Am I the only one who finds statements like this to be somewhat fanatical? Companies compete in all sorts of ways, but I find it hard to believe that Microsoft is some malevolent (thanks) empire trying to crush every OSS entity that they see.
Perhaps I just am not familiar enough with what they've done to harm OSS.
And, this is only the list of the last few years. I actually stopped caring about this sort of thing for the last five years or so simply because microsoft fans are not part of my life anymore. However, when I did, they were doing evil way back then, and had been since I started to pay attention.
As a Microsoft employee, I'm a bit confused about the C99 reference. You can get C99-compatible compilers from other sources that run under Windows, and if C99-compatibility is important, Microsoft will lose market share to them. My guess is that -- for the line-of-business developers that makes up the bulk of Microsofts dev market, C99 compatibility is simply not important.
Microsoft doesn't ship a Fortran 2008 compiler either; should they?
> if C99-compatibility is important, Microsoft will lose market share to them.
This would have been true if Microsoft wasn't also providing the platform. I have been avoiding MS platforms like the plague for the last 5 years, but when I last developed for Windows, you had to use the Microsoft C/C++ compiler to properly play with many system interfaces (some of which, e.g. IShellFolder, are only exposed this way).
Perhaps gcc is better these days, and you really can do without a Microsoft compiler; that wasn't the case 5 years ago.
> for the line-of-business developers that makes up the bulk of Microsofts dev market, C99 compatibility is simply not important.
Of course, neither was ODF/OASIS support, and neither was OOXML. But the former was an industry standard supported by every other player. And the latter was an incompatible standard introduced by Microsoft for political reasons and not even properly supported by them.
Which supports my claim that Microsoft is not becoming community friendly (for any community other than "Microsoft developers") or helpful in any way.
Microsoft doesn't need to ship a Fortran 2008 or C99 compiler. But I think there's no merit in the claim that Microsoft is trying to be friendly with the open/standard community, or that it has changed its ways (given in my list above) in any way.
There's nothing fancy about interfaces like IShellFolder. From a C perspective, they're just tables of function pointers. I don't know why they would require a Microsoft compiler. But if there's something in those headers that's not compatible with the C standard, then that's a much more valid complaint.
There are commercial compilers from Intel and others which I think are both thoroughly compatible with Windows and support some or all of C99; these are always options.
I wasn't taking issue with any of your other examples, because I'm largely sympathetic to those claims. But Microsoft's failure to sell a specific product you want from them seems like a different category of complaint entirely.
> But if there's something in those headers that's not compatible with the C standard, then that's a much more valid complaint.
There definitely was stuff incompatible. I think at some point gcc/icc started supporting these extensions, but for a long time, all of the midl / type library tools with MS only, and the header files used proprietary MS extensions.
You could, of course, rewrite the definitions for another compiler (COM was documented), but it was a tedious error prone thing to do.
> Microsoft's failure to sell a specific product you want from them seems like a different category of complaint entirely.
The list of complaints was far from complete, I tried to give complaints of different kind. This one is in the same category of the IE6 stagnation (market owned -> innovation stops, standards ignored). It's not as antisocial as the rest of the complaints, but it is definitely in the "Microsoft isn't a friend of the community" department.
Perhaps I just am not familiar enough with what they've done to harm OSS.