Firefox source being hosted by Microsoft us blowing my mind as a child of the 80s.

If someone had told my 80s/90s Libre/OSS advocate rebel mind how things would pan out, I'd laughed.

I think it's more or less similar to the cultural shift that by the 80's most hippies turned into yuppies working at big corporations and one of the nastiest materially and status obsessed people.

Even the most ardent woke/eco/[insert flavor]ists" need daddy to pay their rent, vacation and iPhone bills.

I’m a child of the era. It surprises me Microsoft embraced open source but it also doesn’t surprise me they bought the largest service for it. While git doesn’t have lock-in GitHub actions and the rest totally do.

My view about this: Don't be fooled! Microsoft embraced money, opensource is a tool and strategy in order to get more clients/money by being relevant and don't have all the costs of developing everything.

Azure accounts for something like 35-40% of all their revenue, and those pesky tenants insisted on installing Linux and running things on their other than Exchange or Microsoft Dynamics.

With Microsoft there's always a catch. ( they're are not alone of course ).

Yeah, people think Microsoft somehow saw the light and completely changed. They didn’t. Microsoft will follow market trends to make money on those. That’s what GitHub and Linux on Azure are. The market’s there, let’s go there.

They also try to influence the market. To build lock-in. They’ve never stopped doing that.

well, if we want to get philosophical, that's kinda the point of free market. Not saying that it always works out well of course, but in this case it did so i don't see anything to criticize to Microsoft per se

GitHub has much better usability than gitlab and you also reach more developers with it. And if you ever don’t like what MS does with it you can just move the repo somewhere else. Zero lock in.