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Are there any particular incidents which are responsible for the low reputation Microsoft (and Bill Gates) has in the eyes of the open source community? Microsoft is clearly not the only proprietary company. Companies like Apple have done a lot worse when it comes to restrictions on software. Why does Microsoft get most of the hatred from the open source community?

yannis
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Pulkit Sinha
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    I often find myself shaking my head at things Apple does, thinking, "Wow; if Microsoft had done this, the torches and pitchforks would be out in force!" – Andrew Barber Dec 29 '10 at 08:44
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    bcos Mac is not as serious a contender like Unix's and Microsoft when it comes to a dev platform. – Geek Dec 29 '10 at 08:51
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    One time, I emailed someone in my CompSci department asking about something related to MSDN and the response was basically, "you'll have to ask someone else about Micro$oft products." Hoo, boy. I really like my school and have no plans to leave, but I've got a long few years ahead of me if that's the mentality. – Corey Dec 29 '10 at 09:10
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    @Corey: the anti-Microsoft sentiment seem to be particularly strong in academia. – Dean Harding Dec 29 '10 at 09:19
  • @Dean why do you think that is? – Corey Dec 29 '10 at 09:56
  • @Geek: Would you mind revealing the facts leading to your assumption? – LennyProgrammers Dec 29 '10 at 10:01
  • @Lenny: You use the word facts and assumption which pretty much closes down any reasons I might as well give. All, I can say is I don’t see MAC as the Dev environment for many a commercial Applications. Do you see people building Business Applications on MAC as often as you see on Unix, Microsoft ? What is the percentage of business Applications that end up running on MAC ? However, there are a lot of Mac applications in the market, the keyword here is ‘relative’ to Unix’s and Windows. – Geek Dec 29 '10 at 10:16
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    @Dean@Corey I can back that with my own experience. I never understood why all the PCs need to have ubuntu installed, despite crashing every few hours. And Sun's software stack was always preferable to Microsoft's for no particular reason. and all of this despite my university being a member of MSDNAA. – Pulkit Sinha Dec 29 '10 at 10:48
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    @Geek: Thanks for your answer. I can't imagine a case where separating facts and opinion/valuation/assumption ever hurts. Everybody draws different conclusions from the same facts. Arguing only on the output of a subjective process might not give the best results for everyone. Many people earn quite some money developing Mac OS X and iOS apps on the Mac. Many prominent Open Source developers use Macs. So i fail to see that "Mac is not a serious development platform". – LennyProgrammers Dec 29 '10 at 12:08
  • @Corey: I dunno, that's just been my experience. Maybe it has to do with the fact that most college students (and professors) have little real-world business experience and so the "ideology" is more important to them? – Dean Harding Dec 29 '10 at 12:15
  • @Corey@Dean: My college was solidly in the Microsoft camp, MSDN partner (free products for students), etc. So this has not been my experience. It can go both ways I guess. – Ben L Dec 29 '10 at 14:15
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    @pulkitsinha: Kids don't know history anymore... It is an old struggle that remounts to 1976 and the infamous 'AN OPEN LETTER TO HOBBYISTS - By William Henry Gates III'. – Paulo Scardine Dec 29 '10 at 15:08
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    @pulkitsinha: Wow, your admins really must be incompetent with Linux, if your Ubuntu boxes crash that frequently. Or you need to get cleaner power. Or something like that. – David Thornley Dec 29 '10 at 15:18
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    I used up all my remaining votes on this! – Zabba Dec 29 '10 at 15:44
  • Can anyone name a single application for Linux that Microsoft even had a hand in? – Nathan Osman Dec 29 '10 at 16:57
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    IE3/4/5 (albeit only Unix/Solaris), PHP, Apache, .NET CLR (up to 2.0), a *ton* of Web standards including HTTP, Haskell, the Linux kernel itself, what else... – Rei Miyasaka Dec 29 '10 at 17:03
  • @George Edison: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_%28software%29 – Paulo Scardine Dec 29 '10 at 17:09
  • @Paulo: Microsoft didn't have a hand in that... for the longest time they were threatening to stop it. – Nathan Osman Dec 29 '10 at 17:18
  • @Paulo To be fair, Microsoft doesn't directly involve itself with Mono development due to Novell's legal concerns, although many of the technologically contributive .NET projects like MEF and F#/IronPython/IronRuby and the DLR are ensured to be compatible with it and with Linux/OS X/BSD. – Rei Miyasaka Dec 29 '10 at 17:21
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    @bigown: How is this off-topic? – Orbling Dec 29 '10 at 17:29
  • @Orbling: It's closed as "not constructive", presumably since it's causing arguments. – David Thornley Dec 29 '10 at 18:55
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    Can someone kindly, in a manner that does not describe 'pre-emptive moderation' explain to me how this question is off topic? On SE sites, the _community_ decides what is on topic, inconveniences in moderation are up to the people who said they want the job. – Tim Post Dec 29 '10 at 19:01
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    This question is most decidedly on topic, is constructive and serves a purpose. Perhaps consider it as valuable and decide to moderate the _answers_ instead. I'm a retired moderator and I am quite disappointed that @bigown used the hammer here. – Tim Post Dec 29 '10 at 19:03
  • @Tim Post: The ability to moderate answers would be very useful here. The question itself addresses an interesting on-topic situation, and answers are potentially useful. Arguing about the validity of the complaints is less so, and arguing about Microsoft itself is pointless and aggravating. – David Thornley Dec 29 '10 at 20:23
  • @David Thornley: Arguments are frequently constructive, very disappointing that others are scared of them. I have largely found arguing about Microsoft to be a rare event, most people with any knowledge on the subject roundly despise them. Dissenting voices have been uncommon in my experience. – Orbling Dec 29 '10 at 21:25
  • @Orbling: That depends on what you mean by "argument" (having a Monty Python flashback here). A more or less friendly exchange of opinions with reasons is what this site should be all about. Flame wars are a different story, and questions like this tend to spark them. – David Thornley Dec 29 '10 at 21:29
  • @David Thornley: Whilst I agree, I find the subjects with the most need for discussion tend to be those where the views held are fervently defended and so flame wars ensue. Really important issues are worth it I feel. – Orbling Dec 30 '10 at 02:43
  • @George Where the heck did you hear that Microsoft was threatening to stop Mono? – Rei Miyasaka Dec 30 '10 at 06:51
  • @Rei: There's a feeling among some people in the FOSS community that Microsoft is using Mono as a trap, seeking to lure people into using Microsoft patents beyond what Microsoft's issued a binding promise for. I've seen that several places. Whether this is actually possible is something I've not investigated (i.e., whether Mono goes beyond Microsoft's patent promises and licenses), and I've seen no evidence for this opinion, but it is out there. – David Thornley Dec 30 '10 at 14:48
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    Every opportunity Microsoft have to adopt an open standard they either implement a crippled version of the standard (IE6), or create their own standard which only works on Microsoft platforms. Other companies like apple (far worse) also do this, it's just a profit strategy. – Benbob Dec 30 '10 at 15:04
  • @David Aye, unfortunately I've had to pass up Mono in some cases because people are afraid of it. But to my knowledge it's all just fear mongering so far. – Rei Miyasaka Dec 30 '10 at 16:56
  • I'm so surprised at the fact that noone in this thread mentioned a simple fact: Microsoft is/was the leader. Doesn't that say everything? – Florian Margaine Apr 23 '13 at 20:57
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    The answer is actually too simple: Open Source developers are developers. And MS didn't care to maky anything better than cmd.exe in the last 30 years. That's why. – Ingo Apr 23 '13 at 21:49

19 Answers19

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I guess if there's any one "incident" then it was the so-called "Halloween Documents", which were a series of memoranda that were leaked by a Microsoft employee to Eric S. Raymond in the late 90's, detailing Microsoft's desire to "disrupt the progress of open source software."

It is worth mentioning a fact that highlights the aforementioned statement: that Microsoft often engages in negative (non-technical) campaign against its competitors. One of the greatest foul plays in Microsoft's history is paying someone to write a book claiming that Linux source code was stolen from Minix, in an attempt to make companies afraid to use Linux, so that it can sell its own products, in the basis that it was not legal to use stolen source code. Fortunatelly, Andrew Tanenbaum wrote an article to refute the accusation.

While not so intensively, Microsoft still engages itself in practices like that, as one can see from the recent claim (in 2007) that Linux infringes Microsoft patents (1 and 2) or the more recent (2012) "Droid rage feud" on Twitter. A link for the specific tweet can be found here.

While Microsoft's attitude has somewhat mellowed (compared to the past), many in the open source community still see Microsoft as a rather aggressive (and foul) competitor, particularly with respect to the negative campaigns and to the way they license their patented technologies (the "Open Specification Promise").

Now, whether that reputation is (still) justified is another question. Personally, I don't think Microsoft is as "evil" as some people would like you to think - certainly not compared to some other companies out there.

Rob
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Dean Harding
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  • this seem to give an impression that open source community doesn't like (aggressive) competition. surely that's not the case? – Pulkit Sinha Dec 29 '10 at 10:52
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    Open source projects generally like *technical* competition. The Halloween documents showed that Microsoft didn't want to compete on technical terms, they wanted to disrupt open source projects so they didn't have to. Open sources like a fair fight, basically. – Tom Anderson Dec 29 '10 at 14:59
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    have you read the Halloween Documents? there's nothing like 'competition' there. it's only "how can we squeeze the most out of our monopoly", and "how to block progress of any non-MS player". blocking progress is the biggest sin in my book – Javier Dec 29 '10 at 15:06
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    Offering free analogs of paid products is often a risk to entire industries. There's a word for it in Japanese, "shijō hokai", which translates to something like "market disruption" or "market destruction" -- and it's taken very seriously. It obviously doesn't justify everything that Microsoft has said and done in response (especially not the EEE strategy), but I do understand their alarm. Besides, do you really think that open source developers and software companies aren't constantly looking for ways to kill Microsoft and all of its technological offerings too? – Rei Miyasaka Dec 29 '10 at 15:24
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    :-) Kids don't know history anymore... It remounts to 1976 and the infamous 'AN OPEN LETTER TO HOBBYISTS - By William Henry Gates III'. – Paulo Scardine Dec 29 '10 at 15:37
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    What amazes me is that so many people seem to think those documents are, or were any kind of official Microsoft policy. They were an analysis created by a single employee as their view of the way things should be done. I work for a corporation, and we often have competing analysis done from different angles. That doesn't mean we actually follow through with them. Most times, we don't. So I scratch my head and wonder at how people can convince themselves that something is official policy when it's not. – Erik Funkenbusch Dec 29 '10 at 15:48
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    @Mystere Man: Thank you, I don't know why people have such a hard time understanding that that kind of brainstorming is the whole point of business strategy meetings. – Rei Miyasaka Dec 29 '10 at 16:12
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    And don't forget their former Embrace,Extend,Extinguish policy - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish – nos Feb 13 '11 at 12:08
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    @ReiMiyasaka Um, what? Open source developers aren't, as a general rule, trying to kill Microsoft. Linux isn't trying to kill Microsoft. The _reciprocal_ was actually the case. – Andres F. Apr 23 '13 at 21:52
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    @Mystere Man: They might not be Microsoft's official policy, but they reflect what Microsoft has been doing for the last 30 years. Microsoft has rarely tried to build something new on top of existing best practices (if they did, they would not have produced Windows, they would have built a modular graphical user interface on top of a UNIX flavour). Microsoft strategy has always tried to build monolythic software with its own, incompatible formats and protocols in order to lock in their customers and cut out competitors. – Giorgio Apr 23 '13 at 22:21
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    @Giorgio - Biased much? A) There is quite some debate over whether or not Unix could possibly be considered a "best practice". B) When Windows was first created, Unix was proprietary (BSD didn't become open source until the 90's, and Linux was barely functional about the same time). C) Unix was mired in legal issues (see AT&T vs UCB). D) Windows is far more than just a UI. E) Things are very different today than they were back then. Your argument lacks any basis in historical events, and lacks understanding of the issues of the period. – Erik Funkenbusch Apr 23 '13 at 23:15
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    I remember using Linux since the beginning of the 90-ties and it was a very stable OS already. I also worked with Windows 95 and 98. I remember I kept saving my work (I was programming in JBuilder) because the OS crashed about 2, 3 times a day. Only starting with Windows NT (or rather Windows XP) I had comparable stability. So, regarding stability, Linux was almost 10 years ahead. It is true that open source developers never spent so much time creating a user friendly GUI, but it would not have been a problem to build a GUI on top of a UNIX OS (like Apple later did). – Giorgio Apr 24 '13 at 06:02
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    I also remember how Windows 95 was pushed onto the market to win the competition with the OS/2 from IBM (which was much more stable than Windows 95 at that time). For a few years we had to use a very unstable OS just to allow Microsoft to occupy the market. – Giorgio Apr 24 '13 at 06:06
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    @nos: Very good link. Let's not forget that C# was born after an attempt to apply that strategy to Java. – Giorgio Apr 24 '13 at 18:56
  • @AndresF. Offering for free something that's functionally identical to something offered by several other companies at a fee is often a risk to entire industries. Why do you think the solar business in the US and EU are suffering? It's because China is offering the same thing for dirt cheap, ignoring trade laws. You could argue that it's not as bad in the software industry because the material cost of software is 0, but the fact that the current state of the software industry is okay-ish is still after the fact. It's comically trivializing to say that only Microsoft is playing hard ball. – Rei Miyasaka Apr 24 '13 at 20:24
  • @ReiMiyasaka I'm not arguing that MS is the only business playing hard ball. Apple is doing so as well (to name an example). I just find your remark about "open source wanting to kill MS" absurd. 1- Open source is not a unified front with a common objective beyond "software must be open source", 2- (in general) its goal is not to kill anything. Provide alternatives which happen to be (arguably) better? Sure. Prefer development philosophies which encourage sharing and free&gratis access to the source code? Right! But "killing"? That's _totally absurd_. – Andres F. Apr 24 '13 at 20:43
  • @ReiMiyasaka This is way beyond the scope of this website, but note your comment that FOSS is "offering something for free" completely misrepresents the goals of most Free&Libre Software. Its goal is never the equivalent of dumping (the aggressive takeover of a market segment by lowering prices, done by a business giant) but to provide _libre_ software with a different philosophy! As a dumping tactic it's ineffective, since it empowers the _consumer_ (dumping, on the contrary, is never about the consumer). – Andres F. Apr 24 '13 at 20:49
  • @AndresF. I beg to differ. Open source is two things: it's a marketing strategy, and it's an ideological choice. Open source was historically very much unified under a small handful of ideologically driven licenses -- namely GPL. That has changed somewhat now with licenses diversifying, but you simply can't discount the fact that historically, people were discouraged from using anything other than GPL (even LGPL was poo-pooed) or the rather more reasonable BSD license, and that that license was and is designed and maintained by a single individual. – Rei Miyasaka Apr 24 '13 at 20:49
  • @ReiMiyasaka You are confusing Open Source and the GPL. The GPL is more about _Free_ software than _open source_ software (read Stallman!). But even if GPL software is ideologically driven (no disagreement there) its goal _is not to kill Microsoft_. Libre software is not "playing hardball"; offering you, the consumer, something better both technically and philosophically is not the same as trying to destroy Microsoft! The stated and ideological goal of the GPL is to enforce the sharing, not to kill MS or Apple or anyone else. – Andres F. Apr 24 '13 at 20:51
  • @MystereMan Unfortunately, all "debate" about whether UNIX can be considered "a best practice" (WTF does that even mean?) is utterly worthless. It's the same kind of debate about whether Java or C++ or C# or whatever is a Good Thing; i.e. entirely subjective and pointless. Meanwhile, in the real world, both Unix and Windows are hugely successful and widely used (for different things). – Andres F. Apr 24 '13 at 20:56
  • @AndresF. It doesn't matter whatsoever what the goal was; it's absolutely clear to anyone offering software for free that that choice, still has the same effect as dumping, and that they're gambling the entire industry. As admirable as the OSS cause is, to say that the decision to completely devalue software isn't alarming to people who in part created that business model is seriously skewed. Also, the distinction between open source and the GPL is irrelevant in this case, because, as I mentioned, historically, most significant open source software was unified under the GPL. – Rei Miyasaka Apr 24 '13 at 20:57
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    @ReiMiyasaka Sorry, but the goal isn't what you said it was, which pretty much undermines your assertion that open source "is looking to kill Microsoft". If you seek to destroy something which is free and superior, that makes you the Bad Guy (which nicely answers the OP). Also, there are other popular licenses besides GPL, such as Apache and BSD. – Andres F. Apr 24 '13 at 21:01
  • @AndresF. It's seriously myopic to speak of "goals" whilst ignoring the potential consequences of the process. *Anyone* in any industry would know that offering something for free is a risk to everyone else in that business. I also mentioned Apache and BSD, but again, GPL was the most prominent and significant by far. Also, whether you think it's "superior" is completely irrelevant, just as you agree that the choice of Java and C++ and C# is subjective and pointless. – Rei Miyasaka Apr 24 '13 at 21:08
  • @ReiMiyasaka Well, while "superior" is just my opinion, I'd say it does answer the original question: MS has a bad reputation because they tried to squash a grassroots software philosophy (perceived by some people as superior, but also as "the little guy") just because it threatened their business. – Andres F. Apr 24 '13 at 21:13
  • @AndresF. That's the cut throat nature of globalized business. As a developer (open source developer, even), I despise it, and I understand the sentiment of rallying against what was one of the most organized businesses at the time, but I don't excuse it -- especially when it's neither true that open source software is necessarily "superior", or that the open source community is "the little guy", or that open source is grassroots. OSS might be very ad-hoc, but it really isn't grassroots at all. It's just a different -- and often very lucrative -- income model for software developers. – Rei Miyasaka Apr 24 '13 at 21:25
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As Dean pointed out, for historical reasons. However, I think Microsoft has been progressively heading the right way, take for example this:

Microsoft signs the Joomla! Contributor Agreement

http://www.microsoft.com/web/joomla/

Keep in mind that Microsoft, above all, is a business, and they will always look for profit in some form of another, however, I think they now know the value of community. Regarding being evil in open-source, I think Oracle is the new Microsoft, v.gr.:

Oracle sues Google, says Android infringes seven Java patents (plus unspecified copyrights)

I think what saves Microsoft is that their actual constant interest is to cover all of the market and this can lead to intelligent strategies, and Oracle's demise in open-source is plain interest in profit. Perhaps I'm being a little visceral against Oracle, so if anyone can prove me wrong, go ahead.

dukeofgaming
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    I always thought that Adobe was the new Microsoft, but that might be a personal thing against their desktop software. – GWLlosa Dec 29 '10 at 20:33
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I am an active open source developer with commit access to several projects. I don't hate Microsoft. There are some things that I dislike about our industry as a whole, of which Microsoft is a part:

  • Patent litigation, I hate it when software is designed in court. I hate the concept of math I can't use. I can't stand companies that purchase hordes of patents with the clear intention of using them to get rich through litigation.

  • I don't like DRM. I don't like it pushed on me. I think the whole concept is stupid. I feel the same way about trusted computing. At some point, publishers and producers are going to have to wake up to the fact that their old business model is no longer tenable, and neither is constant litigation.

  • A corporation is legally bound to look after the welfare of its share holders first, above everything else. I feel that this sometimes puts companies in a position where they are legally obligated to do despicable things, once the potential profit of doing them is realized.

None of these gripes are at all exclusive to Microsoft. Yes, I read the Halloween documents when they leaked, but I wasn't really put off by them. I said then, just as I say now that a truly functional distributed development model is nearly impossible to disrupt. That has proven to be the case in most instances.

Technically, I am not fond of some of Microsoft's products. I suffered through EDLIN, laughed at BOB and avoided Vista at all costs. However, Windows 2000 is still (in my book) one of the hardest OS's to kill. I'm also becoming rather fond of Windows 7. I wouldn't purchase my own copy, but I'll happily use the copy that my company provided.

As others have said, I'm far more concerned regarding Oracle being Oracle than I am about Microsoft being Microsoft. At the time of this writing, Microsoft is at least predictable and they are trying to repair past damages to the free software community. Like others, I take those repairs with a grain of salt, but they do seem to show the capacity for metacognition, albeit on levels that many would consider trivial. Note again, publicly traded companies have an obligation to their share holders.

My decisions on what technology I use are based solely on technical merit. I'm not the only one who thinks that way. It just happens that, if I have the source code to something and can modify it to suit my needs, the merit increases exponentially. If I change it and can't share it, it is useless to me.

I'm also not completely immune to the idealism of free software, I really hope that one day, open collaboration prevails and we really start advancing ourselves free from litigation and secrets. I live in the real world, and I don't see that happening in the immediate future.

One can hope, and I do, and I work for change. Until then, I do have bills to pay :) I don't get paid for speeches.

Tim Post
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Microsoft had something of an anti-competitive reputation before open source was ever an issue.

One example is one of the Office apps (Word, I think) which was claimed to include during startup an allocation of an unrealistically huge amount of memory which was then immediately freed without ever being used for anything. When asked to allocate a large block of memory, MS-DOS would always succeed initially irrespective of whether all that memory was actually available. Digital Researches DR-DOS would fail immediately if too much memory was requested. The effect was that the Office app worked just fine on MS-DOS, but crashed immediately on DR-DOS. The claim was that this was intentionally done to give the impression that DR-DOS was buggy, and to make using DR-DOS impractical for customers already dependent on Office.

The policy of allowing a memory allocation even though the memory isn't immediately available isn't so wierd as it sounds. Linux does the same thing even now. That policy often allows things to run without problem that would otherwise have a problem, though very occasionally the policy backfires and the Linux kernel has to start killing off processes to free memory as a result. The reason I point this out is because, for all I know, there may have been some weird but genuine reason for the large allocation at the start. It sounds implausible, but so does the policy of allowing allocations when the memory isn't immediately available.

For that matter, the whole thing might even be a myth. Certainly some well known ex-Microsoft employees have published blog posts describing the extreme measures that Microsoft used to (and maybe still does) go to to ensure that old applications, including third party apps, continue to run on later DOS and Windows versions - though that is a slightly different thing, of course.

  • There was also the supposed "DOS isn't done 'til Lotus won't run" story, but I think this has since been debunked. – Richard Ev Dec 29 '10 at 11:06
  • The first time I heard a reference to the "DOS isn't done" story was at a Microsoft .NET launch event in Detroit. The funny thing was, I heard it from a Microsoft employee during his lecture. – Larry Coleman Dec 29 '10 at 15:22
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Well some time ago (like 5-6 years AFAIR) they tried to make linux illegal by throwing money at SCO company lawsuit. They were sending legal threats and trying to sue linux users, pretending to own it. It took like 2 years, before they finally acknowledge they were unable to point any "stolen" code, so they switch to a nice thing called software patents and then they said their "intellectual property" was stolen.

As you may know Intellectual Property is some bullshit, not a real thing, so it's easy to say someone stole it from you... when you don't even know what it is. "I use red backgrounds for my desktop - you stole my intellectual property".

SCO's reputation get so bad that they went bankrupt and i guess this one, beside many others is enough to hate microsoft for financially backing up this bullshit to undercut linux reputation.

We can add some mentally retarded Ballmer's quotes to the equation: -- "Open Source is a cancer"
-- "Open Sourse is not free, finally patent owners will come and you'll have to pay the bill"
-- "Open Source is communism" (I think that was Bill Gates)

But, in the end MS is 100x more friendlier than eg. Apple. Apple made it illegal for their programmers to use tools that they want (eg. cross compilers or flash)... treat to destroy any free video codec (because they own all Intellectual Property, bla bla bla)... so at least MS is sane in this matter (not treating their programmers and users like slaves).

We should really hate Apple, microsoft get much nicer over time. Now Apple is trying to delegalize owning a brain.

To end with optimism. It's good that we, in European Union don't have any sortware patent or intellectual property bullshit going on. So apple can for now go f** themselves... and harass United States people only. Even the Terms Of Service (TOS) agreement for private end-users was ruled illegal by the German court (and several other countries ruling followed), so in EU it means just NOTHING. How good is that? :)

Slawek
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  • Software patents are certainly strange. e.g. FAT filesystems. These are basically combinations of simple textbook data structures, only in specific concrete form rather than just the generalised principle - specifying exact offsets, sizes, constants etc. They are also an evolution of the older CP/M filesystem, borrowing and hacking in extra ideas from e.g. Unix. AFAIK Microsoft itself didn't contest a thing when competitors and others products (e.g. DR-DOS, GEM on PC and on Atari) used the same filesystem or a minor variant of it. This is an example of what others have "stolen"? –  Dec 29 '10 at 14:10
  • You do realize that Apple contributes heavily to open source, don't you? You seem to be complaining that (a) they restrict software on iOS devices, and (b) that they use proprietary video codecs rather than making sure to include an open source one. – David Thornley Dec 29 '10 at 14:56
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    This is silly. Of course the European Union has extensive intellectual property protections. – President James K. Polk Dec 29 '10 at 15:00
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    Umm.. Open source *IS* communism. It's the very definition of it. Granted, Gates or whoever was using the term perjoratively, but come on.. Open source ideals are the embodiment of communism, and that's hard to deny. – Erik Funkenbusch Dec 29 '10 at 16:13
  • @Steve So far, to the best of my knowledge, Microsoft has only gone as far as to demand a *25 cent* royalty for every device using FAT. – Rei Miyasaka Dec 29 '10 at 16:46
  • @David, what i also realize is that Steve Jobs stated that he will destroy any loyalty free video codec, because ANY video codec that exists is violating his Intellectual Propoerty rights. For EU IP protection, it is protection for SANE things, of scientific value. Not offsets in file system or hyperlinks on a webpage. Most OS developement is moving to EU, because law in US is INSANE. You can look on the debian page for example, in their donations page they ask for servers especially in EU, because they can't run DEV in the US. – Slawek Dec 29 '10 at 16:51
  • @Slawek I don't think that the EU suing Microsoft for supposedly killing Real Media is an example of sane law. – Rei Miyasaka Dec 29 '10 at 16:54
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    Well in US Microsoft could patent a media player and then kill every media player maker. Not perfect, but what's more sane? :) There is no patent armageddon only because every company "owns" some "pack" of moronic ideas (like patents for shopping cart, buy now button, displaying images on website, etc.). Apple & Open Source... they contribute only because they exploit it. Mac OS is Open Source (BSD), they took it and closed the code. – Slawek Dec 29 '10 at 17:11
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    The reason there's no "patent armageddon" is because most companies aren't as stupid as the laws are. I don't disagree that patent laws in the US are ridiculous, but as a whole I don't like the EU's software laws any more than I like the US'. By the way, Microsoft proposed a bill a few years ago to make it more difficult to sue people over frivolous patents. It got thwarted after lots of lobbying. – Rei Miyasaka Dec 29 '10 at 17:33
  • I think they actually proposed a law that'll make it hard to sue big corporations (like microsoft) by individuals or small companies that dont use their patents. So it's very good for big corps. They can still sue small players and create this law-enforced monopoly, but even when you patent something - you won't get any money from them. They will have an option to use all small companies technologies for free and then, in return sue them for any bullshit (FAT filesystem, etc.) – Slawek Dec 29 '10 at 17:42
  • @Slawek: Having looked into it, it turns out that there's a clause in the bill that says that patents are granted to the first-to-file rather than the first-to-invent, which puts them in line with the rest of the world. The effect of concern is that inventors might end up being late in some cases because they don't speak very good legalese. To say it's "very good for big corps" is somewhat of an overstatement, and it certainly doesn't automatically mean that "they can still sue small players" asymmetrically. – Rei Miyasaka Dec 29 '10 at 18:10
  • >>says that patents are granted to the first-to-file rather than the first-to-invent<< Well in this case it isn't only "better" for corporations but allows them to rob inventors of their scientific work. – Slawek Dec 29 '10 at 20:00
  • @Slawek In many cases, yes, but it's not as ominous as the other side of the fence makes it sound. It certainly only makes it only as bad as the EU, given that the rest of the world uses the first-to-file system. – Rei Miyasaka Dec 29 '10 at 22:26
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    The EU is *effectively* precisely as bad as the US. The reason is if you file a patent in the US, due to international agreements, the patent can be enforced in the EU and pretty much worldwide, irrespective of whether it could have been registered according to local laws. Not sure, but I think that even means the small guy may need to travel to the US to defend himself from a patent troll in the courts, or else be automatically ruled against. –  Dec 31 '10 at 09:31
  • Copyright law and software patents is the government getting involved in a free and open market. Regardless of whether you think that involvement is justified, it seems to me that those advocating for strong copyright protections are more in line with communism than those advocating for less regulation. – David Stone Dec 12 '12 at 06:21
  • @MystereMan : Open Source is analogous to Communism only if people are forced to use it whether they like it or not, and then those who refuse are shot and their relatives are tortured. On the other hand, *voluntary sharing* existed in various forms for millenia before comrade Lenin was born. Therefore using the term "Communism" for any kind of sharing is completely misleading. (At best, we could say that Communism is a very specific form of sharing. Even then, there is no reason why Open Source should be compared with this specific form, and not with countless others.) – Viliam Búr Apr 24 '13 at 12:43
  • @ViliamBúr - do not confuse Communism with the police state of soviet Russia or china. Communism as philosophy is very different from communism as a political party. I stand by what I said, Open source is the embodiment of communism. – Erik Funkenbusch Apr 24 '13 at 15:05
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    @Mystere Man: Are you suggesting that open source is the embodiment of a philosophy in which people share the products of their work with others instead of keeping them for themselves in order to make profit? Does not sound too bad. – Giorgio Apr 24 '13 at 19:11
  • @David Stone: Without copyright protection, how do you protect the profits of software companies? – Giorgio Apr 24 '13 at 19:13
  • If we're going to discuss political science in these comments (probably not a good idea): open source in the GPL sense is more like anarchism than communism. The idea is that noone controls the software. Anarchists are opposed to authority and control of iberty. In communism, the state controls everything. – MarkJ May 04 '13 at 16:17
  • @MarkJ: "In communism, the state controls everything.": This is a DDR-like definition of communism (and not the only possibly definition). Also, not all anarchists are against **any kind** of authority. There are a lot of variations to these models and I would be careful with generalizing too much. – Giorgio May 09 '13 at 10:30
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As Paulo Scardine has pointed out, Gates started off hostile to the hobby computing community, and it isn't clear that he ever changed that.

Microsoft has used aggressive and frequently illegal business tactics to get to its position, and sells primarily to businesses rather than individuals. Microsoft is currently a monopoly in the OS and office software field, and it's difficult to get a computer without some money going to Microsoft. This is exactly the sort of thing that got a lot of people hating IBM back when they were in a similar position.

The 1998 Halloween documents showed Microsoft as actively hostile to the Free Software/Open Source community.

Microsoft is generally believed (I haven't checked it out myself) to be the financial driver behind the SCO lawsuit that attempted to destroy Linux. The lawsuit was ill-advised (SCO didn't even own the copyrights they claimed they were trying to enforce) and destroyed the company, but that didn't seem to stop anybody.

Microsoft was behind the OOXML standardization scandal, which destroyed a lot of confidence in the ISO and interfered with their ability to get things done. (This involved Microsoft fast-tracking a bad standard by having MS partners step into the standardization process to push specifically for OOXML standardization, ignoring objections, and leaving standards bodies without a quorum when the MS partners left.)

Microsoft has alleged, many times, that Linux violated MS patents, without ever saying which patents or in fact supplying evidence. This was viewed by lots of people as an effort to cast FUD over Linux, making MS look like the safe legal choice through innuendo.

The SCO lawsuit, OOXML standardization, and patent rumbles are all in the past several years.

Therefore, Microsoft's got a strong history of being the enemy, including fairly recent actions. The Free Software/Open Source community has a collective memory, so it will take a long time and a lot of work for Microsoft to lose its bad reputation.

David Thornley
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    As i've mentioned elsewhere, the Halloween documents were a single employees analysis, and not official company policy. The SCO thing is nowhere near as clear-cut as it might seem. It was the Open Source community that made the OOXML standardization a problem. It was not a scandal, and the OSS comunity did far worse than they accused Microsoft of. While OOXML may not have been a perfect standard, it was better than the ODF which had vast swaths of missing functionality in it. Linux most likely *DOES* violate many patents. Linus has even admitted that. You cant bury your head in the sand – Erik Funkenbusch Dec 29 '10 at 16:02
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    @Mystere Man: The question was why some people hate Microsoft, and the Halloween documents are part of the answer. SCO was that clear-cut, and the OOXML standardization process did cause the harm I mentioned. The Open Source community was not responsible for that, and I didn't mention ODF. (Missing functionality is not a problem for a standard, while specifying non-standard date fields and a lack of specificity are. to give examples.) Linux may well violate patents, but vague accusations are for PR and FUD. – David Thornley Dec 29 '10 at 16:28
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    @David - The date formats you mention are there to address compatibility with Lotus 123, and are considered "deprecated". It's just a talking point that ODF supporters latch onto, like republicans claiming Obama wasn't born in the US. I'm also confused by your claim that "missing functionality isn't a problem" but then you claim that "Lack of specificity" which could be called "missing functionality" *is* a problem. Do you guys even think these arguments through? – Erik Funkenbusch Dec 29 '10 at 16:46
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    @Mystere Man: OOXML was presented as a storage format, which is not the same as a save file format. There was no need to maintain compatibility with Lotus mistakes; all that was necessary for practical purposes was a converter. Also, lack of specificity in existing functionality (like "render this like MS Word 5") is much more of a problem than missing functionality ("we'll fill in the spreadsheet format later"). Not that I've expressed any support for ODF here; you're the one dragging that in for no obviously relevant reason. – David Thornley Dec 29 '10 at 16:56
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    @David - Again, you mention a flag that was considered to be deprecated and not part of the official spec. It was there for completeness, because, like it or not, OOXML was largely an XMLization of the old .doc format. It was there because the flag could be present in old documents, but was not to be supported in new documents. It's basically saying "You might run into this, but ignore it if you do, it's no longer supported". Lack of definition of that flag is far far far far FAR less important than defining how spreadsheets should interoperate, yet that damn flag was the end of the world. – Erik Funkenbusch Dec 29 '10 at 17:01
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    the problem with OOXML wasn't that is was a bad standard, or a bad specification. the problem was that to get it approved, MS did destroy ISO committee's credibility. – Javier Dec 30 '10 at 19:13
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Kids, sit down, uncle Paulo has a nice history for you.

Bill Gates was one of the first business man to advocate selling software by itself. Before him, software was mostly something bundled with hardware. He started the damn software as a product industry.

The infamous 'AN OPEN LETTER TO HOBBYISTS - By William Henry Gates III' dates back to 1976!!! A young (just 20) Bill Gates wrote this letter to the legendary Homebrew Computer Club complaining that Altair BASIC was being rampantly copied.

The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these “users” never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.

Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software.

And, towards the end:

Most directly, the thing you do is theft.

So the thing remounts away back before Microsoft became known for playing hardball business. Before the software industry, software was free, something bundled with hardware to make it useful. It came with sources and hardware maker was happy when you fixed or improved programs.

It's why old farts like RMS (and myself) despise this guy - BTW it's why we have the whole free software moviment.

Paulo Scardine
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    "for sale" software may not have been common, largely because computers were not that common. IBM has been selling software since the 1960's, not just bundling it with the OS. So your comments seem... skewed. – Erik Funkenbusch Dec 29 '10 at 16:08
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    @Mystere: indeed, but with a crucial difference: they where usually sold with sources. FOSS is not against selling software, it's against software distributed without source code. – Paulo Scardine Dec 29 '10 at 17:01
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    @Paulo - They were sold with sources because you had to compile them for your given platform. You were not legally allowed to take that source, modify it, then resell the new product. – Erik Funkenbusch Dec 29 '10 at 17:06
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    @Mystere: why did you came to the conclusion that FOSS movement has anything to do with 'take that source, modify it, then resell the new product'? – Paulo Scardine Dec 29 '10 at 17:18
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    @Paulo - Because that's what the GPL is designed to allow, and in fact was the impetus for its creation (Gosling took Emacs, modified it, then started selling it without source). – Erik Funkenbusch Dec 29 '10 at 17:24
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    @Mystere: you got it soooo wrong... GPL was designed to prevent, not to allow that. – Paulo Scardine Dec 29 '10 at 17:29
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    @Paulo - No, it wasn't. The basic freedoms of the GPL are designed to ensure anyone can take a GPL'd work, make their own changes to it, and redistribute it.. either for sale or free, doesn't matter. The only thing it's designed to prevent is doing so without providing source. Regardless, it doesn't change my point. You couldn't take, for example, OS 360, make some changes and sell it (even if you included the source) as your own product. It wasn't open source just because they included source with it. – Erik Funkenbusch Dec 29 '10 at 18:37
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    @Mystere: you are taking GPL for the open source definition. – Paulo Scardine Dec 29 '10 at 18:58
  • @Paulo - You said "BTW it's why we have the whole free software movement". You didn't say "open source", you said "free software". – Erik Funkenbusch Dec 29 '10 at 20:07
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    @Mystere: GPL isn't the Free Software definition. It was designed to keep Free Software from becoming non-Free. The Open Source movement was largely a fork of the Free Software movement, so I'd have to say the GPL was very important to the Open Source movement. – David Thornley Dec 29 '10 at 21:32
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    @Mystere: I guess you know that the free in free software is 'free' as in 'free speech', not as in 'free beer', and are just trolling. – Paulo Scardine Dec 29 '10 at 21:45
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( http://theoatmeal.com/comics/computers )

What really got the ball rolling was the Netscape vs. Microsoft stuff, which included accusations that Microsoft deliberately broke Win98 in a way that caused Netscape to crash.

This accusation turned out to be false -- it was the result of Apple QuickTime not following Netscape's plugin development guidelines. The judge rejected that evidence (most likely because she didn't understand it), and it quickly became popular for governments and organizations to sue Microsoft over silly crap, with the EU following suit insisting that Microsoft killed Real Media with Windows Media Player.

Of course, then Netscape went open source and was forked under the name Mozilla and then Firefox, so the hate swelled within the open source community from there too. All of Mozilla's campaigning didn't help either.

The worst part of all this scapegoating and witch hunting is that it's letting people be incredibly irresponsible, like when people decided to blame half a million SQL injection attacks on SQL Server, rather than admitting that that particular class of bugs is entirely the fault of the database user.

I'm quite critical of Microsoft myself, but I'm even more critical of the people who think that they can get away with anything if they just blame Microsoft.

Also, Microsoft's particularly hated in the open source community because some people -- including Ballmer -- have instilled a false dichotomy between Microsoft and free/Free software.

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Rei Miyasaka
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    What got the ball rolling, really, were the Halloween documents, and there had been lots of accusations that Microsoft made certain competing software fail before that. – David Thornley Dec 29 '10 at 16:11
  • I'd edit my post to change the wording, but that'd taste a bit cheap, so I'll just say it here -- it's the Netscape/DOJ lawsuit that got the ball rolling in *public sentiment*. Almost no one knows about the Halloween documents; anyone who watched the news in the late 90s knew about the Netscape case. I just don't think the Halloween documents are as significant a factor, considering it's all from one source and painted with a sensational title, and to the minds of many would come across as being at least a bit like a cooky conspiracy theory. The Netscape case was more than enough smearing. – Rei Miyasaka Dec 29 '10 at 16:15
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    The question was about the Open Source community, not the general public. The Halloween documents (regardless of what they actually were or represented) had a big effect there. – David Thornley Dec 29 '10 at 21:32
  • @David That's true. – Rei Miyasaka Dec 29 '10 at 22:24
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The main cause of dislike for me toward Microsoft is (was) the disdain shown towards open standards.

I think the prime example that comes to mind regarding this issue is Internet Explorer 6. IE6 is so buggy it rapidly becomes a true nightmare to develop websites catering to it. Not having clear, common standards that every party (in this case, browser companies) agree upon only slows down end users work (webdevs), and, in a broader sense, progress as a whole.

Microsoft is making amends and trying to do "good" with IE9, we just have to wait for IE 6, 7 and 8 to slowly die.

For a long long time it was also close to impossible to read a .doc file in anything but Word, preventing users from switching text editors if they wanted to do so.

Bad communication regarding Outlook 2010 also started an uproar on twitter, see here : http://fixoutlook.org/

I think Microsoft has covered a lot of ground towards being more "open" and more standards-friendly, which is a good thing. I predict the "new ennemy" will soon be Apple :)

I don't think of Microsoft as evil, now they're more clumsy and under a lot of pressure, trying to do as best they can to please both devs and users, which isn't always easy.

François Cassin
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    The problem isn't that IE6 was not standards compliant, it was that it wasn't updated in 5 years. Back in 2000 no browser was that standards compliant. – Craig Dec 29 '10 at 12:09
  • Back in 2000 the browser war was fought over proprietary, non-compliant ECMAScript additions, making it very hard to develop a website for every major browser. – François Cassin Dec 29 '10 at 12:12
  • Today's browser war is fought over how much of the HTML5 spec is implemented, which is a very good thing! The real problem with IE6 is that it'll still be officially "supported" until 2014 :( – François Cassin Dec 29 '10 at 12:18
  • What do you mean by "bad communication"? The problem with Outlook that prompted that "fix outlook" campaign thingy is an actual problem... – Dean Harding Dec 29 '10 at 12:24
  • You're right, I edited that part too fast. It was bad decision making from their part, followed by good communication when the rendering engine was changed. – François Cassin Dec 29 '10 at 12:36
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    People also forget that Netscape 3 had standards compliance issues and performance issues which led to IE4's popularity, and that a lot of the current HTML/JavaScript standards (both the good and the bad) are just descriptions of Netscape's behavior. To blame IE6 for all of the current standards issues is frankly simple favoratism and mass amnesia. – Rei Miyasaka Dec 29 '10 at 15:55
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    @Rei: It's pretty clear that MS didn't help, and their monopoly position was very harmful. It wasn't until they started to get real competition that cut into their browser share significantly that they started to do anything useful. – David Thornley Dec 29 '10 at 16:06
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    @David Thornley - I think you're missing something. Microsoft has traditionally tied releases of IE to releases of the OS. There were no major OS releases between 2001 and 2007, and that's the primary reason that IE was not updated.. not lack of competition. I'm also of the opinion that disorganization within the W3C also lead to a "wait and see" approach. It's only with the recent formation of HTML5 working groups and CSS2.1 and CSS3 that any real progress has been made. The standards had to exist to follow them, and usable ones did not exist until very recently. – Erik Funkenbusch Dec 29 '10 at 16:20
  • @Mystere Man: Are you claiming there was practical development of mass-market browsers in the early 2000s? Should I have said "monopoly positions", plural? After all, if they didn't have an OS monopoly the IE monopoly wouldn't have been nearly as harmful. Heck, if they didn't have an OS monopoly, they couldn't have gotten away with no major OS releases for those years and then come out with Vista. – David Thornley Dec 29 '10 at 16:33
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    @David If it was because of MS' monopoly that IE6 is still rampant, IE7/IE8 would have already killed it by now. MS is hardly less of a monopoly on the desktop now than it was back then. The web happened to have its growth spurt when IE6 was there, so that's how the user base got shaped. – Rei Miyasaka Dec 29 '10 at 16:37
  • @David Thornley - I'm saying that things aren't as simple as many people like to make them. Microsoft bit off too much with Longhorn, and they ended up going back to the drawing board. They didn't just sit there doing nothing. And yes, they could have "gotten away" with waiting that long, after all Apple spent years working on it's successor OS (Pink) and finally ended up giving it up and buying NeXT. The first version of OSX (Symphony if i recall correctly) was also very poor. – Erik Funkenbusch Dec 29 '10 at 16:39
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    @Mystere Man: Microsoft already had a monopoly position on OSes. Apple was nearly killed by the OSX transition, and did continue to provide major releases while working on Rhapsody (Mac OS 9, for example, after 8 had been intended as the final release of the old MacOS). If you could show a real decline in Microsoft fortunes due to the long wait between XP and 7, you'd at least have a parallel. – David Thornley Dec 29 '10 at 17:00
  • @Rei: Surely it must be obvious that IE 6 had a very long period as the monopoly position browser, much longer than was good for anybody but MS, and that's one reason why it's so embedded. – David Thornley Dec 29 '10 at 17:02
  • @David IE6 became embedded because WinXP is and was popular, and because people don't like to have to download a browser separately just to use the web. Also, regarding your other comment, a fact that people like to hide under the rug is that Microsoft invested $150M in Apple in 1997. That was the primary funding for OS X. – Rei Miyasaka Dec 29 '10 at 17:08
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Disclaimer: I'm not sure about this answer, I tried to stay objective and point out some of the flaws and problems, not rant about Microsoft. Maybe I failed at that, if I did so, I'm sorry.

I think one part for this is the fact that Microsoft has a virtual-monopoly on the Operating System market, and is partially aggressively defending it (Get The Facts, anyone?). Which is absolutely valid, it's a company which needs to make money, the problem with monopolies and virtual-monopolies is that it is good for the company, but not for the market and especially not good for the customers.

We don't have a really free OS-Market at the moment. Sure, the situation has improved a lot over the last years, but there are still many issues out there. F.e. the fact that Windows/Office comes bundled with most PC systems, without the option to get a OS free system (or a completely different OS pre-installed or at least installation medium). Or that most schools are teaching kids that Windows is pseudonymous with PC and Microsoft Office is everything you'll ever need (which is the bigger issue in my eyes).

The next problem is that Microsoft can't really be open and compatible to the rest of the world, because it would destroy their business model. Windows is a closed platform, the moment everything is compatible and open, that's the moment you don't need Windows. F.e. the Office Open XML Standard, which has so many flaws in it and in the standardization process that many call it a violation of the ISO.

In the end, Microsoft is a capitalistic company with a virtual-monopoly, that's absolutely valid...but that doesn't mean that it's good for us. And many people think that way, especially if they've seen other possibilities.

Bobby
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  • Oh please. OOXML has so many flaws in it, yet it's competitor that was ISO standardized through a similar method wasn't even complete enough to allow interoperability between spreadsheet documents. ODF was (and still is) far more flawed, it's just that ODF isn't Microsoft. – Erik Funkenbusch Dec 29 '10 at 16:41
  • Windows being installed on new computers is not really something you can blame on Microsoft. The PC makers could choose to install other OS's or give you an option of what comes pre-installed, but is the demand for such a thing really worth the effort from a business stand point? Can you buy a MAC without Apple's OS installed? – Tester101 Dec 29 '10 at 17:53
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    @Tester101: In fact, Microsoft was offering incentives for manufacturers to include their OS on all computers they made, so manufacturers who made some computers with MS OSs were strongly discouraged from offering anything else. This was found to be anti-competitive behavior by the US courts. – David Thornley Dec 29 '10 at 19:01
  • @David - True, but in the end the PC makers still have the choice and make the final decision. – Tester101 Dec 29 '10 at 20:05
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    @Tester101: It should be the consumers' choice, not the PC makers', what goes on the machine. – JUST MY correct OPINION Dec 30 '10 at 08:27
  • @JUST MY correct OPINION - That's not completely true, the PC maker still has to offer support which costs more if they have to support multiple operating systems. Though it is ultimately the consumers choice, if enough people requested a change it would make good business sense to make the change. The problem is as it stands now, it does not make good business sense to make the change. Most people don't care what OS is on the PC, they just want it to work. – Tester101 Dec 30 '10 at 12:59
  • @Tester101: It's the PC maker's choice which OSes they'll support. "Hello? I've got a problem with my Archos on my PC." "Bye." – JUST MY correct OPINION Dec 30 '10 at 13:57
  • @JUST MY correct OPINION - Yes it is, but supporting more operating systems costs more money. If the cost of support goes up, the cost of the product goes up. Which means potential customers might pass you up to save a few bucks from your competition. At any rate this is still not MicroSoft's fault. – Tester101 Dec 30 '10 at 14:41
  • @Tester101: I once went to a shop and asked how much a PC would cost. Then I asked if windows was preinstalled and included in the price. I then said: ok, I want an empty PC, I will install my favourite OS, do I get a discount? The answer was that it was not possible (I went to another shop). Many manufacturers package Windows together with the computer and you pay for it even if the first thing you are going to do is to wipe the hard disk. – Giorgio Apr 24 '13 at 19:46
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When talking about Microsoft to people who don't know too much about IT, I notice that they wrongly think that:

  • Microsoft is a strong concurrent to Open Source, whereas other companies are not, or not so strong,
  • Microsoft forces everyone to use Windows despite Open Source solutions by installing its operating system on every computer sold,
  • Microsoft does not encourage neither Open Source, nor free products.

After all, most people don't bother to know what are the restrictions of Microsoft vs. Apple or other companies software: for them, they are all proprietary, so restrictive in the sense that you cannot download or share the software product legally.

Most people also doesn't know that Microsoft is strongly involved in Open Source products and, even more, in free products, which have a less restrictive license than most Open Source ones (for those people, it's a good idea to invite them to visit CodePlex).

Finally, I think that criticism against Microsoft is stronger than against other companies just because of the dominant position of Microsoft. Probably people using Apple products will have the same arguments against Apple when talking about Open Source.

Arseni Mourzenko
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    +1 particularly for mentioning Microsofts free-as-in-beer products. In particular, the Visual Studio Express editions are much more than just compilers, are so good that many developers may never need a Pro version, and permit commercial development. You don't get the same freedoms as with GCC, but many people won't care much about that. –  Dec 29 '10 at 10:06
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    @Steve314 - That is FUD talk. The only freedom you don't get with GCC is the freedom to make a non-GPL derivative of GCC. And I bet Microsoft would have something to say if you tried to distribute a derivative of Visual Studio without paying them for the privilege. – Stephen C Dec 29 '10 at 16:06
  • @StephenC: I took the comment to mean "You don't get the same level of freedom with VSE as you do with GCC" rather than "GCC gives the same level of freedom as VSE". So the comment agrees with what you said. – Matt Ellen Dec 30 '10 at 16:39
  • @Stephen - as I said, you *don't* get the same freedoms with Visual Studio as with GCC. I never claimed that GCC lacks any freedoms. However (and I say this as a user of both express editions and GCC), GCC in itself isn't a complete development solution - there are open IDEs with debugging etc that either automatically use GCC or can be configured for it, but you have to search, evaluate etc - with VC++ it's already there and many people simply aren't going to look at the GCC source code or try to patch it anyway, so lose little or nothing by choosing a Microsoft express edition instead. –  Dec 31 '10 at 09:54
  • OTOH, I use cmake as my build system anyway - that's how I use both VC++ and GCC with a minimum of fuss, so the overall open source thing can provide extra options. And of course GCC can support tools that you don't get even as free-as-in-beer from Microsoft, such as profiling and coverage (gprof and gcov), though gcov isn't very easy to use in my experience, and I haven't even figured out gprof yet (probably similar to gcov, but that means figuring out how to configure an appropriate build for a start, even before running the tool - everything seems to take time to figure out with GCC). –  Dec 31 '10 at 10:01
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It has historical reasons. Microsoft was earlier very active against (and sometimes in an unfair way) against concurrents. That also includes Open Source. Halloween-documents are an example. Microsoft also had an agressive campaigning against OSS. That included also some patent-claims, that lead to the contract between Novell (Suse) and Microsoft. That contract made Microsoft in the end to one of the biggest Linux-distributors.

Recently Microsoft has changed it's strategy. The firm no longer agitates against OSS. It even produces some Open-Source-software. Apples and Oracles doings in the recent past, make them currently much more 'evil' than Microsoft. But some people are conservative, that also includes their choosen enemies.

I would add, that Microsoft had been building it's bad reputation not only with the OSS-folk. OS/2-lovers, Netscape-users or Java-programmers all have also reason to hate Microsoft.

Mnementh
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The primary reason is because big business is notorious for patenting everything they can and locking others out of the industry. If I invented something, I'd want to profit from it too, but big business takes it a different level, attempting to patent generic ideas and trademark generic words. This is called economic rent seeking. It's a very corrupt practice which congress has not had luck in stopping. It is counter-innovative. Open source people tend to have innovation in their mind more so than money.

Keep in mind, SO is closed source, and profit based. The difference is that they create things of value and ask for little in return (ad revenue). There are even clones of SO out there (for Django, PHP, etc), but SO doesn't sue their creators. Microsoft and Apple sue the competition out of business and charge a killing for their products, while providing little more than an expensive marketing message in return.

orokusaki
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I can't speak specifically to open source, but I do know that at least for a while Microsoft made cross-platform programming more difficult than necessary. I spent a good chunk of the '90s writing code that had to run on multiple platforms (various flavors of Unix, Linux, Windows, and occasionally MacOS), and it always seemed like Windows was the long pole in the tent. Microsoft made it relatively easy to develop for Windows, but if you wanted your code to build on any other platform you had to jump through a number of hoops. By comparison, classic MacOS didn't throw anywhere near the number of hurdles in your way that Windows did, although working with MPW would occasionally make you question your career choice.

John Bode
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    I tried working with MPW, and came to the conclusion that the money I was spending on Metrowerks Codewarrior was well worth it for my personal sanity. – David Thornley Dec 29 '10 at 16:08
  • CodeWarrior rocked! i was really sad to see Apple concentrating on Objective C. XCode is nice but it's always like trying to convince the system to do what you want, not like simply building your software with the right tools (like on sane IDE's or editors) – Javier Dec 30 '10 at 19:34
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This isn't the main reason, but it doesn't help: Microsoft has been accused of astroturfing. I've never seen it proven, but I used to lurk on Linux forums, and every so often I would see posts claiming Linux crashes regularly and is hard to maintain. The posts would come from people claiming to be seasoned computing professionals, but there would always be something very basic that they didn't know, or they would say something indicating that their knowledge of Linux was years behind the times.

I reserve judgement as to whether Microsoft was or was not behind the posts, but as I say above, I'm sure the accusation didn't help matters.

Larry Coleman
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  • You know, there's people on both sides of the fences. There are Linux people claim Windows crashes 3 times a day. Does that mean that Red Hat is paying them to say that? The conspiracy arguments are silly. – Erik Funkenbusch Dec 30 '10 at 15:59
  • I'm certainly not claiming those arguments are valid, and I can't rule out trolls, to tell you the truth. I'm sorry if the answer wasn't clear on that point, but I'm not sure how to word it more clearly. – Larry Coleman Dec 30 '10 at 16:47
  • @Mystere Man: Windows XP and Windows 7, which I have used extensively at work, are quite stable. Older versions of Windows (Windows 95, Windows 98) DID crash three times a day. I still remember this scene of myself working at home on some JBuilder project and getting ANGRY several times a day when my computer stopped responding and I had not saved my last 30 minutes of work. Back then I soon got used to saving my work every minute or so. – Giorgio Apr 24 '13 at 19:37
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I was an almost exclusive user of and developer for Microsoft platforms until Microsoft joined the Trusted Computing Group and basically started to show that I, the person who bought their products, wasn't who they were concerned about pleasing; that instead they'd please media companies, et al, at my expense. I switched away from my MSDN Enterprise subscription (paid a pretty penny for that!), stopped using Microsoft products one at a time, beginning with Windows, as I found F/OSS alternatives until nowadays my computer is 99.44% uncontaminated with anything Microsoft.

I can't speak for open source developers (because I barely qualify as one), but I can say that for my own choice I made it because I got tired of Microsoft taking my money with one hand and taking away my ability to use the computer I paid for with the other.

I'm not a committed F/OSSer. I don't buy into the rabid versions of F/OSS philosophy (or, rather, attitude) so I'll use commercial software provided the following criteria are met:

  • There is no viable F/OSS alternative.
  • I can afford it (obviously!).
  • It is not made by Microsoft.
JUST MY correct OPINION
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  • While I applaud your idealism, not everyone can take the approach of "I'll do whatever I want, regardless of the laws" approach that Open Source does. By that, I am referring to the fact that media companies have the law on their side in regards to controlling who can and can't play their content. If you want to legally play the content, you have to play ball with them. Whether or not you feel it's morally wrong for them to do this, the fact is that the laws are on their side. Microsoft would be sued to hell and back, and lose, if they tried to implement DVD playing without content control – Erik Funkenbusch Dec 29 '10 at 15:56
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    @Mystere Man: The media companies have the laws on their side, because for the most part their lobby groups make them. – Orbling Dec 29 '10 at 17:35
  • @Orbling - I don't understand your point. It's irrelevant as to WHY the laws exist. The fact that they do exist means that if you want to legally do it, you have to follow the laws. – Erik Funkenbusch Dec 29 '10 at 18:31
  • @Mystere Man: It is far from irrelevant, law is what people make of it in the long term. – Orbling Dec 29 '10 at 21:21
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    The issue for me, @Mystere Man, isn't the media. I agree that people should pay for the media they listen to, watch, read, etc. The issue is that the Trusted Computing Group wants to start issuing controls on **everything** that's on my computer, effectively treating my computer as their playground, not mine. Read the assorted Trusted Computing Platform specs a little more closely. There's some Orwell-scary stuff in there. (This is also leaving aside the assorted "fair use" arguments which DRM and the like simply bypass and ignore and which the platform spits on.) – JUST MY correct OPINION Dec 30 '10 at 08:24
  • I'm not talking about pirating here, nor am I talking about the ethical issues. I'm talking strictly about the legal ones. Whether or not you think it's ethical to do what they do, it's legal, and media companies can legally dictate that if you want to watch their content (even if you've paid for it) you have to use their approved systems. What that means is that either a company plays ball, or they don't offer the feature at all. Microsoft wants to offer media playback, so they have to play ball with them. Trusted Computing is grossly misunderstood, it refers to YOUR rights, not theirs. – Erik Funkenbusch Dec 30 '10 at 15:53
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    That is indeed the sales pitch around the Trusted Computing Platform. It is, of course, utter hogwash. – JUST MY correct OPINION Dec 30 '10 at 16:16
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    [the problem with trusted computing](http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5115609628556940516) – Javier Dec 30 '10 at 19:24
  • @Mystere Man: "the laws are on their side" If the majority of people decided that copyright laws are b......t these law would be abolished. Laws are not eternal and if we decided that certain laws are against public interest they can just be abolished. – Giorgio Apr 24 '13 at 19:54
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One more reason:
(I think it's not mentioned in the many existing answers yet - correct me if it is and I over-read it)

Microsoft has a history of picking existing and successful open source projects, creating a closed-source clone of it, and integrating it into Visual Studio.

Some examples:

Mostly the Microsoft-made alternatives were seen as inferior by the community - at least by the community of the tool they cloned, and sometimes even by the whole .NET community.
And some generated a lot of heat - think about the Entity Framework Vote of No Confidence.

In the meantime, they partly changed their minds and did things like officially shipping jQuery with Visual Studio. Today we are used to this, but in 2008 that was a radical change.

But after that, they still created tools that did the same as already existing OSS projects, for example:

...which probably causes a lot of people involved with open source to still hate Microsoft.

Christian Specht
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It isn't that people or for the question's sake, geeks, hate Microsoft. When people turn towards open source, initially there is always the open source sentiment in mind. In those sentiments, they just get carried away with all the evil-doings of Microsoft in their past and end-up hating it. But, with time and work, they again realise that it wasn't exactly their not-involved nature, it was more about their inclination in their initial phase. I too started to hate MS in the beginning of my inclination towards open-source but with time, it just faded away.

Harsh
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    Social psychology. When you join some group or movement, there is a tendency to adopt and display the norms of that group. There are various textbook reasons. One that sticks in my mind is that it can be a kind of flag-waving badge-wearing thing, since failing to adopt the norms of the group can damage your credibility within the group. Factual objectivity isn't always a successful social strategy. Of course most people are members of many distinct groups, so having particular strong group-norm beliefs associated with one particular group can be difficult to sustain. –  Dec 29 '10 at 10:30
  • @Harsh: I do not dislike Microsoft per se, I dislike monopolist practices whether they come from Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Apple, etc. Such practices involve making software less flexible on purpose in order to lock customers in. Less flexibility means lower quality to me. In certain cases, being able to understand, extend and adapt software to your needs is important, that's why some users move away from proprietary software if they find a good alternative (zdnet.com/to-the-space-station-and-beyond-with-linux-7000014958). I do not dislike MS as much as I dislike their products. – Giorgio May 09 '13 at 10:34
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Everyone needs an enemy in order to motivate the troops. We have always been at war with Eurasia.

Certainly, Microsoft hasn't been a saint. However, only half of what is ascribed to them is really valid criticism, most of it is simply hyperbole, conspiracy, and sensationalism.

I've seen mention of OOXML in this thread, and frankly that is the worst possible example because the anti-OOXML campaign was orchestrated by Sun and IBM for their own commercial interests. People like Rob Weir played the Open Source Advocates like a banjo, wrapping their commercial interests in the flag of "openness". Almost everything they accused OOXML of was equally applicable (or more so) to the community trumpted ODF spec, and the ODF spec was seriously deficient in many areas. All the complaints about "ballot stuffing" could be equal leveled at IBM (who actually wrote several of the responses by supposedly government groups).

Whether or not you think OOXML was a good spec is irrelevant. Far worse specs go through standards bodies all the time, without nary a peep.. but because this was microsoft, it was somehow the end of the world as we know it. I mean, seriously.. who cares if OOXML is made an ISO standard? Really? There is no law that because it's a standard, you have to support it. There are tons of standards that nobody supports, even in the open source community.

The whole mess was stupid, and the blame does not rest on MS's shoulders for submitting a sub-par standard, it lies on the Open Source advocates shoulders for making a gigantic mess over something that really had no bearing on those that wouldn't implement it anyways.

As evidence, now that OOXML has passed... who cares? Almost nobody. You seldom hear anyone say anything about it, not even Rob Weir. It's simply a non-issue.

Erik Funkenbusch
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    -1 *"Really? There is no law that because it's a standard, you have to support it."* : Standards are there to ensure interoperability which is a goal of all users save those that profit from proprietary methods, this harms users, the law is not the arbiter of righteousness - also, you are very virulently defending Microsoft throughout all the answers in a vitriolic fashion. – Orbling Dec 29 '10 at 17:39
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    No, Standards are there because some people got together and said "Let's make this a standard". A standard does not "ensure" anything. If that were the case, then one could create interoperable ODF documents without resorting to looking at how OpenOffice does things, which simply isn't the case. I'm sorry if you view the truth as "vitriolic", i suppose it would be when it violates your reality distortion field. The simple fact is, standards are just documents that define a way of doing things. Either you use them, or you don't. It's your choice. Passing a standard, no matter how bad – Erik Funkenbusch Dec 29 '10 at 18:28
  • You think it is, doesn't end the universe. I could get together with a bunch of people and create a standard for "question and answer" websites, that doesn't mean anyone has to follow it, even if the ISO approves it. – Erik Funkenbusch Dec 29 '10 at 18:29