[sitkack]

> old Microsoft of the 90s

Not to jackknife the thread, but most developers were born in the 90s and do not remember this Microsoft.

The engineering and dev managers DO remember this Microsoft. So while I agree somewhat they are trying to repair their image, with the younger crowd they only know MS as Minecraft, VS Code, Azure, Github. More people probably got exposure to Linux via WSL than all of the previous installs combined.

90s me would have thought hell would have frozen over, and now me knows it has.

[pydry]

The only real change I've seen to Microsoft since the 90s is that it finally "embraced" open source in markets it was losing in when the only other alternative was irrelevance.

They're still playing dirty tricks on open source. They're just not stupid enough to use the ones that would do more harm than good.

[sitkack]

Most companies are only using open source as a weapon [1].

When people say that "MS gets open source now", what it really means is the MS gets how OS can be used to further its goals. Not that they have fundamentally changed.

MS will have graduated to the next level of maturity when it open sources something that is strategic to the ecosystem and the ecosystem as a whole benefits (Windows NT 4?) or something that is obviously making them money.

[1] https://www.gwern.net/Complement

[GordonS]

> MS will have graduated to the next level of maturity when it open sources something that is strategic to the ecosystem and the ecosystem as a whole benefits

Dotnet Core is cross-platform and fits that bill.

It introduced a huge segment of Windows-only devs to Linux.

Yes, that furthers Microsoft's goals too, as Linux is very important in the cloud, and therefore Azure. But regardless, the move has also benefited many, many developers, and the Linux ecosystem.