This tells me LibreOffice has become a threat to Microsoft, and I’m here for it.
If anyone else is curious what it’s like, LibreOffice’s site is here. Highly recommend.
using Microsoft Word for too long makes me break out in Tourette’s
Writer is so much more understandable
Word is proof that there is no God and that we’re all alone in the cold vacuum of space. Word is every traffic light being red. Word is getting an itchy arsehole because you couldn’t quite wipe yourself properly.
I don’t think anything in the software world has ever pissed me off as much as the fucking ribbon. “We’ve run out of ideas as far as the UI is concerned - just throw everything up there somewhere, menus, toolbars, whatever”. A close second was their genius idea of hiding unused menu items so the locations of the items you do use are constantly changing.
I don’t use MS products any more but my 90 yo parents do and it’s a fucking nightmare trying to help them with stuff. MS Office is certifiable elder abuse.
Office 97 was the last good Office. No auto-adjusting menus, no ribbons, you could actually provide phone support and have confidence that both people were seeing the same thing.
It tells me microsoft is petty
Large corporations have zero empathy for competition.
What will their quarterly report say? Think of the stockholders. (/s)
It’s not even that. It’s way smaller potatoes down in the org chart.
People always say “why would large company do this” and the answer is almost always that guy 7 or 8 rows down the org chart needs this to get their bonus this year and that point gets distilled into 1 bullet in a power point presentation that is summarized by chatgpt.
I visited a local Microsoft office in the mid-90s. Their office employee kitchen had a poster of the Internet Explorer logo smashing the Netscape logo to a bloody pulp.
I worked for apple
It was creepy. I have been in litteral sex-cults that felt less cultish and close-minded.
I got recruited by Apple some years ago because of my Stack Overflow account. I’m glad I ignored them, although there’s something to be said for an ungodly salary and Apple stock options.
If large corporations have zero empathy for their competition, why do they have such an easy time coordinating raising grocery prices well above the free market optimum?
Large corporations are owned by capital holders. Often it’s the same set of capital holders owning different corporations because they’ve diversified their assets. It is not in the interest of their owners to have a free market race to the bottom.
So they make deals. And when socialists force the government to forbid those deals, they find Schelling points where they can make deals without making deals. It’s not collusion; it’s covid supply issues; ask anyone. And with neoliberal/neocon dismantling of regulatory agencies they can just do it.
So they have empathy for other large corporations. But it goes further than that. At least for now, capital assets are still managed by people. Those people are flesh and blood. They eat, they socialize, they make friends, and they care about their friends and acquaintances. And this caring is embedded into the choices that they make at work, where they compete against their friends and acquaintances.
So large corporations have empathy not just for other corporations, but also for rich people in general. Golden parachutes, nepotist appointments, favors, massively overpaid C-suite execs and expensive consultancy jobs from each other’s hobby projects.
Corporations bleed trillions of dollars for the sake of empathy with their competitors and with private individuals, they just won’t accept a competitor to bourgeoisie hegemony.
I have plenty of thoughts about their majority shareholders.
Its just none of those thoughts are positive.
They literally blew billions of dollars and years of developer time just to screw the companies that won the argument of “open internet or Microsoft protocol” back in the day. Yes, petty.
Probably has something to do with more and more things like this happening:
https://cybernews.com/news/france-lyon-microsoft-office-tech-adoption/
Anyone who has projects on Github they care about, you might wanna move it to self-hosting or another git host while you still can, because once MS gets tired of killing e-mails, Github repos are probably going to start getting sniped next.
Even if you stay on GitHub, definitely mirror to another host. Git is designed to be distributed, why not make use of that capability!
codeberg is owned by a nonprofit. highly recommend it
They probably meant purely self hosted. You can self hosted Gitea, Forgejo, GitLab, and probably many others.
git (by itself) is no harder to host than SSH.
I wouldn’t say it is particularly easy to setup, not easier than using a Docker image at least.
Gitea (and hopefully Forgejo as well) really is.
I can vouch for Forgejo, it is pretty easy.
I host my main repository on my “lab server” at home, I got a copy on codeberg, and my public repo are mirrored on github.
I specify in the github description that’s a mirror with a link to codeberg.
Github is the little outcast kid of the bunch…
Self-hosted GitLab is what GNOME and Debian chose to do.
I still use the main GitLab for most things.
https://repo.or.cz/ provides just git hosting.
It’s also relatively easy to just self-host Git, though permissions can be wonky, at least last time I tried.
I can’t recommend Darcs. Luckily I don’t see MS (or any other corp) being able to take over core Git development. I really should try Pijul again, but least time I played with it, the history/branch visualization (which you can do without, but I really like to have) was actually still worse than Darcs.
Or self-host if that’s feasible, MAS has been self-hosting for a while now, for example.
Oh man, I hate the whole git system so much, it was like the worst part of coding.
Mafia shit cause the mob boss is the President.
Lets be real here. They’d do it no matter who’s in charge.
They have been doing this for 40+ years
This isn’t a conspiracy…
It’s the reality of using Hotmail as a business account in 2025.
Which is frankly nuts.
But the author even says the same thing happened to them before too
Using Hotmail for anything was already a bad idea, using it for an open-source dev account is worse. I don’t understand why they haven’t switched to something else 20 years ago.
It’s been a 365 account for years now. They just still use the domain.
95% of senior government officials across Africa will give you a fancy-ass, taxpayer funded, full color laminated plastic business card that lists their email address for official business as Gmail or Hotmail.
Like… Today. Right now. I used to have a collection. Once got one with a 3D hologram thing. Fucking hotmail and gmail address.
Yep, I don’t remember the exact phrasing, but in these situations, I assume incompetence before I assume evil intent.
Maybe it is intentional but the incompetence is in how obvious they are.
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetentance
Is the saying, but it’s definitely not always true.
It’s more like some of the best evil can be hidden behind incompetence for quite a while
I mean, the phrase is for associates and random people you run into for one specific interaction
Basically:
Give em the benefit of doubt
It doesn’t mean if your neighbor kicks you in the balls everyone morning, you still try to shake his hand tomorrow.
No real reason to be using a hotmail account in this day and age, even less so if you’re a developer of a direct competitor for Microsoft.
Eh, that’s the problem with email - it’s much harder to change and migrate, because you can’t guarantee others will use your new email, much less find out who somehow still has the old email to send messages to and expects a reply from.
This is an argument for having your own domain for emails. There is an annual cost but at least your address isn’t locked to a specific provider sokcd you can change some DNS settings to point at a different mail server.
I’ve been with Tuta mail for years now and it just keeps getting better. It’s not free, but I believe that that’s why it’s a good choice. They’ve add the calendar app and are expanding to cloud storage.
Yep, it’s a great idea
It’s also an argument for not having your own domain for emails, because you may one day loose that domain too, and someone could poach the domain to impersonate you.
Unless you own the domain. Then switching providers is a simple DNS/MX/DKIM/DMARC update.
Eh, that’s when you just turn on auto-reply/forwarding and abandon it.
But of course they need to be able to access it to enable auto-reply. :)
This. Don’t ever delete the account because someone will scoop it up and impersonate you. Just set auto reply and log out. Check the terms, you may need to log in every 6 months though. Do that a couple of times at least.
This is what I did. I set up autoresponse giving out an address that redirects to my new email address. My parents called me to see if I was hacked. Everyone else just started using the new address.
Also you can get locked out of other services that use email for 2FA and password resets
compared to what? much easier than phone numbers
What alternative do you recommend that won’t be blocked by Google and Microsoft? I hate Microsoft, but I can’t even sign up for a Google account, and everywhere else I’ve tried is blocked by Google, Microsoft, or both.
I self-hosted my email from 2006-2021, and do not have the stamina to do that any more.
If your concern is being blocked, the best advice is to avoid any free email service and pony up for a paid one.
ProtonMail used to be the big one, but IIRC they had some controversy recently:
Other commenter already mentioned Zoho, but also mailbox.org.
Zoho works well for me with my own domain (though I am on the old free plan that allows IMAP, while today the free plan only supports webmail or their own app). I also know someone who uses Tuta without problems sending to Google and Microsoft.
I use posteo.de
Do they even still issue them? Like prior to ~2007 Hotmail was THE free email to have before Google, like, did it better. But aren’t they issuing outlook.com addresses now?
Dunno… the last time I dealt with it was someone trying to reach my mom and couldn’t.
I asked them to verify the address…
@hotmale.com
Oh, well there’s your problem!
Oh, well there’s your problem!
Or is it?
-yup, it is :-/
When MS ditched the Hotmail name, they went to their “Live” branding. I have an account with that domain, in addition to my old Hotmail account.
I wish I held onto my old Yahoo account, but it got so full of spam that it became completely unusable; so I deleted it 🫤
Yahoo still exists. Somehow. Apparently the brand is extremely popular in Japan, Yahoo Japan is on the list of top 50 visited websites. IIRC the brand was bought by Verizon, and I have no idea if Yahoo even offers web search anymore.
Apparently Yahoo uses Microsoft Bing for their search backend.
How the hell are we down to two meaningful web engines and two meaningful search engines?
There’s Firefox and everyone else, and everyone else uses Chrome.
There’s Google and everyone else, and everyone else uses Bing.
Don’t forget safari, the entirety of iOS userbase is forced to use it
Because complacency. That’s all I can think of.
I stopped using Hotmail when gmail launched and I was given one of the early invites from a tech relative. I have the welcome email from '04.
But now I’m looking at moving my emails to a self hosted solution because they have used everything in my >20year email history for Ai and I don’t want that to continue into the future.
I just don’t really value email accounts much. I have several and only rarely check them.
Relying on American companies is a liability in of itself.
While there is corruption everywhere and on a standardized basis, there are of course countries with higher levels of corruption, the US is the #1 source of corruption and criminality in the world. Additionally it’s the ideological centre for global oligarch/criminal gangs.
Microsoft’s monopoly in Windows and Office alone results in extraction of hundreds of billions of dollars from companies and individuals all around the world.
What isn’t made clear is if this had anything to do with him being a LibreOffice developer. Or just the usual Kafkaesque bullshit that happens when someone’s account gets flagged for “suspicious activity” or whatever and they cannot get a real human being to help or reverse the problem.
Or the terrifyingly-random bullshit that happens when someone chooses to depend on a free service such as Hotmail as their primary mission-critical address. (This article is about the developer getting locked out of their Hotmail, and the generally-broken state of Hotmail’s account recovery process.)
Doesn’t he live in Moscow? So it might just be due to the sanctions.
Or the terrifyingly-random bullshit that happens when someone chooses to depend on a free service such as Hotmail as their primary mission-critical address. (This article is about the developer getting locked out of their Hotmail, and the generally-broken state of Hotmail’s account recovery process.)
That could be it. What is certain is that these big corps really don’t want to pay human beings to sort out issues so if you get caught in the middle of some BS you may have no recourse out of it.
Why do I feel like any customer support has been replaced by ai and it has led to this show of shit?
Replaced? They didn’t have any in the first place
Most likely, yes. Probably some sort of automation that ran wild.
Big tech companies never had any CS people.
By the way, ignoring as much of this big tech corpo crap as you can also makes you live an easier life.
Whenever I see a story of “some guy who relies on <big tech account> working loses access to it and suddenly can’t do anything anymore” I think “this can never happen to me”. Which means there’s a whole category of problems you’re suddenly never going to see. It also means you’re less naive. So just don’t vendor-lock yourself in. Don’t put a log-in for an account which you don’t control in front of important things you need to do. Simple as that.
On top of that, you’ll also leak less private data about yourself and probably others as well. So you even make yourself less of a target when it comes to data protection laws or something. I know, these get routinely ignored. I’m just saying, if you don’t even use the problematic stuff (or almost never), you’ll also have potentially less legal troubles at hand. And you never know, legel troubles might not appear for a while but they could lurk far in the future. For example, many Nazis got into legal trouble for their participation in Nazi Germany, even decades later.
I know, the guy from the story probably only needed that account to ensure he can compare some stuff with how MS Office is behaving compared to LibreOffice, or things like that. So it’s probably not a big deal. But generally speaking, you really shouldn’t vendor-lock yourself in.
I have this exact same thought. I see things like this and I’m like, God, I’m glad I don’t have any of that shit.
Well now i know Linux is ready to switch over to.
Thanks Microsoft!
MS ❤️ Open Source
(/s)
Who in their right mind uses hotmail?
Same kinds of people who still pay for AOL.
why are people that are building FOSS software not using FOSS software to build it? Gitlab? Forgejo?
People are complicated and FOSS isn’t as simple as all or nothing.
Sometimes people have things setup before they discovered FOSS - it’s hard for me to give up my gmail account from age 14, even though I run my own domain now.
Sometimes FOSS gets captured - Microsoft owns githib now, which makes tough decisions for all the projects hosted there.
Thanks for the reply, cheers.
I’m on the outside so forgive me if this is a dumb question, didn’t Linus Torvalds create GitHub?
git is a very complex undo/redo tool designed to simultaneously track the changes made to multiple documents by multiple users while being efficient with managing disk space and other resources. (It also has other clever tricks it can do). It was created by Linus Torvalds, current development is led by Junio Hamano.
Chris Wanstrath, P. J. Hyett, Tom Preston-Werner and Scott Chacon made GitHub.com, which was eventually sold to Microsoft. GitHub does two things well: -You can easily clone any project hosted with them to your own git repository using the command ‘git clone https://github.com/[Username]/[ProjectName]’ -The rest of the public website is basically a looking glass for everything git does under the hood natively (but with a nice webUI instead of a cold command prompt).
Personally I lost faith in GitHub when it started offering Copilot assistant. We’re only a two heartbeats away from Microsoft saying that using Copilot for any of your projects code constitutes Microsoft contributed to that project as a precursor to Microsoft saying it basically ‘owns’ all this open-source stuff. Embrace, extend, extinguish (I recommend everyone run docker and GitTea to create a personal clone store (give your favorite projects insurance) and that all developers move away from GitHub)
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Eat shit, microsoft
What, Microsoft? The corporation built almost entirely out of copying Apple and buying up competitors to destroy them? Microsoft the convicted monopoly?
Noooooo! It can’t be! They’re so . . . uh . . . ubiquitous.
The corporation built almost entirely out of copying Apple and buying up competitors to destroy them?
Ironically enough, their biggest failure to do this was when they let the iPhone (with the help of Android) bitch-slap Windows Mobile and Windows Phone out of existence.
Classic Monkeyballmer
