In Microsoft we trust

Just like many other people, I was following news from the last week’s BUILD conference with piqued interest. The ability to run Linux userland programs on Windows — including, of course, bash — is something to be excited about. If nothing else, it should dramatically improve Windows support of new programming languages that seem to pop up all the time.

There was something else, however, that I couldn’t help but notice. The reactions of tech communities to this and similar developments focused very frequently on Microsoft itself.

The beloved “new Microsoft”, as some call it, embraces open source, supports Linux, and generally does almost a full 180 with their stance on proprietary vs. free software. The circumstances fit this narrative rather snuggly, too: a new CEO makes a clean break with the past to pivot the company in this new world ruled by mobile and cloud.

Still… love? Even considering how Internet comments are grotesquely exaggerated most of the time, that’s quite a declaration. The sentiment is nowhere near isolated either. But it’s not a question whether this infatuation has a rational merit, or whether those feelings will eventually turn out to be misplaced.

The question is: why does it exist at all? We are talking about a company here, a for-profit organization. How can such a language even enter the picture?

Then I realized this is not really a new phenomenon. Quite the opposite: the broad developer community seems to always need a company to champion its core values. Nowadays, we’re simply trying to find someone new to carry the standard.

Why? Because we feel that our old heroes have forsaken us.

Hall of past fame

Take GitHub for example. Once a darling of the open source community, it’s been suffering sharp criticism for many months now. Rightfully or not, many people aren’t exactly excited — to put it mildly — about changes to the policy and atmosphere at GitHub, typified by the ill-fated meritocracy rug. The widely backed and long standing plea for a few critical features has only recently stopped falling on deaf ears. And in the background, there are always concerns about GitHub simply becoming too big, and exterting too much control over the open source ecosystem.

Nota bene, the very same ecosystem it had once been lauded for nurturing.

Among the other flagship tech companies, Apple or Facebook have never garnered much good will. Sure, they are recognized for the pure utilitarian value of hardware they produce; or convenience, broad applicability, and stability of APIs they offer. Facebook may be scoring some additional points for trying to sort out the mess of frontend development, but many say it’s not doing anybody any favors. Neither company is easy to portray as a paragon of openness, though, and it’s probably easier to argue the exact opposite.

And then there is Google, of course¹. Some time in the past few years, a palpable shift occurred in how the company is perceived by the techie crowd. It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact pivotal moment, and the one event that leaps to attention doesn’t seem sufficient to explain it. But the tone has been set, allowing news to be molded to fit it. Add this to the usual backdrop of complaints about the onerous interview process and general fearmongering, and the picture doesn’t look very bright.

Shades of grey

No similar woes seem to have been plaguing Microsoft as of late, even though their record of recent “unwholesome” deeds isn’t exactly clean either. Does it mean they are indeed the most fitting candidate for a (new) enterprise ally of the hacker community?…

Or maybe we can finally recognize the whole notion as the utterly silly concept it actually is. Hard to shake though it be, this quasi-Manicheic mentality of assigning labels of virtue or sin is, at best, a naive idealism. At worst, it’s a peculiar kind of harmful partisanship that technologists are particularly susceptible to. You may recognize it as something that has a very long tradition in the hacker community.

But it doesn’t mean it’s a tradition worth keeping.