[carapace]

I recently bought a couple of cheap "college kid" laptops from the mall to use as dumb terminals. Before installing Linux on them I figured I'd play a round of my favorite old video game "Rome: Total War" (i got a Steam account just for that. Oddly the game won't play on Linux (although I'm sure I recall playing it through Wine back in the day, but maybe that's wrong?) so I figured I'd keep Windows on one of the laptops long enough to play through a round of the game.)

The laptop would not let me start to use it until I had activated Wi-Fi and connected a Microsoft account! It literally would not leave the init wizard until I had "phoned home" to the corporate cloud.

> Name a single thing Microsoft has EEE'd in the last 20 years.

See above.

- - - -

In reply to nfinished sib comment:

> "Ask HN: GitHub just added a feature I don't like to GitHub" is a conversation worth having?

So why are you?

[arp242]

The whole Windows activation story sucks; 100% agree on that. But it's not "EEE". I don't follow how it's even remotely similar.

Aside: I just have a Windows VM for testing, but I bypassed the account "requirement" for that by disconnecting from the internet when installing Windows.

[carapace]

> I don't follow how it's even remotely similar.

Well then I don't know what to tell you. From my POV as a "Free" software fanatic* it all seems "of a piece": VS Code is a Trojan Horse, GitHub is insidious, etc.

(* I'm one of those who sees the "Open Source" movement as a distraction from the main point of the "Free" software movement, although I have to admit that most people haven't heard of either of them, and of those who have, most can't or don't distinguish them.)

[arp242]

Embrace, extend, and extinguish is a very specific term, which means – quoting Wikipedia – "a strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors."

I just don't see how "need Microsoft account to log in to Windows" even remotely fits that. I don't know of anything Microsoft has done in the last 20 or so years that fits that. I can tell you of specific things Microsoft has done in the last 20 years that I don't like, but that doesn't make it embrace, extend, and extinguish.

I think especially if you want to promote Free Software it's very important to keep a cool head and not get too clouded by past grievances. IMHO people are fighting yesterday's war with all of this to the detriment of today's war.

[carapace]

> Embrace, extend, and extinguish is a very specific term, which means – quoting Wikipedia – "a strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors."

That sure sounds like gh vs git to me (the thing this thread is about.)

> I just don't see how "need Microsoft account to log in to Windows" even remotely fits that.

The have embraced and extinguished the very idea of owning your own computer. These laptops come configured as dumb terminals for their corporate cloud. They EEE'd the Dynabook yo!?

> I don't know of anything Microsoft has done in the last 20 or so years that fits that.

I'm sure there are examples of MS following their playbook over the last three decades, I'm not going to "google it for you", there are probably lists kept by people who care more than I do.

> I can tell you of specific things Microsoft has done in the last 20 years that I don't like, but that doesn't make it embrace, extend, and extinguish.

I feel like you're missing the forest for the trees. The EEE thing is a strategy or tactic to achieve the overall goal: getting between people and their hardware and "extracting rent". That's their whole thing, yeah?

GitHub acquisition, VS Code, etc. Everything they do is EEE, whether it looks like a sheep or a wolf, it's a wolf.

Incidentally, that's why I don't accept the "Ship of Theseus" idea that MS has turned over in the last few decades. The ship is still a ship.

> I think especially if you want to promote Free Software it's very important to keep a cool head and not get too clouded by past grievances.

That's what I'm saying: the very idea that these grievances are past is exactly what I have a problem with, because they're not past. If anything, MS is succeeding.

> IMHO people are fighting yesterday's war with all of this to the detriment of today's war.

Following the war metaphor, I think we (the Free software folks) have clearly lost completely. We have been roundly defeated. Most people have never heard of us, let alone know what we're even about.

The closest thing to a front in the "War of General Purpose Computing" is the farmers fighting the tractor companies for the right to repair their tractors now that they have computers in them.

In any event, well met. Cheers! :)