My last act as a Hungarian journalist was translating the speech against DRM @pluralistic gave at Microsoft. For free, obviously. By then I was well on the way of becoming a full time Drupal developer but I felt it important enough.
So I am heavily biased towards him. With that disclaimer out of the way https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/ is nothing short of brilliant.
@chx was that the one from the mid-2000s that started with "Yar"? I helped set that up -- I connected @pluralistic to the person organizing talks for Microsoft Research 😎
EDIT: and here's the link! I had misremembered, it actually starts
"Greetings fellow pirates! Arrrrr!"
@crowbriarhexe Microsoft Research had a lot of autonomy at the time and prided themselves on allowing critical viewpoints. Also it was still an open question about what to do about consumer DRM -- they released the first version of Zune without DRM. And I had written a BillG Thinkweek paper on "Why Microsoft should abandon DRM" and he had forwarded it on with "not sure I agree but we should think about this" (or something like that).
@jdp23 @crowbriarhexe @chx @pluralistic
Speaking as someone who left MSR in 2000 (not all that long after we got the memo from legal that roughly went: Giving aid and comfort to open-source projects = TREASON), I'm likewise astounded.
Also surprised your DRM memo didn't end up being a career-limiting move.
@wrog @jdp23 @crowbriarhexe @chx @pluralistic
Simon Peyton Jones, at that time the lead developer of the open source Haskell compiler ghc, worked at MSR Cambridge from 1998 till 2021, and he certainly didn't do his ghc work in spare time only, also his co-workers contributed to ghc.
Thus I wonder how universal "treason" has been applied.
Yeah, there were always exceptions. And, open source is an area where Microsoft’s position has changed over the years - they’re now fairly supportive
@jdp23 @dimpase @crowbriarhexe @chx @pluralistic
(1) I'd think hiring SPJ would have been *impossible* without *some* kind of arrangement re GHC.
Easy, too: Haskell is an infinitesimally small "market" (vs. Office, Windows, or even Visual Studio); MSFT wouldn't give 2 shits (... hard enough getting them to care about C/C++ & dev tools; those only sold ~20,000 copies -- in the noise -- kept losing political fights).
(2) Memo was mainly about Linux and Apache, direct server/OS competition that MSFT was *losing*. My supervisors assured me memo didn't quite mean what it appeared, but our group *had* been throwing stuff over the wall to the GNU emacs folks for some time, and it was fairly clear that would be getting harder.
1/3
@jdp23 @dimpase @crowbriarhexe @chx @pluralistic
(3) I'm sure MSR *was* allowed to get away with shit that other parts of the company couldn't, but corporate was NOT shy about cracking down when they felt the need.
Last group I worked for had built a research Java compiler, a framework for testing out optimizations -- choice of language didn't matter *that* much, but in 1996 it was an obvious one.
By 2000 they'd produced a solid stream of publications and patents from it -- i.e., highly successful from a research point of view.
2/3
@jdp23 @dimpase @crowbriarhexe @chx @pluralistic
Problem was by that point Sun was suing MSFT (over J++ -- completely unrelated) and there was always the worry that it'd be game over for the research group once a sufficiently high level of management caught wind of its existence.
Sure enough, about six months after I left, the hammer came down, manager was not-quite-fired, but also not invited to join the new C# research group (that would be having to drop everything and spend the next 6 months rewriting all of their Java code, just because).
Also maybe Cambridge MSR being farther away is under less scrutiny than Redmond MSR.
And, to be fair, this was 20+ years ago.
3/3
chx
The Witch of Crow Briar
Roger Crew✅❌☑🗸❎✖✓✔
Dima Pasechnik 🇺🇦 🇳🇱