Microsoft has asked Lenovo to make it harder to boot Linux on their computers.
obviously I know some really cool people who work at Microsoft but it's very funny to me that people have been harping on us FOSS types for not instantly forgiving them for 20 years of malice, and now we've got this. [1]
when Microsoft is asking manufacturers to prevent people from booting other OSes and not communicating as to why, they are positioning themselves as the enemy. it's that simple. if they want to be trusted by Linux users, they need to earn that trust.
we're about 2y away, by my estimation, from living in a bizarro world where x86 PCs are less open to free desktops than ARM Macs.
@tindall i dont know why but the "microsoft ❤️ open source" thing has been scarily successful and a lot of people are actually convinced that microsoft is "good now and cares about users more than profit"
then every time microsoft does something like this they act surprised as if "how were we supposed to know?" when people have been warning them for years and they have been ignoring it
@AgathaSorceress it's a gaslighting tactic in the true original use of the term. we who were harmed, or remember our predecessors being harmed, are essentially being told that we're imagining things, while the people who harmed us are able to benefit from our work without consequences
@tindall @AgathaSorceress Like - hmm, I wonder. This company that wrote a fuckload of memos in the late 90s about how they were going to lose to open source and linux in general, a company has a history of doing FUD and if that fails, EEE. Has stopped doing FUD, and is suddenly embracing open source software and linux? hmmmmm. hmmm I wonder what is going on heree
@alexandria @AgathaSorceress yep! "Noooo it's not EEE they just ❤️ open source"
I genuinely hate the people at Microsoft who decided to do this.
@tindall @alexandria from my experience its especially common among dotnet devs who really like the "but they switched CEOs! the new one is good and wont do EEE anymore!! they truly love open source!! look they contributed to the linux kernel!" excuse
@tindall @alexandria the worst part being that microsoft's biggest contribution to linux is creating WSL, which is essentially "we made it so you can use linux on windows so you can stop using full linux now"
@AgathaSorceress @tindall @alexandria and don't forget Azure! which is… running Linux on Hyper-V… so, i guess kind of the same
but there's also their Kubernetes offering (and involvement) which is probably the best way to run your Google like infrastructure, since… Google won't sell you (useful) support… even if you… paid for it
@AgathaSorceress @meena @tindall @alexandria kubernetes is a google offering, not MS (sorry if that’s what you intended!)
@mood @AgathaSorceress @tindall @alexandria Kubernetes is a Google invention, but it's FLOSS, and MS' offering is probably one of the best supported by actual real engineers
@AgathaSorceress @tindall @alexandria
"OS/2 had a chicken-and-egg problem. Its best selling point was its compatibility with MS-DOS and Windows applications. However, this meant few developers took the time to write OS/2-native apps. So, why run OS/2 at all?"
Many devs out there are too young to remember how MS killed OS/2
https://www.howtogeek.com/688970/what-was-ibms-os2-and-why-did-it-matter/
@antanicus S.O.M. will save us all.
@tindall @alexandria @AgathaSorceress embrace, extend...
@tindall @AgathaSorceress I think it's really hard for people to not anthropomorphize corporations; but they aren't people, they are systems. good people can and do exist inside if those systems. Sometimes they are able to rock the system back and forth, at great personal stress and exhaustion, from the inside and shake loose some resources toward something good.
Maybe some queer employees get a pride initiative going; maybe someone is able to get their job to divest from ChildLaborCo™️. Maybe someone can make the case to their boss that open-source is good, actually;
But at the end of the day, these systems are paperclip maximizers, but for profits. They have one, singular goal, and absolutely no consideration is given to anything else in pursuit of that goal unless it endangers that goal.... over the next quarter or two.
This is how you can have a corporation that can do rainbow shit all June and really mean it; and at the same time donate money to queerphobic politicians and ALSO really mean it.
Anyway. The point is, you can't trust these COs. Maximize what good you can extract from them, but don't loose sight of the fact that they are going to steamroll your whole family if it comes down to it.
@rgegriff @tindall @AgathaSorceress they also aren’t usually coherent in their decision making, especially Microsoft. The people running GitHub aren’t the same people making Lenovo lock down their bootloaders
@tindall @AgathaSorceress Yeah I mean. I called it out as another EEE tactic when it first happened but got shouted down lol