That leads to the question: is a corporation a mega-entity in and of itself, with its own inherent behaviors, or is its behavior reflective of its management? The C-suite is altogether different at Microsoft now than in the Ballmer era, so one might argue it's a completely different company.
By the same process, would you continue to consider Red Hat a trustworthy company if they close-sourced everything they did, started installing encryption backdoors on the system and launching campaigns against open source projects? Or would you conclude they were now no longer safe, because their behavior had markedly changed?
If the latter, what is the diff between that and Microsoft? (honestly want your take)
I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
I think the point is that I don't know, and can't know, what's going on in a behemoth like that. The only data I have to go on is that they've been consistent bad actors in the past, who have actively tried to sabotage progress in fields they see as competitive.
I think there's a certain amount of management sway, but it's difficult to tell how much is honest and how much is just a spin on their regular behaviours.
I like your flipped example. It makes me think, but it's always going to be much easier to believe someone(s) has changed for the worse, so apologies for the incoming hyperbole:
Say I had a friend who used to be a serial killer. Maybe they're "ok" now, they give to Help The Aged and work in a soup kitchen. I have another friend whose life went the other way and they turned to assassination after working for charity all their life.
I'm afraid even trying really hard, I'm not going to trust either of them. It's not like a minor issue, not like they used to commit petty crimes, they actively tried to damage other people.
Maybe that's a bad prejudice on my part. Maybe if they disbanded the company and gradually reformed under a different name I wouldn't notice and would think they were great. It's all a bit emotion-driven.
// , “It is not so important to be serious as it is to be serious about the important things. The monkey wears an expression of seriousness... but the monkey is serious because he itches."(No/No)
a mega-entity in and of itself, with its own inherent behaviors
That one. This is the reformists' fallacy, where they believe that simply by replacing the people that they can make systemic change. But it's only temporary until the system itself changes or, better yet, is sacrificed on the altar of the public good.
And if RedHat made a wholesale change like that, I'd begin to grow suspicious, but I'd trust a closed source product from them more than an "open" sourced product from Micro$oft whose devs and infrastructure they happen to pay.
Much of my work, especially recently, has to do with ensuring that people don't lose (as much) control of what they're putting up on someone else's computer.
// , “It is not so important to be serious as it is to be serious about the important things. The monkey wears an expression of seriousness... but the monkey is serious because he itches."(No/No)
That leads to the question: is a corporation a mega-entity in and of itself, with its own inherent behaviors, or is its behavior reflective of its management? The C-suite is altogether different at Microsoft now than in the Ballmer era, so one might argue it's a completely different company.
By the same process, would you continue to consider Red Hat a trustworthy company if they close-sourced everything they did, started installing encryption backdoors on the system and launching campaigns against open source projects? Or would you conclude they were now no longer safe, because their behavior had markedly changed?
If the latter, what is the diff between that and Microsoft? (honestly want your take)
I think the point is that I don't know, and can't know, what's going on in a behemoth like that. The only data I have to go on is that they've been consistent bad actors in the past, who have actively tried to sabotage progress in fields they see as competitive.
I think there's a certain amount of management sway, but it's difficult to tell how much is honest and how much is just a spin on their regular behaviours.
I like your flipped example. It makes me think, but it's always going to be much easier to believe someone(s) has changed for the worse, so apologies for the incoming hyperbole:
Say I had a friend who used to be a serial killer. Maybe they're "ok" now, they give to Help The Aged and work in a soup kitchen. I have another friend whose life went the other way and they turned to assassination after working for charity all their life.
I'm afraid even trying really hard, I'm not going to trust either of them. It's not like a minor issue, not like they used to commit petty crimes, they actively tried to damage other people.
Maybe that's a bad prejudice on my part. Maybe if they disbanded the company and gradually reformed under a different name I wouldn't notice and would think they were great. It's all a bit emotion-driven.
That one. This is the reformists' fallacy, where they believe that simply by replacing the people that they can make systemic change. But it's only temporary until the system itself changes or, better yet, is sacrificed on the altar of the public good.
And if RedHat made a wholesale change like that, I'd begin to grow suspicious, but I'd trust a closed source product from them more than an "open" sourced product from Micro$oft whose devs and infrastructure they happen to pay.
Much of my work, especially recently, has to do with ensuring that people don't lose (as much) control of what they're putting up on someone else's computer.
So, on that basis, what would you expect to see for there to be a systemic change?
Governance changes atypical for the industry.
To pick one extreme example, a move to employee ownership, that kind of thing would make me start questioning.