Some people want to avoid tying their own projects to certain vendors, and this information is helpful to them. See also Oracle, IBM, etc.

Microsoft has done quite a lot to rehabilitate their image, a decade ago few would be so quick to defend them.

> Microsoft has done quite a lot to rehabilitate their image

I don't want to sound as a anti-MS fanboy, but that's the standard procedure when you get to the point "If you can't beat them...". Microsoft isn't to be trusted just because they're a business, but because like many others they're after profits above anything else. Just look at how they turned a potentially very decent OS (Windows 7) into worse privacy nightmare at every new version. I simply don't want them to mess with Linux.

Oh absolutely. Many of us remember EEE[0], but many more have forgotten - or never learned in the first place.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

I was recently forced to use Windows at work. I’ve since found a way to avoid that, but I did experience an ad pop-up before migrating to Linux.

I can’t fathom how tech professionals can accept this kind of lack of control of their operating system.

Absolutely not. When the paychecks come from a company that fundamentally does not believe in the four freedoms, that is critical information with regards to infrastructure.

Free software is an ideology and philosophy, not just a license.

I appreciate where you're coming from but unfortunately I'm not able to support software that is backed by harmful corps like MS.

Yeah, it's called the 'embrace' phase.

Agree with sibling comments. Not immediately relevant to me but at my current position we go out of our way to avoid anything and everything Amazon. Very hard to do. And if a project were backed by Amazon I would be very embarrassed to start building on it at work.

We are so serious about this that I almost got a contract canceled because it looked like they were running on AWS, and we got them to switch to Azure.

Sibling comments are bashing MS. I read your comment to the end, and it read like a punchline to a joke, given who owns Azure?

I agree it does read like the punchline to a joke, that did not escape me when I wrote it, but the larger message is that comments explaining who really owns projects we're talking about are not "unhelpful and unproductive".

Many of the sibling comments were coming from the maintaining freedom perspective, which I personally appreciate as well. I wanted to chime in that this information is also helpful from a corporate/competitive perspective.