probably turn it down too.

[freeone3000]

Are they that wrong? What real support does an npm module have?

[isostatic]

What support do you get by buying a non-open source module?

[falcolas]

A support contract, typically. Few people sell code alone. They sell code plus a contract to support that code.

Support contracts can be very lucrative.

[bernierocks]

It's usually included when you purchase a commercial license.

I work with a company that generally stays away from open source software, unless they have an in-house developer that can maintain it.

Most open source projects (unless it's backed by a huge company that also charges for support) are run by volunteers that have a day job. This means that support will be non-existent beyond what the developer(s) feel like and bug fixes/updates may or may not happen. This doesn't work that well when a company relies on this software for any critical task.

[cameronbrown]

Exactly. Given the absolute shitshow maintaining anything in the JavaScript ecosystem I can't blame them.

[EpicEng]

Replace "open source" with "GPL" and I think you'd be correct.

[Iv]

I do believe we are coming in an age where reputation is going to be increasingly important to companies. Those that change their opinions based on the hype and the short term profits are going to only have features and price as sales arguments whereas a company with a strong reputation and clear values will be able to charge a premium.

I have no doubt that Microsoft is in the first category, but a company that would be in the second one would understand the importance of making public excuses for past stances.

[asdfman123]

Microsoft also used to be a company whose growth depended on maintaining the Windows monopoly over the PC market, so everything they did helped underscore that.

Now they are trying to compete in the cloud, and the dynamics are different. They know Windows servers aren't going to beat out Linux servers. They need to use honey instead of vinegar to win people over.

It's a different company with different revenue streams, thus a different approach.

[Iv]

Microsoft has always been very sweet and very competent when it was the underdog. It then seeks to establish dominant and becomes one of the worst players.

In the cloud, it is dwarfed by other companies so it needs to play the OSS game well to win over devs. But I have no reason to think that their main ethos has changed.

[jacquesm]

I'd be happy with a donation to the FSF roughly equivalent to all the money they made by scare tactics against Linux on the server, including their backhanded funding of the SCO lawsuit.

[feb]

And the money to "standardize" the ISO docx format.

[dhd415]

Frankly, I think that is a situation where Microsoft just voiced what was common practice in many places in the industry. I've worked on a variety of both commercial and widely-used open source software projects and in all cases, GPL-licensed code was forbidden after consultation with counsel because of the limitations it would have imposed either on the company itself or on the users of our software.

[arminiusreturns]

This is more due to bad lawyers not understanding things than gpl itself, especially considering agpl, apache2 etc. Usually because nobody takes the time to explain it to them. Using RedHat as an example tends to be the most productive with legal and the C's in my experience.

[Jedd]

> They should, however, be a bit more repentant about starting a McCarthy-esque red scare against all things open source.

Or, as rms went to some lengths to explain here and elsewhere, free software.

Paying attention is important in this particular case.

[ChrisSD]

But MS were, at the time, against all things open source. Not just free software (although that did seem to get the full brunt of their ire).

[Jedd]

> But MS were, at the time, against all things open source.

This may or may not be the case, insofar as an organisation can be said to have a position on a vague notion.

As per the article, rms is seeking that:

"Publicly take back Microsoft's attacks on copyleft made in the 2000s. Ballmer called the GPL a "cancer"."

I suspect rms doesn't care terribly much if MS were 'against all things open source' since no one really did, or does, know what that might mean.

[jraph]

This is all about sending a message and clarify a position.

When someone in a marketing team of a company sends a message, they usually speak for the company, not for themself, except otherwise explicitly stated. So indeed, we can't expect a huge company like Microsoft have a uniform opinion on all things, but Microsoft as an entity stills sends a more or less coherent message if they take care of their communication.

And I would not blame someone understanding a statement from Ballmer for Microsoft's official stand if the statement was made when he was the head of the company and the company did not issue an apology or a clarification after the fact.

[Jedd]

I think we agree in principle, however the point I made originally was that it's not hurtful, false, and/or spurious claims about 'open source' that rms seeks remedy for, it's 'free software'.

[samatman]

Just as Free Software is, effectively, whatever the Free Software Foundations says it is, open source software is whatever the Open Source Initiative says it is.

[Jedd]

Perhaps it's that easy, but rms is referring to comments made about the GPL (which is definitely aligned with free software, not open-source) and which were made a year or two after the OSI pinched/borrowed Debian's Free Software guidelines and came up with their initial definition.

So, at the time Ballmer was a) definitely talking about free software by mentioning GPL, and b) probably not particularly interested in, or aware of, the split by the 'open source' proponents.

[lunchables]

That's my problem with "Microsoft [heart] Linux" - there was never any apology. They attacked linux and open source for years and now suddenly they want to be best friends.

I need to see some real contrition and proof that they understand all the things they did were wrong so I can be convinced they won't repeat the same behavior. Otherwise it just sounds like an abusive partner begging you to take them back.

[youdontknowtho]

"support GPL as they are definitely unlikely to be using it for any products"

They ship the Linux kernel as part of Windows now. They ship updates for it through Windows update. It's in beta, but will be released this quarter, I think?

[UserIsUnused]

Ballmer was more specifically referring to governmental funding going to free software, his competitors.

[jccalhoun]

I still have a creative commons communist shirt I bought when I saw it on BoingBoing https://boingboing.net/2005/01/06/more-gates-creative.html

They were created in response to Bill Gates comment that people who want to weaken or eliminate intellectual property laws were "some new modern-day sort of communists" https://boingboing.net/2005/01/05/bill-gates-free-cult.html

[dwighttk]

Making money rather than crucifying a savior?

[ndespres]

A reference to the Good Friday Agreement, a pivotal development in the UK/Republic of Ireland peace talks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Friday_Agreement

[dwighttk]

(Thanks)