I read the parent as sarcastic. Since the mentioned the continued negative things they do.

I view it as new paint on same crappy house.

They had to do the open-source thing for .NET because of external pressure - not because they've changed.

They had to get GitHub because of the eyeballs. It's not some altruistic play.

In both cases some VPs spun it around, juked the stats and got their bonus.

The first E of EEE feels so good makes you forget the inevitable outcome. Like heroin.

> produced one of the largest open source ecosystems in use (.NET)

Are they going to ship an official cross platform UI library any time the next century? Decades after the Java lawsuit they still ship only a crippled copy of their scrapped Microsoft JVM for other platforms.

> Microsoft is a huge open source contributor now

Aren't almost all of their contributions for integration with their proprietary technology?

> Sorry to say, but believing nothing with MS has changed is deranged.

Yes, they got worse. They maintained Windows XP for ages and you could actually feel the improvements they shipped. Windows 11 meanwhile makes me wait for them to add a robotic arm with a knife as hardware requirement, to improve the backstabbing experience.

Nothing has changed except that it's even worse now than before, and the venue or arena changes every few years (os to developer tools to office to cloud etc). vscode or .net core or whatever you think is so valuable does not make MS your friend any more than giving you free IE did. Come the fuck on. It is beyond ignorant to try to make this argument. (or it's perfectly consistent with having a financial interest)

I guess if there are always new 20 year olds just discovering something, that must mean there are also always new 15 year olds that haven't discovered it yet, and 80 year olds that have gone Dawkins and lost what they had, and the just plain ignorant or unobservant with no real excuse.