You don't celebrate a major tech company catching up 5 years late. You kick in the CEO's office, light his desk on fire and make pointed enquiries into how much money they wasted farting around on Windows 8 and other failed ventures.

They did that. He was fired, and now there's a new CEO.

it's microsoft, how is that not an achievement?

Releasing proprietary software behind a walled garden is not exactly a celebratory-worthy achievement, even Oracle and Apple can obtain this kind of achievement.

So the only celebratory-worthy achievements are about releases of "libre" stuff?

Because, I'd say, if the software is good, and fits its users needs, then "releasing proprietary software behind a walled garden" is totally celebratory-worthy too.

Releasing a vendor lock in focused system is an act of self interest.

Releasing something for the public good, open source, open for all to use is an entirely different, more applaudable action.

You don't get browny points for being baiting your traps. Even if it's fancy cheese.

Sometimes I'd rather buy and use something costing money, from a vendor that only sells it himself, than some free stuff offered that I think its crap.

A turd of a software, even if libre, is still a turd. I won't celebrate it just because someone offers it for free.

I'm not talking in general: there's excellent libre software, and excellent proprietary software too.

But there's specific libre software that's just plain crap for most use cases compared to its proprietary alternative (e.g consider a high-end DAW and the libre DAWs. Or a high-end NLE and the libre NLEs).

And some other libre software is mighty fine in itself, but lacks other characteristics that some proprietary software has (from 24/7 paid on the phone support, to quality documentation, to working with your preffered OS or your other infrastructure, etc). So some people can make good use of it, while for others it's not suitable.

MS can both act in self interest (it is business after all) and do something for the "public good".

It's weird that you think these two marks cannot both be hit in one stroke.

yah sure. If free market was a zero sum game it would be pointless. However, I see absolutely NO reason I should applaud them for it, not when then are people making real sacrifices for open source software.

Well, that narrow view got us into this mess in the first place.

What mess?

I was there in past decades. We're better off than ever, both with regard to accessibility and pricing of proprietary software and with regard to abundance of libre software.

Oracle has: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_NoSQL_Database

Yep, you could also say Apple's CloudKit is another proprietary NoSQL solution for the purpose of providing more value and lock-in into the iOS ecosystem. But at least CloudKit has generous free usage up to:

   - 1PB for assets
   - 10TB for database

https://developer.apple.com/icloud/documentation/cloudkit-st...

Looks like you'll need 10 million users in order to have that much space, though.

By this logic we ought to discredit just about every single small business ever.

Yes, but 5 years behind the curve? I think not.