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Meat Boy
Meat Boy

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What are the modern examples of Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish?

Some time ago Microsoft was well known for their EEE strategy for overtaking the IT markets. Firstly they created a tool using open and popular standards, then created a proprietary extension which quickly gained popularity and finally used this extension to control all the market and extinguish their competitor.

Currently, I see nothing has changed in Microsoft and sometimes, you can still hear about open source anti-trust activities like removing at the last moment support for hot reloading from .NET https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/pull/22217 and locking conversation. Just because PR spread over the Internet they reverted commit.

In 2018 Slack chat moved from open source IRC and XMPP to their protocol making it difficult to swap messenger clients https://www.theregister.com/2018/03/09/slack_cuts_ties_to_irc_and_xmpp/ Anyone who wanted to stay with their ecosystem since then had to use their proprietary client.

Some developers are afraid of the recent activity of Microsoft in the IT toolchain: GitHub, NPM, Copilot, TypeScript, Codespaces, VS Online and so on. Most of these tools are open source at the ground level, but they contain proprietary code and every time we are using them we are helping Microsoft to centralize the industry.

What are others recent EEE examples you heard about?

Top comments (6)

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alexey_romenskiy profile image
Alexey Romenskiy

Pretty everything Google does regarding web standards and web browsers. Systemd is another fine example. Bad fit for Unix philosophy, ideal for EEE. Gnome Desktop without systemd is already a marginal thing.

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lil5 profile image
Lucian I. Last
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meatboy profile image
Meat Boy

That's really interesting. Besides google, there is many developers who don't care about other browser than chrome because they are minorities (chrome 63% vs safari 19% vs 3.9% firefox).

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codewander profile image
codewander

Mapbox-gl?

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tonnerkiller profile image
tonnerkiller

Learn Emacs, avoid VS Code. Or at least use VS Codizm.

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codewander profile image
codewander

I haven't followed faunadb closely, but it might match this pattern?

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