As a developer who still has to work very hard to forgive MS for all the pain IE6 put me through a decade ago, this grates on my ears, even though I understand that it might be true in the abstract.
Classically, MS has been good to developers who agree to be chained to their platform, but has made life extremely difficult for developers who want or need to be platform independent.
Platform vendors and developers will forever have conflicting interests.
Yes, Active X, Windows, Java etc, and god knows how many awful things they did I cant remember them all. But years later Bill Gate decide to donate his wealth to good cause. Not only is this not a PR / Marketing Stunt, he is actually using his time and energy running it. That alone halves whatever hatred I have had.
Ever since they lost the Smartphone OS race ( if you consider they were even part of it ), I don't consider M$ a monopoly or threat any more.
And given the amount of Good things they have done since new CEO took helm, WSL, and now WSL2, VS Code, .Net Fully Open Sources with MIT license, ditching IE ( God that feels good ) , Direct X RT, along with lots of Research put out, I think it is worth reevaluating that hatred against M$ we once had.
We have no lasting friends, no lasting enemies, only lasting interests.
MS was mainly known for its languages and its apps, more than the OS. IBM PCs still came with CP/M or PCDOS (MSDOS).
Then when Windows 3 came out, MS started to act like IBM but on steroids, thinking they owned the "stack" (as it was). OS/2 was the last attempt to extract the "PC compatible" world from the Windows domination.
Then IE6 and ActiveX ensconced MS in the enterprise. What used to be "you won't get fired for buying IBM" became "you won't get fired for buying MS because there's no choice".
The onset of the web and competitors in MS's dominant space (well except for apps, Office still rules the world) and the demise of the Ballmer years (especially the death of their mobile/phone ecology) means that MS is now actually doing what IBM did about 15 years ago when they adopted Linux.
To quote Vonnegut, "So it goes".
MS were acting like mini IBM throughout the 80s, and before the mid 80s had very much gained a negative reputation globally. It was against Microsoft, not IBM, that was the usual target of complaint when the first AT clones were coming out - 84? 85? I think Windows 1 was about the same time. Certainly enough of a reputation to be amazed they were still collaborating with IBM to produce the first OS/2, again around the mid 80s.
Did he? Bill Gates has consistently been getting richer according to Google, and now has a staggering 90B.
Fraud in charities is a real thing. There are a lot of "charities" that do some good work, but primary exist for the benefit for the benefit of someone. Often the primary purpose is to hide bribes: the CEO's spouse is a high government official. It is very easy to get mess up in such a charity and end up not doing well with your money.
The other problem is 90B is to much money for any charity to handle at once. Any charitable program that has a lasting (and thus useful) impact will take time. Even if the charity sets up a trust, there is nothing to stop the CEO from raiding that trust in latter years. Several charities started good, but over time have slowly - and legally - morphed into something that is very different from what the founders intended.
Staying in charge of his money is the best way to ensure that it is used well.
Eg their main focus for .net Core has been multi platform - ie the last 3-4 years!
Visual Studio Code.
And on browsers they are building what will probably be a better Chromium than Google's Chrome, in the new Edge.
Platform vendors benefit when developers are locked in by network effects. Developers maximize their value when their skills are transferable.
And that goes for Github and its package registry. Concentration of power is problematic.
The costs of supporting multiple cloud providers is still a cost. K8S, Docker, Pulumi, Packer are starting to reduce that interoperability gap, but it's still a friction.
I've moved to .NET on Ubuntu for our current project (I'm an Engineer Manager/Architect, but the team is C#). It's been remarkably smooth and low friction.
So it's a balance, the interests of a platform vendor are of course that you stay on their platform. But currently there's enough competition that it's still a buyers market.
AWS is getting a bit too powerful, Azure is doing a good job of keeping MS shops in the MS world, but GCP is disappointing.
