The main thing people feared would be "embraced, extended, and extinguished" back in the day was open web standards. That's what the big anti-trust suit was about, Microsoft was forcing Internet Explorer on users and giving it proprietary standards. Nowadays Internet Explorer is fully dead and Edge is Chromium-based.

People also feared that Microsoft was going to try to destroy the GPL and other copyleft licenses somehow. Now Microsoft releases many things under copyleft licenses, Dot Net's runtime is MIT-licensed, and Microsoft runs GitHub, one of the largest repositories of open source software there is (a lot of people freaked out when that happened but I've yet to hear of them "extinguishing" anything).

Microsoft is far from the most open software company but it's much more open than it was back in the day.

[–] jorpylaforge@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

how many years of lost productivity and set backs in open web standards because of their internet explorer nonsense and you're saying it wasn't a successful execution of this strategy? i think they won and set back the open web by years.

one point about the mit license is that it's not copyleft because mit license does not protect derivative works. that is why they fought so hard against gpl licensed works and even forbade the gpl3 license on codeplex. mit license is no threat because it can be incorporated into closed source products.

with github, i don't think they are going to pull a musk or a spez, they are going to wield their influence carefully to frame the conversation and tools around open software to work in their favor as they have always tried to do. i do agree that they seem less outwardly aggressive than back in the day, though.

as far as facebook in the fediverse, they will have the ability to inflict significant, if not fatal, damage, just like ms did to open web with ie and just like google did with xmpp with gchat. that's something worth discussing.

[–] Rinox@feddit.it 7 points 1 year ago

It didn't work because thousands of people put in lots of work to make sure it wouldn't work. The fear was justified, we just managed to band together and stop that.

It's like with Y2K or the ozone layer issues. It's not that they weren't important, it's that many many people put in the work to fix them before they got a point where we were fucked.