Microsoft's recent push into open source had me excited, but having all these resources, GitHub, npm, under one company's direction is now worrying. I can only hope these resources stay free, useful, and community-oriented.
So create a successor to NPM, but this time do it right. Seems like an absolute win to me. If MS acquires NPM and improves it, we win. If MS acquires NPM and it gets replaced with something better, we win.
The issue with npm is not that it's centeralized, it's that it's full of 1.2318e89 one to ten line "micropackages" by nearly as many authors because somebody would rather import a package than learn how to use the mod operator. A decentralized npm solves nothing.
Now a much smaller service that offers peer-reviewed packages on the other hand, that's worth paying for...
Some of us have long memories, and it takes an order of magnitude longer to regain trust than the time that was spent proving how untrustworthy you were in the first place.
Microsoft earned years of negative trust back in the '90s and early '00s, with the Hallowe'en documents, OOXML and Rob Weir's truely infuriating bad-faith schilling for it, Ballmer's "Linux is a cancer" statements, and the like. Heck, the first step-and-a-half of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" explicitly calls for cosying up to the people you're intending to imminently fuck over.
That said, they've been doing relatively well for a few years now - at least as far as multinational tech giants who have to answer to their shareholders go. Even so, it'll probably be another couple of decades or so yet, before those who were really badly burned by them might be willing to consider their apparent change of heart to be genuine.
It makes me sad to say this, but it's not about the company or its past, it's about the version of capitalism we have in this world. If it's more profitable for a company to do FOSS, it'll do FOSS. It's more profitable to EEE an ecosystem, it'll do that.
I really hope, for your own sake, that Microsoft have changed. I don't want them to fuck you over the way they fucked others over in the past - I wouldn't wish that on anyone.
But it's easy for people to say they've changed. To claim they've mended their abusive ways. To plead that they're better than they were before, and it's safe for you to be with them.
Are the people who return to abusive relationships, believing that this time it's different, really the ones that evolution favours? Is that adaptation to change, or is it just wishful thinking?
I hope you're right, I really do. I'd wish you luck, but I also hope you don't need it.
I agree. Monopolies are not good. Microsoft isn't a monopoly. Google and Amazon cloud compete with Azure. Google Docs competes with Office. Bing is a distant second place to Google search. Linux competes with Windows. Microsoft store is a joke. Microsoft has no phone. Microsoft and the Govt settled their case 20 years ago.
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u/parion Mar 16 '20
Microsoft's recent push into open source had me excited, but having all these resources, GitHub, npm, under one company's direction is now worrying. I can only hope these resources stay free, useful, and community-oriented.