this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
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That is at least in part because Windows has actively undermined Linux for years, and the older ones of us also remember M$ killing OS/2 (&Novell on tge server side) and learnt our lesson not to trust them even when it looks like they're playing nice
Corporations aren't people. Brands aren't people.
I feel like in these online conversations where everybody is mostly just viscerally reacting to a headline people forget that a lot, and that worries me about as much as the underlying subjects of conversation.
I'll be honest, I'm about as exhausted with both sides of that argument. I use both Linux and Windows daily and I have zero patience for people parading out this type of train of thought. I care about what works and, for obvious reasons, I'd much prefer if the effective default was free and open source, but the "We root against Windows because it was mean to us" thing is a borderline non-sequitur as far as I'm concerned.
Setting aside the fact that legally a corporation actually is a person, there is such a thing as a corporate culture, and a corporate ethos.
Let's start with an old microsoft ethos: embrace extend extinguish
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Now don't try to tell me I made it up, there's enough evidence for it to have its own wiki page.
Similarly there's FUD an approach they most certainly didnt invent but did an excellent job of weaponising to a fine art.
And so on and so forth. Those of us who have been around a while know the true shape of it, and that leopard has never changed its spots.
I got my MCSE on NT4 back when CNE was much more respected. I still work in IT so yes I too use both windows & linux, that doesn't stop me having a clear eyed view of them.
They're also not the worst by a long chalk, google, meta, palantir are all far less principled and far more detrimental to society.
M$ still arent good though, and its woven into their culture
I've been around since MS-DOS 3, let me put that out there.
Also, a corporation isn't a person where I'm from. You guys can sort your garbage legal system in your own time. (alright, so it's a juridical person, which is a collective form of personhood where you can hold some rights, but you definitely do NOT have a physical person's rights and you CERTAINLY don't have an actual personality).
So besides repeating common tropes of online commentariat, which are by and large memes more than arguments, I'd point out that it's not just that they aren't the worst offenders, it's that the conversation is about why they get that exact set of tropes waved in every conversation where other companies that do those same things do not.
The example I'm using is Apple, just because they've deployed the closest example to this, but they work because... well, you didn't list them.
You seem to think that this is about being "for" or "against" companies. This is about why people would think it's one or the other, and why they assign different attributes to corporations that largely operate in similar ways.