[whateverboat]

"Have become"?

Always have been. It's like people have forgotten Halloween Documents.

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

> In discussing ways of competing with open source, Document I suggests that one reason that open source projects had been able to enter the server market is the market's use of standardized protocols. The document then suggests that this can be stopped by "extending these protocols and developing new protocols" and "de-commoditiz[ing] protocols & applications". This policy has been internally nicknamed "embrace, extend, extinguish". Document I also suggests that open source software "is long-term credible ... FUD tactics can not be used to combat it", and "Recent case studies (the Internet) provide very dramatic evidence ... that commercial quality can be achieved / exceeded by OSS projects."

[tonyhart7]

its been 20 years, their strategy now is to incorporate open source into their product offering

[AnthonyMouse]

That strategy is over 20 years old:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

[pjmlp]

In regards to FOSS, Google, Facebook, Amazon, IBM and co, are much better at it than Microsoft has been.

[AnthonyMouse]

Are they? They extended DNS, LDAP and Kerberos to make Active Directory so that now every Microsoft-locked corporation is stuck using Microsoft as their internal DNS. They do the various things they do to get everyone stuck using their email instead of any other standard IMAP/SMTP/webmail provider. Azure is "somehow" one of the three major cloud providers.

[ariamailclient]

Truth be told, IMAP & SMTP are wildly obsolete in today's needs. Have a look at this: https://jmap.io/

[Lord-Jobo]

Jmap is a desperately needed upgrade, but email as a whole needs to be rebuilt. The fact that it’s so core to our current infrastructure, but is really poorly suited for maybe 75% of its usage, is a bad situation that’s only going to get worse.

Of course it’s ridiculously hard to change something that’s so foundational, and I don’t trust any of the players with enough juice to pull it off (besides Google if they actually put their whole ass into it)

[pjmlp]

Yes, given how many FOSS projects change their licenses thanks to FAANG leeching, and walled garden platforms built on FOSS software.

[AnthonyMouse]

Lots of projects started off with the BSD license instead of GPLv3/AGPL/etc. and then discovered what the consequences of that are, but those consequences haven't been hard to predict for a while now, since they're the reason those other licenses exist to begin with.

[ffsm8]

Arguably not, if they're still doing eee... Even vscode is just a shell again with most noteable extensions /language servers being proprietary again

[pjmlp]

FAANG still wins out.

[nemo136]

Yeah, and block as much as possible the possibility to include their cash cow (office) in open source: the desktop Microsoft Office apps are impossible to run under Linux without a VM, and the web versions are a PITA and lack many necessary features.

[samrus]

What i absolutely love is that this exact strategy is why coding agents dont work with proprietary tools. Open standards have so much context out in the open that any harness/agent can work effortlessly with it. But things like excel and word need manual integration which will be slow and painful and wont offer the same seamlessness for a feasible amount on effort.

Its an amazing schadenfruede, and im revelling in it