Fleeing Microsoft's Digital Cradle: Who Is Killing Your Digital Sovereignty?
*Translation of a zhichai.net forum post. The views expressed are the author's own.*
In 2004, Linus Torvalds pointed at a Microsoft-funded attacker and said: "He has a big nose, and I think all his lies are hidden inside it." That was the wild-west era of open source versus monopoly—Linus was like a lumberjack wielding an axe, with sharp instincts and a foul mouth.
But 22 years later, we haven't seen the envisioned victory. Instead, we have collectively moved into a cage built of code completion, free hosting, and polished UI—a "gentle prison." The big-nosed lie never disappeared; it just learned to speak to you in the docile tone of a "Copilot."
The Trojan Horse
Microsoft's so-called "love" for open source is the most successful Trojan horse in business history. It no longer tries to kill open source the way the 1998 "Halloween documents" revealed. It chose assimilation instead. It bought GitHub, shipped VS Code, and then—with Copilot as a giant harvester—it reaped the wisdom developers had irrigated into the commons for decades, ground it up, and sealed it into its proprietary models.
By 2026, the deal's gentle mask finally came off. GitHub's updated terms explicitly state that as long as you are in an "interactive state"—plainly, the moment you open your editor and start writing code—every character you type becomes "interaction data" for Microsoft's AI training. This is not a tool; it is a digital tithe paid in kind. Every line of code you write adds bricks to Microsoft's AI empire, and what you get back is merely a few lines of auto-suggestions that may themselves carry copyright disputes.
Windows Recall: The Peak of Erosion
This erosion of sovereignty reached its peak with Windows Recall. The feature takes an unencrypted screenshot of your screen every few seconds, and at one point even stored data—including passwords and bank account numbers—in a plain SQLite database. Microsoft calls it "giving your PC a photographic memory," but in reality it installs a 24-hour electronic ankle monitor into your digital life.
It strips away humanity's most important evolutionary protection: forgetting. A life that cannot be forgotten, that can be audited by third parties at any moment, is no longer a life of free will—it is a data asset awaiting sale.
The Great Professional Demotion
We are experiencing an unprecedented "professional demotion." Developers are degenerating from creators of logic into sorters on an AI model assembly line. The saddest part of this regression is that we performed it willingly—laughing, chasing the illusion of "maximum efficiency." We depend on Microsoft's full infrastructure stack like tenants, forgetting that tenants can never say no to a landlord's surveillance. Once you get used to letting Copilot steer, you eventually forget how to drive—and even forget that you own a car.
Conclusion
Linus's old profanities now sound like oracles. Microsoft is not evil—it is simply too good at packaging "convenience" as shackles. If you don't feel a chill down your spine right now, it means you've grown comfortable being a digital sharecropper, accustomed to the big nose that is devouring your sovereignty.