Microsoft using open source components is very much in line with other large tech companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. It isn't really something to applaud, and just normal business strategy for any tech company in 2016.<p>For Microsoft to become a true open-source company they would need to open source Windows, which goes against their advertising, telemetry, and tracking goals.
It is difficult to believe that a 40 year old company is going to change its spots and not execute on some kind of embrace, extend, extinguish strategy. To me it appears more likely that MS wants to tamper down the distinctiveness between its products and open source alternatives. Then, when management makes decisions on solutions, they'll choose the MS solution because it is no longer sufficiently differentiated and thus move development focus to the MS platforms.<p>As sort of an example, MS SQL server is moving to Linux and while not open source, the playbook of eliminating differentiation is at work.<p>1. It is directly aimed at Oracle and DB2 who traditionally run on Unix environments. It isn't clear that Oracle and DB2 can be as effective in the Windows environment as MSSQL can be in a Unix environment.<p>2. SQL Server in the bizspark program is nearly free for the first 3 years (so I recall) and then you're locked in and the price jumps substantially.<p>3. Traditional IT managers tend to want to buy from MS for the possibility of support - support for Postgres via IRC is excellent btw.