#microsoft is evil

So, open my email at work and get a “my analytics” message. Didn’t think much at first. I handle websites, work with the social media team , etc. so there are lots of analytics we track. Then I took another look. Nope, this is Microsoft tracking ME and wanting to tell me how focused I was at work last week. 

Now Microsoft claims this info is private and googling it showed me how to find the command to supposedly turn it off. But I really have no way of knowing that it is off or that my company can’t get access to the info to find ways to justify a lower raise or worse if they wanted. 

So, here is what is wrong with this deal and why anybody active in the open source community should be upset that Microsoft is going to be the steward of this large body of code. For starters, Microsoft has a very long history of abusing its position vis-a-vis open source and other companies. I’m sure you’ll be able to tell I’m a cranky old guy by looking up the dates to some of these references, but ‘new boss, same as the old boss’ applies as far as I’m concerned. Yes, the new boss is a nicer guy but it’s the same corporate entity. Some concrete examples of the things Microsoft have done:

Abuse of their de facto monopoly position to squash competition, including abuse of the DD process to gain insight into a competitors software

Bankrolling the SCO Lawsuit that ran for many years in order to harm Linux in the marketplace

Abuse of their monopoly position to unfairly compete with other browser vendors, including Netscape

Subverting open standards with a policy of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

The recent Windows 10 Telemetry abuse

The acquisition of Skype, after which all the peer-to-peer traffic was routed through Microsoft, essentially allowing them to snoop on the conversations. To pre-empt the technical counter argument that this was done to improve the service: It only improved the service for some edge cases, for everybody else the service got worse because of the extra round-trip latency. So if that was the real reason then you’d have expected to see the traffic routed to the central servers only if one of those edge cases was detected.

Unfair advantage over competitors by using internal APIs for applications unavailable for competing products

Tied-sales and bundling

Abuse of Patents

The list is endless. So, this is the company that you want to trust with becoming the steward of a very large chunk of the open source world? Not me. And for all you closed source customers of GitHub, do you really want the company that abused a due-diligence process faking an acquisition interest to have the inside scoop on your code?

I’ve deleted my GitHub account, I’ll find a way to replace it and if you’re halfway clever so should you. Foxes may change their coats, they don’t change their nature.