last time I checked Microsoft was a company (not a platform) and like any other it has to make money to survive. Your saying is applicable to every other company releasing open source code
Yes they are... And believe it or not people / companies can change. And changing to a more open culture even if the reasons for doing this is because they will cease being competitive if they don't is still a good thing. Open source these days not only makes sense technically and ethically but also economically... And that's a good thing.
And I absolutely agree with it. Even happy about that. Companies should make money, developers should make money - it's all the right things. I love money too :)
The only thing I'm talking about is honesty - MS is trying to show they love open-source just because they are so awesome and hackers, but in reality it's just profitable mask and they are glad to wear it.
I submit that Microsoft is staffed and led, in part, by talented software developers, many of whom are invested themselves in open source philosophy. When ideas make it into the light of day that reflect this internal culture, I think it is a cause for happiness. Let's use care when claiming to understand the actual decision making process in any complex organization, particularly one formed from many intelligent, autonomous agents. Certainly skepticism is healthy in general, but in this case it doesn't seem to serve a positive purpose.
I appreciate your efforts to register this account just to write this reply. But as it's just common words (each huge software company have developers who are involved to open-source projects), nothing has changed in my opinion - I'm still sure they wave "open-source" flag just to not loose developers for their platform and any their new standard or new language is a tool for vendor-lock (platform-lock) as it was before for years.
