Please point to any company that does anything out of the goodness of its heart. Companies don't have hearts, they have employees and shareholders that need to be kept happy and paid.

Never claimed any other company did that, what I am suggesting is your post reads like a PR fluff piece, and gives more or less the same rhetoric Microsoft gives as well.

Honestly, most of the FAANG companies are guilty, but I will give Facebook kudos for being fairly honest about the mutual benefits that came from open sourcing React.

Thanks for calling out FOSS. Microsoft's open source contributions absolutely do not enhance our freedom to compute how we wish. Nothing they are doing will help you compute ethically, or prevent someone else from imposing their ethics on you. They are just trying to capture a market of developers that happen to code in the open.

I'm confused.

Let's say I like C# and I also like Linux. Doesn't them making C# (and .Net) open source and cross-platform enhance my freedom to compute how I wish?

Or is that somehow different from other open source languages, like Python or Rust? How do those help with computing ethically?

Your preference indicates that you have been captured. They will use it to move you to a platform they control eventually. Maybe you'll like it, but it won't be more free. It will have a ToS.

> Doesn't them making C# (and .Net) open source and cross-platform enhance my freedom to compute how I wish?

Why do you need this on Linux? Only to integrate with MS proprietary products, that's why.

I don't need it. I want it, because C# is my favorite programming language. Isn't that what freedom is about?

This means that when I'm writing a website or a Docker microservice, I want to use C#. And since the best OS to run those is Linux, there are no proprietary MS products in sight.

When I'm writing a cross-platform desktop application, I want to use C# too, but I can't, so I'll use another language.

Embrace, extend, extinguish. Don't blindly trust anyone backed by shareholders.