MS’s attacks on open source, open formats, and free software impacted and still impact democracies, developing nations, general computing capabilities, and create vast market inefficiencies. Looking at it as pure tech misses the forest for the trees. The corruption of the Office OpenXml process alone is a daily pox on the developing world. The tax impact of those entanglements is recurrent, and frequently hurts education and healthcare.

Also: if someone got burnt by some industry jerks and have had to deal with the fallout for decades, “it was 20 years ago” completely misstates the problem. Some BS was started 20 years ago, sure, but with daily crap-bowls that needed to be eaten every day in between. Entire careers have fallen into those cracks, armies of IT staff forced into suboptimal and broken workflows to satisfy decisions based on establishing and abusing monopolies.

Breaking a spine, even years and years ago, impacts the every day. Bitterness can be well deserved with an understanding of what was lost.

Heres a hasty link to an article about it https://www.techmonitor.ai/technology/microsoft_offered_to_u...

Did people pick up literal guns and fight each other with literal bullets over Linux/Microsoft?

No of course not. Even most American nerds aren't deranged.

Did Microsoft do everything it could to try and kill Linux, and the concept of OSS in general? You bet your fucking ass they did.

> Microsoft sued Lindows for infringement and won. After the rename to Linspire Microsoft actually worked with them on compatibility.

Holy revisionist history batman.

This isn't exactly fucking hard to find

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Lindows.com....

> As early as 2002, a court rejected Microsoft's claims, stating that Microsoft had used the term "windows" to describe graphical user interfaces before the product, Windows, was ever released, and the windowing technique had already been implemented by Xerox and Apple many years before.[4] Microsoft kept seeking retrial, but in February 2004, a judge rejected two of Microsoft's central claims.[5] The judge denied Microsoft's request for a preliminary injunction and raised "serious questions" about Microsoft's trademark. Microsoft feared a court may define "Windows" as generic and result in the loss of its status as a trademark.

> In July 2004, Microsoft offered to settle with Lindows.[6] As part of this licensing settlement, Microsoft paid an estimated US$20,000,000 (equivalent to $33,294,574 in 2024), and Lindows transferred the Lindows trademark to Microsoft and changed their name to Linspire.

> completely contrived by some fans of Linux

I mean there are absolutely some fanboy fantasies of grandeur here but I don't think it's the "fans of Linux" who are delusional mate.