alt Hacker NewsThere is a difference between what you say to and about volunteers working for free on their hobby and what you say about the work of a company famously known as "The Death Star"
You want to work with people and the group says "yay and this is how we will work together" you do that or go away. This is entirely separate to stating a universal truth such as "Microsoft product blows because they do not care", "Oracle sucks" or famously "You can't anthropomorphise Larry Ellison"
Did Linus ever blow-torch community volunteers or did he get the pip purely with big corp submitting paid trash for their own purposes? He seems to cop a fair bit himself from people saying thou shalt not...
The standards differ. Microsoft is going to be ok guys.
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I have no connection to Microsoft but I think this take is terrible.
Part of maturing and growing up, for me, was realizing that there are really very few people who truly deserve scorn and disrespect[1]. Those I disagree with politically, mostly think they’re doing the right thing and they think that if people only understood, they’d change their tune (and that’s basically what I think of them). Those “big companies” like Microsoft, Atlassian, etc, their incentives line up - and literally must line up - in a fashion where they make software that frustrates many users constantly. It really isn’t malice or incompetence - no one, from the intern that wrote some snippet of JS on GitHub dot com, to Satya Nadella, is either intentionally phoning it in nor waking up in the morning asking himself, “how can I frustrate the efforts of people out there?”
And anyway, because most people are trying their best, regardless of how the outcomes line up to affect my life and my interests personally, really do not deserve my scorn and derision. If I were in their situations, very little if anything would actually change. So spouting insults at these people who I don’t know, and whose roles I don’t really understand, is really not a mature, productive, nor fair thing to do.
[1] if you are curious I’d say murderers, etc. dominate that group.
Microsoft is actually just a group of people as well.