I found this part interesting: > González Waite said that all of the large proprietary software …

Meanwhile, all major OEMs, and OS vendors routinely use BSDs and Linux distributions in some form, yet it is the same business as usual as 30 years ago, reverse engineering hardware support. The only "Linux Desktop" ready desktops and laptops to find at local shopping mall for normies are Android and ChromeOS devices, likewise in out-of-the-box experience for hardware support for peripherals.

There was an interesting story with the LiMux[1] ( Linux & Munich) project. The local government in Munich used it for quite some time. But than Microsoft came and installed there German Headquarters in Munich. With that new headquarter and enough lobbying, LiMux was forced out by the then new government just the moment it got "successful". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

I worked for a very old school manufacturing company based in Switzerland. We wanted to roll our own IoT platform for sensors in the factory. We spoke to MS, what they had was a load of garbage, so we decided to carry on as we were. I later found out that the MS CEO called the CEO of this company and from then on we were fighting every day as to why we weren’t using MS. This was a private company, not even a big spend, yet they got the CEO involved on sales calls? That’s when I realised how corrupt it was an org.

Most of these companies are absolutely total bullies. They’ll go to your board, CEO, governor, senator, mayor, audit firm, wherever. Punish your friends and elevate your enemies. A big part of being a CIO or CTO is having and maintaining relationships with key suppliers. This is especially true with SaaS/IaaS, where your business is valued based on whatever bullshit churn metrics the company cooked up. Your $2M deal may have way bigger impact on a Sales VP bonus than you think. You have to be a different kind of asshole to maintain control of these guys than in the old software world.

I can recommend watching the free documentary "The Microsoft Dilemma - Europe as a software colony" which highlights and explains how they target corrupt branches of the government, with under the table deals for specific threats and doxxes against politicians, up until "shilling" as government officials when they are not even working there, creating fake email addresses on their tenant's email domains to make it look like they have an administrative say in decisions in other teams of the projects. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=duaYLW7LQvg Yt-dlp while it's hot. Microsoft sure sends DMCA takedowns after this one.