We're all right to be cautious about trusting large companies' motives when they embrace an open standard. But I don't think there's any reason to invoke EEE! until they have introduced a proprietary (i.e. closed-source) implementation of something and then added non-standard extensions.

Since much of Microsoft's recent activity has been released as open source (MIT licensed, no less), I have a hard time believing Microsoft would go down that road again any time soon.

Rather, I think they're building their business on providing the best and easiest-to-use hosting and cloud services provided you're using their excellent and free developer tooling. And I'm OK with that, since they're not doing anything that is unfairly competitive. (Even AWS could start providing VSCode extensions and they'd be on equal footing with Microsoft, though to win they'd have to compete with MS's cloud directly.)

That would be WSL wouldn't it? Their goal is clearly to avoid having people moving to Linux as a development platform, and keep them on Windows.

The extensions are the ability for Linux processes to integrate with Windows software running on the same machine. In a way, they're extending Linux with Windows services.

I think it's the opposite. There's little danger that Windows shops are going to move to Linux. However, I know a bunch of devs currently using Macs that would probably switch to Windows with nice devices like the Surface Pro and access to real gaming and such, if only Windows was a suitable Unix environment for their work.

They want devs using Macs and such to move to Windows, and I think it's going to work.

For WSL 2, they're taking the Linux kernel whosesale and dropping it into a VM in Hyper-V. If anything, they're backing away from anything that could be construed as a possible EEE.

I like when a company wins by just being superior (and hopefully in a way where they aren't deliberately building a moat)

What good? All that open source code.

The constant goalpost moving here is ridiculous. “Oh, Microsoft released n projects as Free Software? Well by god they should have released n+1.”

Either way, because C#/.NET and Roslyn are open-source, the likelihood of .NET shops being left high-and-dry without a debugger is very slim, since it wouldn’t be all that hard for an experienced developer to build another one.

Now, ASP.NET can be developed in OSX/Linux/Windows and they've cut out layers involved so that developers can work within Linux on their Windows machine.

Is the goal to upsell you on Azure? Most likely. Nothing wrong with that though: every company that intends to make a profit wants you to use the thing that gives them said profit. The fact you can use the two previously mentioned things without any requirement to use Azure is probably what they should be measured on in regards to those two things. On the bright side, Azure is a pretty diverse setup whereas it could've been Windows Server w/ IIS and Windows Server w/ SQL Server instances as far as the eye can see.

Another possible perspective is that Apple has more or less given a passing interest to OSX in recent years and Microsoft felt they could make inroads with developers using Mac products (that weren't there for iOS development. ie web). It's worked to some degree (anecdotally. Though the substantial enhancements to the OS on the Windows side have been at a higher clip than on the OSX side for a bit though) and been a driver for a bit of good faith with development audiences so they probably view it as a win-win. But they're not doing a great job of extinguishing (if that were indeed the goal) because Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code have both found their way onto OSX (VSCode on Linux too). Would seem nutty to bolster OSX's appeal if this were the same old Microsoft just under new management.

They seem to be embracing openshift as a prominent k8s distro on their cloud, which I think is interesting. Instead of attempting to create their own EKS type service, they're providing an openshift platform.

Nope it seems their target is not linux but the whole dev(millenials)community