Just came across this sentence in an oped... some strange times we live in. I still remember when I was getting into tech how everyone was afraid of Microsoft... but to be honest google & apple are doing more EEE than Microsoft so...

Microsoft is a strange one, and I think it's wise to seperate it into different divisions then as a whole.

Some of its software / services is great and helpful, and on the other hand, it's a spying lard of shit that doesn't work.

There's a lack of consistency across the board.

Microsoft has been anything BUT oss friendly. It wasn't until they started ramping up the GitHub acquisition that they gave a shit. Github isn't what it is because of them, or Nat Friedman. It was around and thriving far before that.

Also, GitHub was most definitely NOT awesome during the youtube-dl situation until it ended up becoming a bad PR incident for them.

Reminder that the best parts of their "open source" editor vscode are actually just proprietary

This is a tough one. It feels like Microsoft is trying at least more than the others to be more open source friendly. They have nice offers for students and it's nice that I can develop and app just like this, without having to pay for just trying to develop it myself (looking at you apple).

It feels like one gets a lot out of MS office, even the payed version, compared to some other software out there.

I dunno. I guess I have mixed feelings about them but I really like some of their products.

I will admit Microsoft seems to be the least evil, but I can't help but to feel that their OSS initiatives are just a marketing ploy to placate long-time open sourcers/hackers/indies about a large mega corporation literally owning their space.

One isn't more evil than the other, they are simply enterprises working on strategies to harvest as much money as possible while balancing the thin line between the law and your trust.