You really had to be there to understand the emotions involved. It was like a real life version of Star Wars with the Rebel Alliance (GNU / Linux / BSD et al.) against the Galatic Empire (Microsoft).
People protested and made it into a social movement that has since become mainstream:
Microsoft is a company that in the past tried very hard to use their dominance in certain markets take over other markets. It’s hard for young people to understand how powerful Microsoft was as a company in the mid 90s.
They had a history of outright stealing of other companies' intellectual property. They had the habit of deliberately misleading people about other companies' products. Those of us who lived through the 90s lost all trust in Microsoft. They will never ever regain that trust.
Some places to investigate for your own education: 'The Halloween Documents', 'AARD Code', 'Embrace, Extend, Extinguish', 'STAC software stolen, DriveSpace released','Exclusionary Licensing', 'Sendo', 'XBox 360 Disk Failures Suppressed', 'Microsoft Litigation', etc, etc, etc.
They also used public standards and added propietary incompatible standards on it.
outlook 365 requires changes to use smtp and imap that are not always compatibel with standard software. They "standartised" their xml based document standard (docx, ...) despite the open document standard already beeing standartised and impossible to implement for other developers except microsoft(modern office files are incompatible with the standard).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents
Things have changed since then:
https://www.idginsiderpro.com/article/3584911/how-microsoft-...
You really had to be there to understand the emotions involved. It was like a real life version of Star Wars with the Rebel Alliance (GNU / Linux / BSD et al.) against the Galatic Empire (Microsoft).
People protested and made it into a social movement that has since become mainstream:
https://youtu.be/1j9j-Ywjmbk