[dscottboggs]

It's not just about privacy, it's about building your project as dependent on an organization that does harm. It aligns you with them and makes you want them to succeed so that you can sustain your project, when without that dependency you may have otherwise wished them ill.

[bamboozled]

How on earth are any of the Nix foundations project "dependent" on GitHub?

I mean they even have their own independent build system?

[rijoja]

There's this whole concept of "Embrace, Extend Extinguish", that a lot of people in the open source community hasn't forgotten about, and therefore find it hard to trust anything that Microsoft is about.

[chpatrick]

What's the most recent thing Microsoft extinguished?

[dscottboggs]

Probably Atom

[bamboozled]

I think atom was going down before Microsoft bought GitHub ?

[chpatrick]

I mean it never really took off an VS Code is a great replacement. It's not clear if Atom would've gone anywhere even if MS didn't buy Github.

[dash2]

What harm does Microsoft do? I think on net the world is better with it.

[cygx]

Microsoft is not your friend. Like most large companies, it tries to game the system to the detriment of the general public: Monopolistic practices (embrace-extend-extinguish, discounts for hardware vendors that only bundle Windows, ...), lobbying for software patents, tax avoidance, all that jazz.

There are also concerns with regard to civil liberties such as spying on their customers out of self-interest and on behalf of the US government, cooperating with authoritarian regimes such as China or their participation in Trusted Computing. Also note that while nowadays, just like many other tech companies, Microsoft might get criticized as being 'woke' by people with a certain political outlook, in the late 2000s, they were throwing people off xbox live for mentioning being gay in their profiles (or just having the surname 'Gaywood', for that matter).

[dash2]

This sounds like "Microsoft has done some bad things, ergo it must be a villain that makes the world worse". That doesn't seem like a sensible evaluation strategy.