luna

Yes. I’m strongly in favor of noncommercial clauses in licenses. Because fuck capitalism.

The fact that so many people so firmly believe that MS is one of the good guys now is just bewildering to me. Like were they not alive in the 90s? This is classic embrace, extend, extinguish, as you say.

The only thing Microsoft is investing in is marketing to fool people into thinking they’re your friend. Remember that Copilot is automated open source license violation at scale. They’re building a tool to take your work, without crediting you, so others can use it without compensating you.

This is “love” in the same way an abusive relationship is “love”.

Insofar as “FOSS” is a specific, delineated, reified thing you can point to and describe, it doesn’t reject profit and capitalism when devs use licenses that enable corporations to use their work for free. That’s enablement, not rejection.

Steve Ballmer also throws chairs at employees.

A modern version of Stars! (the ! is part of the title). It’s an early / mid-90s (as in it worked on Windows 3.1!) 4x scifi strategy game, one of the early ones. Huge tech tree for its day, something like six-eight different research fields (propulsion, biology, energy, etc.) and 26 (!) levels in each with techs that depend on different levels in each research field. Different species had their own unique traits, techs, ships, playstyles, you could build your own with literally dozens of minor traits, customizable tolerances for planetary traits like radiation, gravity, temperature, custom breeding rate, productivity, … Unlimited completely custom ship and starbase designer where you could put any part in any slot where it fits and the game would just let you. No limits on the number of ships you could have (take that, Masters of Orion!) Came with a manual an inch and a half thick, supported many different kinds of multiplayer (including play by email… again, 1995!) and so many other cool things. Sadly, the company that owned it was passed around a bit and then the parent company went out of business, so it’s abandonware and no one is likely to do anything with it.

Also a modern version of the old Might and Magic games (3-5 in the series, especially 4-5, usually known as World of Xeen) with some elements of the old (1-5) Wizardry games. Did I mention I’m old? I’m old. I know someone who’s working on something like that, but I hear she’s harried by capitalism and has ADHD besides and hasn’t made a lot of progress. I really should bug her to keep at it… (spoiler: she is me)