Interesting. For me with Chrome+ublock origin I still get the auto-playing video. With Firefox+ublock origin the video appears but doesn't play. Instead it shows a red and white "I'm still loading" icon over the video, which is quite annoying but much better than auto-play. Is this what you get?
Are they going to give back all the royalties they've stolen from every Android phone manufacturers with their patents, which the manufacturers didn't need to develop their phones, so they just gave them money for nothing?
It encourages people to use Microsoft technologies without having to worry about patents or licensing issues. Ultimately Microsoft probably thinks that the extra Windows licenses will generate more revenue than their patent licenses.
I am guessing they see Cloud Services as their main cash cow so they get a ton of good will and I am guessing more contributors to projects they care about?
Microsoft's cash cow is Azure which means the target market are developers so anything that generates good will among devs and puts Microsoft's past further in the back of their minds benefits them.
Definitely a lot of goodwill between patent non-aggression, all of their work in the developer community (VSCode), listening to user feedback (most of the time anyways). Also they gain access to other patents in the OIN. Plus most of their revenue seems to be from cloud and licensing, I'm sure they are making a mint on Office, Windows, and Azure without needing any patent aggression.
I keep asking myself "is this a trojan horse" and the more time goes on, the less I think it is. Maybe they have actually changed for the better.
Yes, this Microsoft does seem to have left much of the Gates and especially Ballmer machinations behind - at least as regards its openness and collaboration.
Now that Microsoft is offering a packaging of Linux inside Windows (Linux subsystem), by continuing to charge for their old file systems use on phones with Linux, it was basically saying they can access all of Linux for free but to use a small old part of their operating system costs money. In other words it was very unfair. And possibly asking for legal action.
Now it's slightly less unfair although it's still questionable that Windows isn't providing _any_ monetary support for Linux that they embed.
How? Linux is intentionally released under an open source license. As far as I know, MS follows that license to the letter. How is that unfair? Things don't have to be perfectly symmetric to be fair.
I do think using the FAT patent was wrong on its own, because it was about interoperability when using the one filesystem that can be used everywhere. But I don't think fairness has anything to do with that.
Wasn't that a fat32 patent?
Would I have had to pay for this patent if my phone didnt have an SD card slot and didnt support reading of fat32 partitions on USB OTG storage devices is what I would love to have known.
OIN requires that members provide patent licenses for all patents that are part of a "Linux System". So unless there is a ClearType implementation being widely distributed with Linux, then I would assume this doesn't apply.
But if someone writes something like that and integrates it into common Linux distributions, then maybe. I feel like this is ripe for (the right kind of) abuse.
> By joining the Open Invention Network, Microsoft is offering its entire patent portfolio -- with the legacy exception of its Windows and desktop application code -- to all of the open-source patent consortium's members.
Is this sentence a meaningless tautology (application code is not the same thing as patents) or are there some older patents that Microsoft isn't donating? For example the VFAT patents?
I think that's kind of the entire idea. Microsoft is expecting people to use the IP in the patents to write code for Linux now without fear of being sued.
When they donated the IP to OIN, for all intensive purposes the patents were liberated given OIN's wide coverage.
I would like to see the definitive analysis as to whether they will continue to benefit from those licences on patents that affect open source software.
How do they plan to recoup their losses? They weren't getting much anyway?
Microsoft's Android patent shakedown was the big thing that kept me from believing the company had really changed - I think I'm ready to consider that it really has changed now.
They started changing for the better as soon as they got rid of Ballmer in my opinion. He was toxic for the company and for the industry as a whole. It's taken a few years, but I don't think there's much of the "old" MS left anymore in terms of business practices and ethics.
The part about leaders generating energy is interesting.
I wonder what he thought about Scott McNealy's attempts at generating energy by trying to make Microsoft out to be the great enemy of humanity that Sun was going to vanquish, which I though fell flat because you should never let yourself be defined simply in terms of opposition to someone else. When Sun Microsystems fell apart into several different companies, he even named one of them "SunSoft" in opposition to "Microsoft".
You've got to have something of your own to be energetic about, without needing an enemy to fight against. For so many years, Java was first and foremost simply a weapon in Sun's arsenal for their much bigger purpose, the raging war against Microsoft. They actually weaponized a programming language, and that was a higher priority than any other consideration. They wasted all that energy they generated around Java in a war overseas, instead of building infrastructure at home.
That's a great observation and reminder, thank you.
I agree Ballmer's strategic actions were problematic for the larger technological ecosystem and only benefited Microsoft in shortsighted ways though they did establish Microsoft as the most important technology company in the world for nearly 10 years (1995 - 2005).
It's been 4 years since Ballmer left Microsoft and it's taken some time for new management to effect change. Microsoft is a much more interesting, cooperative, and innovative company as a result.
EDIT: Change "Ballmer" to "Ballmer's" and number agreement.
Yes and no. Credit to Satya Nadella, the culture really is changing towards openness and collaboration. However, Microsoft has a lot of "lifers," and you don't just roll back two decades of the old Microsoft in a couple years.
At the high level/PR level, I think the business practices and ethics are improving, but it'll take many years and possibly a good number of retirements (because the industry is actually old enough for that now) for the mindset change to propagate throughout management.
I'm still unconvinced, I think we'll need to see years of really good behavior for me to possibly believe they've changed. There have been decades of bad faith attacks on free/libre technology, I think I'm going to need to see at least 5 years of no fucking around from them before I consider this more than the embrace part of embrace, extend, extinguish. Up till now my biggest complaint has been the extortion racket they've been running with these patents, so this is certainly a move in the right direction, but that company is evil to the core and I don't believe for a second they're really trying to change for any reason other than marketing/public perception.
It doesn't matter - just another person that jumped on the MS bash bandwagon because it's fun and it lets you score quick brownie points. Most people have crap articulations of why MS is evil or why it sucks besides "patents", and it's the same basic drivel I see repeated about any company. Never ceases to amaze me how critical thinking skills can cease so thoroughly on a subject.
I think you may be missing some historical perspective. Microsoft have quite the history of being extremely unpleasant toward free and open source software.
There's also this list of more recent issues with their software:
Technical details I cannot think of anything off the top of my head; my issues would be with his motivations. He ascribes things to malice that could be easily attributed (and rightfully should be) to incompetence or out of touch with the customer.
> He ascribes things to malice that could be easily attributed (and rightfully should be) to incompetence or out of touch with the customer.
So you're ascibing spying, tacking, inserting ads etc. all to "incompetence". Interesting. I'd definitely say it's malice. It's not "out of touch with the customer", it's making money at the expense of the customer.
It definitely wasn't malice, but feel free to believe in whatever makes you feel better. The way people like to throw around words like "malice" and "evil" without seeing the ridiculous hyperbole is beyond me.
It's good you're doing fine, but some of us noticed Windows tracking us and pushing ads on us, NSA spying and backdoors, Amazon deleting books and spying on conversations, Google tracking our location even when we opt out etc.
Well, I suppose now. Their last majorly problematic behavior (that I'm aware of) was the extortion racket against Android vendors with their FAT patent, which is presumably no longer going to occur.
I'm not sure they've really changed, but I judge them from an enterprise viewpoint. I think their strategy has certainly changed, but I think their core ideals have remained the same, and I think they are really just honing in on their primary market.
Their tech still doesn't play well with others, only in the areas where they absolutely have to.
I think Sharepoint in the cloud is a good example. It's really great if you let it handle most things, maybe you buy a theme or maybe something bigger to put on top, but generally you let Sharepoint handle most things on your intranet. You'll include a few non-Microsoft systems through Sharepoint apps or widgets, and that still works well enough. That's the great use case. The terrible use case, is using it alongside 500 other IT systems and trying to include those, the way you'd like a modern enterprise intranet to do.
We have a system to report our driving to get it refunded. Another system to get vacation time accepted and validated, and a third system for sick leave. All with their own web-interfaces, mobile apps and open APIs. They rely on AD and ADFS for authentication, but they're their own things. Sure you can build a Sharepoint specific plugin for each of them, but a modern intranet should really support stuff like VUE stand alone widgets/apps so that you can share those widgets between systems and you really can't do that with a Sharepoint plugin.
We use Azure a lot, like I said, and it I think it's great, but it's very clear that .NET is very first class in Azure. You can argue that stuff like Node.js is up there, and maybe the few python frameworks that Microsoft support with visual studio, but JAVA, Go, Flutter or whatever you can think of certainly isn't smooth in Azure.
And just try using non-outlook, libra office or something other than one drive for business in your Microsoft enterprise setup, you can, but it's not very nice.
I'm sounding negative, but I actually really like Microsoft. I think they're great at what they do, and I think they're one of the best partners you can have in enterprise, along as you embrace their tech. But that's the catch, and that's why I think they haven't really changed their core values. I do think it's perfectly reasonable, for them to want you to use their technologies, from a business point of view, but when I look at the options for stuff like cloud, I think it's very clear that Azure wants you to also build your backbone in .NET with maybe Node.js + a JS framework on the front, where as with AWS I feel like Amazon doesn't really care what your stack is.
This seems like an extension of what large tech companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google have been doing among themselves all along. Over the last two decades they amassed huge patent portfolios and then mutually agreed to only use them defensively.
The difference here is that anyone who joins OIN can play along too.
I feel like this a natural evolution of their policies over the last decade.
> A patent loss in a German court may lead to trouble for Microsoft's Android strategy ... one of Microsoft main Android patent weapons has been rendered harmless for now in the EU. This may sound like a minor patent. It's not. Microsoft has been using this patent since 2003 to pressure Linux and Android companies that use the popular FAT file system for compatibility with other operating systems ... combined with the recent judgment that the US version of this patent, "Common name space for long and short filenames," Patent No. 5,758,352 "invalid for obviousness," may finally blunt this patent's usefulness for Microsoft.
Depends on whether there have been subsequent court rulings on the FAT patent. If the value of the FAT patent was reduced by court rulings, it may have factored into the donation of the patent to OIN. If the patent was upheld in recent court rulings and revenue from the patent has been increasing, that would put the OIN patent donation in a different light.
Microsoft stay's draining billions out of the Android market in particular with patent trolling for products they didn't support one bit. Their own products were big losers. Thanks to corrupt patent law, they can still suck money out of the winners. I don't trust anything Microsoft says about open-source and patents. If there's money to be made, they might weasel into something good for them and bad for others.
This, as opposed to all the holy virgins elsewhere in the tech industry that did not, say, stifle 2 decades worth of search engine innovation with their patents, patent novel compression techniques belonging to others, completely wipe out a rich and varied mobile telephone industry by coupling a bunch of open source code alongside JAVA to access to the only search engine worth its salt and easy access to third party applications, ...
I'm just picking on Google here, but you could make a list like this for any large tech company, which is my point. But somehow this always comes up in the context of Microsoft, as if somehow they are are particularly more evil than just about anyone else.
> completely wipe out a rich and varied mobile telephone industry
Huh?
Your examples aren't very good. The biggest evil thing Google has done is join Jobs's no-poach agreement. It remains to be seen whether their China project will surpass that. On patents in particular, Google has thus far been very reasonable.
I think people are too eager to claim Microsoft as one of the "good" guys. Microsoft has been around since the 70's and has not been "good" through almost that entire period. So, Microsoft releases a (nice) text editor, releases a Linux subsystem, partially open sources .NET, releases an open source JavaScript framework, has an active GitHub account (filled mostly with nonsense by the way), and we're supposed to forget the 40 years prior? ExxonMobil has been investing heavily in renewable energy lately; would you tell an environmentalist that they're wrong to dislike Exxon now?
Microsoft changed because they had to. That must be the context in which they are evaluated in.
Joining a couple organizations, and open sourcing a couple projects doesn't negate the fact that they were forced into this position because they were losing mindshare, developer prestige, and can no longer force everyone into their playground.
FWIW I hadn't intended to suggest Microsoft was somehow 'good', just not 'particularly bad' compared to any other company. The readers of this thread are polarized into two camps, neither of which match reality, and Microsoft discussions always end up like this. People have no problem with nuance and "on balance" regarding other huge companies (perhaps except Oracle), but when it comes to Redmond, the same tired old noise is regurgitated every single time.
In addition, Apple, Amazon, and even Google aren't completely open source friendly. In the case of Google, pretty much all their webservices are closed source, and they make more and more components of Android become part of the closed source Google Play Framework. I realize Google is the best major corp for open source. But somewhat cynically, I view the ultimate purpose of their open tools to be for running proprietary code.
Exactly to the point, Microsoft did it because it has absolutely no other choice, it was forced to embrace OSS these days. After so many years there is no way I can trust Microsoft in any way. And yes I use Linux as my Desktop since 10+ years ago, and did my best to have nothing to do with Microsoft's ecosystem(.Net, C#, Azure, whatever).
The only exception is vscode, in which case I also have geany, vim and pycharm etc in parallel for daily coding, just in case.
Skype for Business on Linux? Not happening. Good luck trying to install Linux on Surface Books/Laptops and the like without lots of screwing around as well -- and it probably still won't properly work.
Right, well, apart from "a (nice) text editor, releases a Linux subsystem, partially open sources .NET, releases an open source JavaScript framework, has an active GitHub account (filled mostly with nonsense by the way)" -- what have the Romans done for us?!
I think it only highlighted Linux specifically because of the prior tug-of-war there, it mentions right afterward " and other important OSS technologies".
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/LInux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux.
If Microsoft is doing this selflessly, then why aren’t they simply putting their patents into the public domain?
Consider the open innovation network as a kind of club, with good intentions.
When a company like Microsoft joins it might seem like the pinnacle of success, but with it really means is that the club has become a mafia.
It won’t be long before OIN uses its patent leverage to affect control over the behavior if its members.
Think about it for a minute… Why wouldn’t such a group or simply convince corporations, like Microsoft, to put their patents into the public domain? If you have to join a club to gain access to something, but it’s not really open source and it’s not really some kind of charitable contribution.
Another way of looking at this is, Microsoft has just one goal, being a publicly traded company, which is to increase the share price of its stock… Why are people so stupid always constantly fall for the same tricks, believing that such companies do anything that is actually charitable?
No one suggests they're doing it selflessly. They're doing it because they get more value out of the IP by sharing and collaborating, than they do by litigating. Like so many OSS evangelists have said for the last 20 years: open source isn't about charity; it's actually a better way to develop.
I think you raise a good point about the public domain. Why wouldn't the GNU licenses just force users to put their works into the public domain? Because public domain software isn't copyleft. "Joining a club" in this case is just signing an agreement (for free) that compels open access to your entire patent portfolio. The OIN agreement is a copyleft-style patent club, similar to the GPL. You get unlimited, royalty-free access to my software, but you must agree to offer similar access to everyone, too.
That’s not a valid comparison. If Microsoft was licensing their patents under GNU (if that was possible), we’d be talking about something different entirely, but they’re not actually open sourcing them in any way at all... they’re entering into a contract to trade them like Pokemon cards with a consortium that will actually, eventually become a monopoly. Once they become a monopoly with enough leverage, they will inevitably agree to change their terms to be more hostile to the rest of the world.
Open source software offers usage under some kind of license for essentially nothing in return, not “you can use our software if you make all of your software open sores as well”.
I’m gonna leave this comment here so that I can come back and reference it in an article that all right 10 years from now when everybody is talking about how this consortium effectively took over the world of IP and how it’s too bad nobody could see that snowball when it was near the top of the hill still.
Here’s another thing to consider: given the right terms, which the constituents of this consortium could agree to, this IP monopoly (read: mafia) could even use their IP to collectively sue basically everyone (the cross section of that many patents will overlap with much more IP in the world, creating an economy of scale nobody can compete with).
> While this is a step in the right direction, MS still seem to be "all in" on telemetry.
In the latest release of VSCode getting to see the exact telemetry data sent got even easier and they even pointed it out in the release notes. (It is also easy to turn it off (see below). I haven't done it since the data I see are OK with me and I want to help the devs improve VSCode for me.)
> Until the telemetry and data sent by MS software can realistically be turned off completely, they shouldn't get any kind of positive treatment.
Another instance of this "all or nothing" attitude that we have here on HN (I guess it is legacy from Slashdot and Usenet).
Steps in the right direction should be praised. This holds true for pets, kids and grown ups and I think companies too.
You might not get a chance to reward the results you want if you cannot reward the steps to get there.
Edited to add the first quote and comment.
Edit 2: Turns out it is easy to turn off telemetry.
But I'd like Microsoft's reputation to be proportional to how objectionable it's behavior is.
For example, I don't want Microsoft's reputation to go from a C- to an A- because of this patent issue, when they continue to require telemetry in Windows.
> For example, I don't want Microsoft's reputation to go from a C- to an A- because of this patent issue, when they continue to require telemetry in Windows.
We can agree on that.
GP however wrote (emphasis mine):
> they shouldn't get any kind of positive treatment.
MS adheres to GDPR regulations and has applied those protections to all users. You can opt out of telemetry, you can view what they've collected on you and delete it.
Does this include data collected from activity on Windows 10 endpoints? Previously, this could only be disabled on Windows 10 Enterprise. Can all on-device data collection and telemetry be disabled on Windows 10 Pro or Home, including "Customer Improvement" data collection, crash logs, keystrokes, screen grabs?
The article you linked points to an online Microsoft Account Privacy dashboard.
I have Windows 10 installed with a local login. I don't have or want an online Microsoft account. It doesn't seem to be possible to disable telemetry in this case, or at least I haven't found out an (officially supported) way to do it.
Bottom line, if MS is going to show you telemetry data that's been gathered, they've got to know its you that they've gathered it from, so authentication has to occur. Without going into details, it's hard enough to do this with an online account, and quite impossible for local logon scenarios, and getting it wrong opens up possibilities for malicious actors. So, that's why the privacy dashboard requires a Microsoft account.
Best information I can provide on limiting telemetry for the local logon scenario is here:
I realize that setting it to 'basic' isn't going to satisfy the conspiratorial minded among us, but I will say that I, personally, have no qualms setting my machine to 'basic'.
More details, and instructions to disable via regedit following the instructions here:
Hang on, are you seriously saying people need to create a MS online account just in order to tell their own computer to NOT send data to MS?
That's ridiculous. There should be an obvious friggin question during install "Enable telemetry and data collection?" and if the answer is no... that's it. No telemetry or data collection gets done. Ever. End of story and question doesn't get asked again. Ever.
Any other approach is literally just weasel words trying to deceive people. "Just manually change this RegKey setting" is a good example.
> Bottom line, if MS is going to show you telemetry data that's been gathered, they've got to know its you that they've gathered it from, so authentication has to occur.
I understand that. I just want to stop sending data from now on.
> I realize that setting it to 'basic' isn't going to satisfy the conspiratorial minded among us
I want no private or personal data to be sent. Calling me "conspiratorial-minded' is simply wrong. There isn't a conspiracy that Microsoft is collecting data about Windows 10 machines; it's an admitted fact, it was never secret. And I would prefer not to send such data, but Microsoft doesn't want to give me that option.
There is no official information on what data is gathered under the Basic setting. The page you linked to has just one sentence, and it's very vague:
> information about your device, its settings and capabilities, and whether it is performing properly
"Information about your device" could cover a lot indeed. What information does this collect that's covered under GDPR? How has it changed, and will change, over time? Who has access to it? I don't know. That doesn't make me a conspiracy theorist.
I don't buy the Microsoft claim from the same page that "This is the minimum level of diagnostic data needed to help keep your device reliable, secure, and operating normally.". It can't be impossible for Windows 10 to be reliable or secure without sending data home. It's evidently not impossible for the Enterprise edition. I accept that this data helps Microsoft do these things, but it should still be my choice as to whether to send it or not, and my right to know what's included in it. And now the law says so too, at least in the EU.
The Dutch DPA already determined Microsoft to be in violation of the GDPR a year ago (https://autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl/en/news/dutch-dpa-micr...). I don't know about more recent developments there. But this isn't just a few private individuals' opinion.
> More details, and instructions to disable via regedit
Those are not official Microsoft instructions or documented settings. Windows updates have been known to revert them, and (separately) to require changes to the instructions. Messing with the Registry and disabling system services might have other effects beyond the desired. This is not a satisfactory solution, exactly because I do care about "keep[ing] your device reliable, secure, and operating normally".
Ok, I'll admit mistakes on my original post. The regedit method clearly isn't seen as a suitable fix for the broad population, and 'basic' telemetry isn't the same as 'no' telemetry.
Some other points:
> I want no private or personal data to be sent
I would say that none is sent on basic, but the definition of 'private or personal' is overloaded enough that we might disagree.
> Calling me "conspiratorial-minded' is simply wrong
Sorry, I didn't call you that, just a hypothetical broader population. Probably bad wording on my part either way.
> There is no official information on what data is gathered under the Basic setting.
The best way to see what's gathered would be to sign up for an MSA, enable basic telemetry, and then go to the privacy account page and view it yourself.
> The Dutch DPA already determined Microsoft to be in violation of the GDPR a year ago
Not sure what to make of this since most US companies targeted compliance for May 2018, nor does that article mention the GDPR.
> Those are not official Microsoft instructions or documented settings.
Thanks. I'm glad you're able to see my point of view.
> I would say that none is sent on basic, but the definition of 'private or personal' is overloaded enough that we might disagree.
It's less about definitions, and more that I just can't be sure what exactly is sent.
> Lots more info here:
Thanks, that was informative. It seems they gather as complete a profile as they can of all my hardware and of the software they deem relevant (drivers, Microsoft apps) and its configuration. This is clearly enough for a globally unique fingerprint, many times over. (I don't know that they're building one, but they clearly can.)
The part that most worries me here is that at every point this doc says the list is inclusive, not exclusive. "The data gathered at this level includes". "Examples include". "Device attributes such as". There's no wording that I can see that would exclude anything at all that Microsoft might choose to collect now or later.
This holds for the Basic level, unlike the Enterprise-only Security level that explicitly says "No user content, such as user files or communications, is gathered" and "we take steps to avoid gathering any information that directly identifies a company or use". It's pretty clear that this doesn't hold for the Basic level. (Even if the purpose of gathering the data isn't to identify anyone.)
> nor does that article mention the GDPR.
You're right, it predates the GDPR and refers to a Dutch law. I was wrong to reference it and I'm sorry for muddying the discussion.
> Many of our products require some personal data to provide you with a service. If you choose not to provide data necessary to provide you with a product or feature, you cannot use that product or feature
And then in the section on Windows:
> Rather than residing as a static software program on your device, key components of Windows are cloud-based [...] In order to provide this computing experience, we collect data about you [...]
It seems Windows is included in the statement that collecting personal information is mandatory and without it you "cannot use that product or feature". Although it's not explicit and so that may not be the intent for Windows - but it's not clearly disclaimed either.
Of course, any claim that collecting "Basic" data is truly required for Windows to work well is highly suspect because the Enterprise edition doesn't do it.
But OK, there's a "Learn More" link at the end of the Windows section that shows much more text. Unfortunately, while it includes many details, it also contains lots of inclusive statements. E.g., Activation is said to send "data about the software and your device" with no further explanation.
Bottom line: I would like to trust Microsoft (in this particular regard, at least). I think it's more likely than not that nothing terrible is going on. I think so because collecting data about me is not really part of Microsoft's business model, does not benefit them in any obvious way, and might harm them if it became known. But it would help a lot if Microsoft made a clear public statement (and put it in their contracts and EULAs), instead of all this "for example" wording.
It requires informed consent for any personal data being processed. It's entirely plausible to have a useful telemetry system without any personal data. (I have no knowledge of what MS does store.)
They're slightly less evil than they were, but they're still a company. To quote Brian Cantrill, they're still a lawnmower and will chop your arm off if you put it in the wrong place, without any hard feelings.
I agree with you that they can't afford to be super evil, because they're not the only big fish anymore. They're actually not even the biggest one.
I think it's a bit too early to decide if Java or .Net Core is better placed for the future, though.
Your post makes me think you read that statement backwards. (The lawnmower comment is from an oracle talk, etc) It's proposing to move to .net from Java.
With recent licensing changes to Java and microsoft's recent good behavior I have considered it myself.
I've edited my comment to clarify that I'm not backing any migration option (Java -> .Net, .Net -> Java). In my opinion both ecosystems are very solid :)
Their open source work in past few years is commendable and I'll give them kudos for it, even if it frequently gives off an air of feelgood lip service. .NET is cool, but otherwise it doesn't really feel like they're contributing anything particularly valuable or tangible. Not to discourage them from it, but I don't think the extent of praise being sung at them for their open source is a little more than warranted.
But in no way am I going to refrain from calling Microsoft a big bad evil company even today, after all these years. My comfort zone issues with Windows aside, their relentless vice grip on corporate and organizational IT with Office suite and especially 365, exchange email, Azure and especially Azure AD, traditional on-prem active directory and such is showing no signs of loosening.
Sure, they aren't Oracle but that's about the lowest bar you can clear in IT corporate ethics [insert cantrillian rant here]. I'd even be fine with letting go of the memories of 90s Microsoft's iron fist (easy for me, I'm too young to remember first hand) but MS of today is still too evil to deserve all the credit they're getting for being oh-so-wonderful nowadays. They absolutely can afford to be evil, just ask your sysadmin.
Does anyone know (or have a speculation on) the annual profit loss coming out of this? Didn't they get a very significant portion of every Android sale?
I'm still a little skeptical since this applies to "Microsoft" and not any of its holding or investment companies. A great move to earn trust is to "Open Source" almost expired or useless patents.
I am sure most of the FAT patents must be expired at this point since patents last 20 years and FAT32 came out 22 years ago. The Chinese manufacturers didn't have much of incentive to pay Microsoft.
It's a quite interesting move actually. It indicates undoubtedly that Microsoft's business model also radically shifted away from selling software to selling hardware, subscription services and user data & analytics. It's not surprising now that Microsoft doesn't plan to make money off patents. So they make that huge OIN move to promote themselves as a big OSS supporter. That's quite a PR move, I'd say, a nice one though.
Well while I mostly agree, I think it is important to note that it seems they are going for more of a SAAS approach. With Office and Azure, etc.
They are more into the service industry now than they've ever been in the past. This move was them realizing that OSS is just a really good way to improve software for cheap.
I doubt this will have lasting effects as I have yet to see them actually open source anything that I would consider special.
Remember now Linux is part of Windows via Windows Subsystem for Linux (Ubuntu). This is very important for me as developer and I am using it every day.
By joining ONI MS is strengthening parts of its offerings (Linux), and maybe is using (or will be using) existing ONI Linux patents to defend that part.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 191 ms ] threadDoes that work for you?
It's hard to know either way, imo.
I keep asking myself "is this a trojan horse" and the more time goes on, the less I think it is. Maybe they have actually changed for the better.
Now it's slightly less unfair although it's still questionable that Windows isn't providing _any_ monetary support for Linux that they embed.
How? Linux is intentionally released under an open source license. As far as I know, MS follows that license to the letter. How is that unfair? Things don't have to be perfectly symmetric to be fair.
I do think using the FAT patent was wrong on its own, because it was about interoperability when using the one filesystem that can be used everywhere. But I don't think fairness has anything to do with that.
> And possibly asking for legal action.
What kind of legal action?
By changing their attitude towards open source software, they hope to bring more developers towards their cloud.
Which other large companies could now sue vendors of devices (e.g. ereaders) which use Linux? Is Oracle in OIN?
Is OIN's Linux patent pool now large enough to deter other large companies?
Has Microsoft published a definitive list of their Linux-related patents which were previously subject to royalty payment? Is the FAT patent covered, https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/originalD...
But if someone writes something like that and integrates it into common Linux distributions, then maybe. I feel like this is ripe for (the right kind of) abuse.
Is this sentence a meaningless tautology (application code is not the same thing as patents) or are there some older patents that Microsoft isn't donating? For example the VFAT patents?
When they donated the IP to OIN, for all intensive purposes the patents were liberated given OIN's wide coverage.
It's not in the ZDNet article body either, just in the small lede under the header. The body instead says,
> You see, Microsoft, with the major legacy exception of its Windows desktop and desktop application code, is an open-source company.
It seems like an editing mistake or a badly worded statement.
How do they plan to recoup their losses? They weren't getting much anyway?
Wikipedia mentions briefly that he worked at Sun. What did he do there, for how long, with whom, and how did that influence his time at Microsoft?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Nadella
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30835567-hit-refresh
https://medium.com/@xaviergeerinck/my-key-take-aways-from-re...
The part about leaders generating energy is interesting.
I wonder what he thought about Scott McNealy's attempts at generating energy by trying to make Microsoft out to be the great enemy of humanity that Sun was going to vanquish, which I though fell flat because you should never let yourself be defined simply in terms of opposition to someone else. When Sun Microsystems fell apart into several different companies, he even named one of them "SunSoft" in opposition to "Microsoft".
You've got to have something of your own to be energetic about, without needing an enemy to fight against. For so many years, Java was first and foremost simply a weapon in Sun's arsenal for their much bigger purpose, the raging war against Microsoft. They actually weaponized a programming language, and that was a higher priority than any other consideration. They wasted all that energy they generated around Java in a war overseas, instead of building infrastructure at home.
I agree Ballmer's strategic actions were problematic for the larger technological ecosystem and only benefited Microsoft in shortsighted ways though they did establish Microsoft as the most important technology company in the world for nearly 10 years (1995 - 2005).
It's been 4 years since Ballmer left Microsoft and it's taken some time for new management to effect change. Microsoft is a much more interesting, cooperative, and innovative company as a result.
EDIT: Change "Ballmer" to "Ballmer's" and number agreement.
Yes and no. Credit to Satya Nadella, the culture really is changing towards openness and collaboration. However, Microsoft has a lot of "lifers," and you don't just roll back two decades of the old Microsoft in a couple years.
At the high level/PR level, I think the business practices and ethics are improving, but it'll take many years and possibly a good number of retirements (because the industry is actually old enough for that now) for the mindset change to propagate throughout management.
There's also this list of more recent issues with their software:
Did Microsoft employ some aggressive business practices? Sure. Show me another modern-day company from any country that hasn't done the same.
So what exactly has he been wrong about?
Technical details I cannot think of anything off the top of my head; my issues would be with his motivations. He ascribes things to malice that could be easily attributed (and rightfully should be) to incompetence or out of touch with the customer.
So you're ascibing spying, tacking, inserting ads etc. all to "incompetence". Interesting. I'd definitely say it's malice. It's not "out of touch with the customer", it's making money at the expense of the customer.
Our industry seems to be doing just fine despite all the Doomsday crap he says is always around the corner.
They haven't opensourced windows, MS Office, Skype, Visual Studio or Active Directory/Exchange.
So no, they haven't opensourced any of their core tech.
Their tech still doesn't play well with others, only in the areas where they absolutely have to.
I think Sharepoint in the cloud is a good example. It's really great if you let it handle most things, maybe you buy a theme or maybe something bigger to put on top, but generally you let Sharepoint handle most things on your intranet. You'll include a few non-Microsoft systems through Sharepoint apps or widgets, and that still works well enough. That's the great use case. The terrible use case, is using it alongside 500 other IT systems and trying to include those, the way you'd like a modern enterprise intranet to do.
We have a system to report our driving to get it refunded. Another system to get vacation time accepted and validated, and a third system for sick leave. All with their own web-interfaces, mobile apps and open APIs. They rely on AD and ADFS for authentication, but they're their own things. Sure you can build a Sharepoint specific plugin for each of them, but a modern intranet should really support stuff like VUE stand alone widgets/apps so that you can share those widgets between systems and you really can't do that with a Sharepoint plugin.
We use Azure a lot, like I said, and it I think it's great, but it's very clear that .NET is very first class in Azure. You can argue that stuff like Node.js is up there, and maybe the few python frameworks that Microsoft support with visual studio, but JAVA, Go, Flutter or whatever you can think of certainly isn't smooth in Azure.
And just try using non-outlook, libra office or something other than one drive for business in your Microsoft enterprise setup, you can, but it's not very nice.
I'm sounding negative, but I actually really like Microsoft. I think they're great at what they do, and I think they're one of the best partners you can have in enterprise, along as you embrace their tech. But that's the catch, and that's why I think they haven't really changed their core values. I do think it's perfectly reasonable, for them to want you to use their technologies, from a business point of view, but when I look at the options for stuff like cloud, I think it's very clear that Azure wants you to also build your backbone in .NET with maybe Node.js + a JS framework on the front, where as with AWS I feel like Amazon doesn't really care what your stack is.
The difference here is that anyone who joins OIN can play along too.
I feel like this a natural evolution of their policies over the last decade.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/04/04/a-new-ip-strateg...
[0] https://www.openinventionnetwork.com/joining-oin/
(and a reply from the person in whose perspective I was most interested!)
> A patent loss in a German court may lead to trouble for Microsoft's Android strategy ... one of Microsoft main Android patent weapons has been rendered harmless for now in the EU. This may sound like a minor patent. It's not. Microsoft has been using this patent since 2003 to pressure Linux and Android companies that use the popular FAT file system for compatibility with other operating systems ... combined with the recent judgment that the US version of this patent, "Common name space for long and short filenames," Patent No. 5,758,352 "invalid for obviousness," may finally blunt this patent's usefulness for Microsoft.
https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-earns-2-billion-pe...
https://www.wired.com/2014/01/huawei/
Microsoft stay's draining billions out of the Android market in particular with patent trolling for products they didn't support one bit. Their own products were big losers. Thanks to corrupt patent law, they can still suck money out of the winners. I don't trust anything Microsoft says about open-source and patents. If there's money to be made, they might weasel into something good for them and bad for others.
I'm just picking on Google here, but you could make a list like this for any large tech company, which is my point. But somehow this always comes up in the context of Microsoft, as if somehow they are are particularly more evil than just about anyone else.
Did that company use those patents offensively?
> patent novel compression techniques belonging to others
Same question. Also https://xiphmont.dreamwidth.org/84214.html
> completely wipe out a rich and varied mobile telephone industry
Huh?
Your examples aren't very good. The biggest evil thing Google has done is join Jobs's no-poach agreement. It remains to be seen whether their China project will surpass that. On patents in particular, Google has thus far been very reasonable.
That it's even possible shows the entire corruptness of the broken patent system and Microsoft's active abuse of it.
They're not just "one of the kids who benefit for misbehavior" they're the poster child.
[1] https://www.quora.com/How-does-Microsoft-make-more-money-fro...
I think people are too eager to claim Microsoft as one of the "good" guys. Microsoft has been around since the 70's and has not been "good" through almost that entire period. So, Microsoft releases a (nice) text editor, releases a Linux subsystem, partially open sources .NET, releases an open source JavaScript framework, has an active GitHub account (filled mostly with nonsense by the way), and we're supposed to forget the 40 years prior? ExxonMobil has been investing heavily in renewable energy lately; would you tell an environmentalist that they're wrong to dislike Exxon now?
Microsoft changed because they had to. That must be the context in which they are evaluated in. Joining a couple organizations, and open sourcing a couple projects doesn't negate the fact that they were forced into this position because they were losing mindshare, developer prestige, and can no longer force everyone into their playground.
The only exception is vscode, in which case I also have geany, vim and pycharm etc in parallel for daily coding, just in case.
And they're still not really doing it.
Skype for Business on Linux? Not happening. Good luck trying to install Linux on Surface Books/Laptops and the like without lots of screwing around as well -- and it probably still won't properly work.
Can you elaborate on this - specially your 'nonsense' claim?
a) you are a member of OIN
b) the infringing software is core to the Linux system
Is that correct? What about other OSS projects that are unrelated to Linux?
This specifically talks about "the Linux System".
https://www.openinventionnetwork.com/joining-oin/linux-syste...
Consider the open innovation network as a kind of club, with good intentions.
When a company like Microsoft joins it might seem like the pinnacle of success, but with it really means is that the club has become a mafia.
It won’t be long before OIN uses its patent leverage to affect control over the behavior if its members.
Think about it for a minute… Why wouldn’t such a group or simply convince corporations, like Microsoft, to put their patents into the public domain? If you have to join a club to gain access to something, but it’s not really open source and it’s not really some kind of charitable contribution.
Another way of looking at this is, Microsoft has just one goal, being a publicly traded company, which is to increase the share price of its stock… Why are people so stupid always constantly fall for the same tricks, believing that such companies do anything that is actually charitable?
I think you raise a good point about the public domain. Why wouldn't the GNU licenses just force users to put their works into the public domain? Because public domain software isn't copyleft. "Joining a club" in this case is just signing an agreement (for free) that compels open access to your entire patent portfolio. The OIN agreement is a copyleft-style patent club, similar to the GPL. You get unlimited, royalty-free access to my software, but you must agree to offer similar access to everyone, too.
That’s not a valid comparison. If Microsoft was licensing their patents under GNU (if that was possible), we’d be talking about something different entirely, but they’re not actually open sourcing them in any way at all... they’re entering into a contract to trade them like Pokemon cards with a consortium that will actually, eventually become a monopoly. Once they become a monopoly with enough leverage, they will inevitably agree to change their terms to be more hostile to the rest of the world.
Open source software offers usage under some kind of license for essentially nothing in return, not “you can use our software if you make all of your software open sores as well”.
I’m gonna leave this comment here so that I can come back and reference it in an article that all right 10 years from now when everybody is talking about how this consortium effectively took over the world of IP and how it’s too bad nobody could see that snowball when it was near the top of the hill still.
Here’s another thing to consider: given the right terms, which the constituents of this consortium could agree to, this IP monopoly (read: mafia) could even use their IP to collectively sue basically everyone (the cross section of that many patents will overlap with much more IP in the world, creating an economy of scale nobody can compete with).
Until the telemetry and data sent by MS software can realistically be turned off completely, they shouldn't get any kind of positive treatment.
In the latest release of VSCode getting to see the exact telemetry data sent got even easier and they even pointed it out in the release notes. (It is also easy to turn it off (see below). I haven't done it since the data I see are OK with me and I want to help the devs improve VSCode for me.)
> Until the telemetry and data sent by MS software can realistically be turned off completely, they shouldn't get any kind of positive treatment.
Another instance of this "all or nothing" attitude that we have here on HN (I guess it is legacy from Slashdot and Usenet).
Steps in the right direction should be praised. This holds true for pets, kids and grown ups and I think companies too.
You might not get a chance to reward the results you want if you cannot reward the steps to get there.
Edited to add the first quote and comment.
Edit 2: Turns out it is easy to turn off telemetry.
But I'd like Microsoft's reputation to be proportional to how objectionable it's behavior is.
For example, I don't want Microsoft's reputation to go from a C- to an A- because of this patent issue, when they continue to require telemetry in Windows.
We can agree on that.
GP however wrote (emphasis mine):
> they shouldn't get any kind of positive treatment.
MS adheres to GDPR regulations and has applied those protections to all users. You can opt out of telemetry, you can view what they've collected on you and delete it.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/microsoft-extending-gdp...
I have Windows 10 installed with a local login. I don't have or want an online Microsoft account. It doesn't seem to be possible to disable telemetry in this case, or at least I haven't found out an (officially supported) way to do it.
Best information I can provide on limiting telemetry for the local logon scenario is here:
https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-10-feedback-diag...
I realize that setting it to 'basic' isn't going to satisfy the conspiratorial minded among us, but I will say that I, personally, have no qualms setting my machine to 'basic'.
More details, and instructions to disable via regedit following the instructions here:
https://www.windowscentral.com/how-opt-out-customer-experien...
That's ridiculous. There should be an obvious friggin question during install "Enable telemetry and data collection?" and if the answer is no... that's it. No telemetry or data collection gets done. Ever. End of story and question doesn't get asked again. Ever.
Any other approach is literally just weasel words trying to deceive people. "Just manually change this RegKey setting" is a good example.
If you want to downgrade/disable it, you follow the instructions in the links provided.
I understand that. I just want to stop sending data from now on.
> I realize that setting it to 'basic' isn't going to satisfy the conspiratorial minded among us
I want no private or personal data to be sent. Calling me "conspiratorial-minded' is simply wrong. There isn't a conspiracy that Microsoft is collecting data about Windows 10 machines; it's an admitted fact, it was never secret. And I would prefer not to send such data, but Microsoft doesn't want to give me that option.
There is no official information on what data is gathered under the Basic setting. The page you linked to has just one sentence, and it's very vague:
> information about your device, its settings and capabilities, and whether it is performing properly
"Information about your device" could cover a lot indeed. What information does this collect that's covered under GDPR? How has it changed, and will change, over time? Who has access to it? I don't know. That doesn't make me a conspiracy theorist.
I don't buy the Microsoft claim from the same page that "This is the minimum level of diagnostic data needed to help keep your device reliable, secure, and operating normally.". It can't be impossible for Windows 10 to be reliable or secure without sending data home. It's evidently not impossible for the Enterprise edition. I accept that this data helps Microsoft do these things, but it should still be my choice as to whether to send it or not, and my right to know what's included in it. And now the law says so too, at least in the EU.
The Dutch DPA already determined Microsoft to be in violation of the GDPR a year ago (https://autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl/en/news/dutch-dpa-micr...). I don't know about more recent developments there. But this isn't just a few private individuals' opinion.
> More details, and instructions to disable via regedit
Those are not official Microsoft instructions or documented settings. Windows updates have been known to revert them, and (separately) to require changes to the instructions. Messing with the Registry and disabling system services might have other effects beyond the desired. This is not a satisfactory solution, exactly because I do care about "keep[ing] your device reliable, secure, and operating normally".
Some other points:
> I want no private or personal data to be sent
I would say that none is sent on basic, but the definition of 'private or personal' is overloaded enough that we might disagree.
> Calling me "conspiratorial-minded' is simply wrong
Sorry, I didn't call you that, just a hypothetical broader population. Probably bad wording on my part either way.
> There is no official information on what data is gathered under the Basic setting.
There is. Lots more info here:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/configure-w...
The best way to see what's gathered would be to sign up for an MSA, enable basic telemetry, and then go to the privacy account page and view it yourself.
> The Dutch DPA already determined Microsoft to be in violation of the GDPR a year ago
Not sure what to make of this since most US companies targeted compliance for May 2018, nor does that article mention the GDPR.
> Those are not official Microsoft instructions or documented settings.
Point taken, you're right :)
> I would say that none is sent on basic, but the definition of 'private or personal' is overloaded enough that we might disagree.
It's less about definitions, and more that I just can't be sure what exactly is sent.
> Lots more info here:
Thanks, that was informative. It seems they gather as complete a profile as they can of all my hardware and of the software they deem relevant (drivers, Microsoft apps) and its configuration. This is clearly enough for a globally unique fingerprint, many times over. (I don't know that they're building one, but they clearly can.)
The part that most worries me here is that at every point this doc says the list is inclusive, not exclusive. "The data gathered at this level includes". "Examples include". "Device attributes such as". There's no wording that I can see that would exclude anything at all that Microsoft might choose to collect now or later.
This holds for the Basic level, unlike the Enterprise-only Security level that explicitly says "No user content, such as user files or communications, is gathered" and "we take steps to avoid gathering any information that directly identifies a company or use". It's pretty clear that this doesn't hold for the Basic level. (Even if the purpose of gathering the data isn't to identify anyone.)
> nor does that article mention the GDPR.
You're right, it predates the GDPR and refers to a Dutch law. I was wrong to reference it and I'm sorry for muddying the discussion.
I read the Microsoft Privacy Statement (https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-US/privacystatement). It says:
> Many of our products require some personal data to provide you with a service. If you choose not to provide data necessary to provide you with a product or feature, you cannot use that product or feature
And then in the section on Windows:
> Rather than residing as a static software program on your device, key components of Windows are cloud-based [...] In order to provide this computing experience, we collect data about you [...]
It seems Windows is included in the statement that collecting personal information is mandatory and without it you "cannot use that product or feature". Although it's not explicit and so that may not be the intent for Windows - but it's not clearly disclaimed either.
Of course, any claim that collecting "Basic" data is truly required for Windows to work well is highly suspect because the Enterprise edition doesn't do it.
But OK, there's a "Learn More" link at the end of the Windows section that shows much more text. Unfortunately, while it includes many details, it also contains lots of inclusive statements. E.g., Activation is said to send "data about the software and your device" with no further explanation.
Bottom line: I would like to trust Microsoft (in this particular regard, at least). I think it's more likely than not that nothing terrible is going on. I think so because collecting data about me is not really part of Microsoft's business model, does not benefit them in any obvious way, and might harm them if it became known. But it would help a lot if Microsoft made a clear public statement (and put it in their contracts and EULAs), instead of all this "for example" wording.
Until the next update automatically re-enables it (and re-installs MS Paint and Candy Crush).
Forgetting to set DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT=1 (or being unaware that you must set it) does not constitute consent.
I agree with you that they can't afford to be super evil, because they're not the only big fish anymore. They're actually not even the biggest one.
I think it's a bit too early to decide if Java or .Net Core is better placed for the future, though.
If Microsoft is a lawnmower that will chop your arm off if you put it in the wrong place, Oracle is a self-driving lawnmower that will hunt you down.
That will then litigate unless you already have a multi-year severed limb support contract.
With recent licensing changes to Java and microsoft's recent good behavior I have considered it myself.
But in no way am I going to refrain from calling Microsoft a big bad evil company even today, after all these years. My comfort zone issues with Windows aside, their relentless vice grip on corporate and organizational IT with Office suite and especially 365, exchange email, Azure and especially Azure AD, traditional on-prem active directory and such is showing no signs of loosening.
Sure, they aren't Oracle but that's about the lowest bar you can clear in IT corporate ethics [insert cantrillian rant here]. I'd even be fine with letting go of the memories of 90s Microsoft's iron fist (easy for me, I'm too young to remember first hand) but MS of today is still too evil to deserve all the credit they're getting for being oh-so-wonderful nowadays. They absolutely can afford to be evil, just ask your sysadmin.
I am sure most of the FAT patents must be expired at this point since patents last 20 years and FAT32 came out 22 years ago. The Chinese manufacturers didn't have much of incentive to pay Microsoft.
They are more into the service industry now than they've ever been in the past. This move was them realizing that OSS is just a really good way to improve software for cheap.
I doubt this will have lasting effects as I have yet to see them actually open source anything that I would consider special.
It looks like they have open sourced a number of .NET components: CoreFX - Core foundational libraries, CoreCLR - runtime, Roslyn - compiler.
As well as PowerShell, VS Code, Typescript, ASP.NET Core, MVC, Blazor, F#, Z3 Theorem Prover, etc.
And that's from just the first few pages of their Open Source page: https://opensource.microsoft.com/
By joining ONI MS is strengthening parts of its offerings (Linux), and maybe is using (or will be using) existing ONI Linux patents to defend that part.