Once Microsoft stop charge users of Linux-based products for their patents or at least stop doing that shady way under NDA I'll believe it's not the same company.

So far they get better in communication with open source community, but their business practices are all the same and Windows 10 only prove it.

I'm curious how many people actually factor this into any due diligence for selecting technology for a project? How much weight do you give it? If I were to advise against using Azure, Windows, .NET because of patents charges for some Linux products I'm not sure my colleagues or clients would take me seriously. Yes, there are lots of reasons why you may not select MS tech, but patents seems a personal, political reason , which would be difficult to justify if you're trying to project it onto other people / organisations.

An approximately shared set of values and/or (business-relevant) political aims is a great advantage in working together.

This is definitely bad behavior from Microsoft that amounts to patent trolling, but that's still way better than the old Microsoft was. They weren't the only ones though, as any of the fancy patent lawsuit maps of the smartphone patent wars would show you.

Apple was notorious for suing Samsung of using the patented shape of a rectangle and while this was a misrepresentation of the way design patents work, most the patents they've used in their lawsuits were frivolous as well.

Well... back in the day Microsoft also was the company everyone was rooting for that was standing to the evil IBM.

Those who ignore history are bound to repeat it.

yes, the roles of the actors cycles around, but the script is the same.

I'm pretty sure you have the things on the wrong sides of the "much less" in your first sentence (unless you intend to say that Microsoft is more like the company it was 25 years ago than the one it was 3 years ago.)

>and Azure requires GNU/Linux

No it doesn't.

It doesn't require you to use it. Microsoft requires it to make their Azure platform viable. Microsoft couldn't just have a Windows based cloud platform, it requires Linux to succeed...which is exactly what I meant.