It's complicated. Microsoft devotes resources to it and they can afford to do so but they only have that luxury from being a massive user trampling megacorp.

If we could trust them to be devoting resources to it without any risk of abusing their access and power in the future, that would be sort of okay, but we can't.

Like, should Lockheed intentionally hire North Korean programmers at cheap rates because North Korea can afford to devote resources to helping Lockheed? The issue here is not primarily that North Korea is a massive citizen-trampling megastate. It's that Lockheed's interests are misaligned with North Korea's.

The goals of Debian is based on those who contribute to it. If Microsoft contributes, then it cannot be misaligned. That's what it means to be open. You may not like how that affects Debian, but to deny Microsoft the ability to participate would be equivalent to no longer being truly open.

Also individuals tend to prioritize work that benefits employer interest but that doesn't mean they can do things arbitrarily. It just shifts energy and focus towards certain areas. It's not a problem unless the company employs a large fraction of Debian maintainers which Microsoft doesn't.

how does that work when Microsoft also makes a competing operating system?

If we think about it in logical terms, they could sabotage Debian by having “interests” that are suboptimal for their core demographic.

this is a similar to how euro-skeptics are the people who make the very unpopular laws inside the European Union, leading to all the negative press about the European Union. But they have to be listened to as they are democratically elected and it is a democracy.

No, Debian has a mission of its own, and has always excluded candidates for Developership if they are opposed to Debian's mission. It has never been open in the way you are imagining.

https://www.debian.org/intro/philosophy

I think employing the project lead of systemd gives Microsoft a kind of influence that employing the packager of libjpeg-turbo wouldn't. Lennart is notorious for doing things arbitrarily, and what we are discussing here is that the Debian package maintainer for systemd is also doing things arbitrarily, and is also employed by Microsoft.

Apparently yes, since the parent to your comment has been flagged.

Personally I find an interesting observation, and microsoft contributing to linux in any way should be met with skepticism based on the entire last 30 years.

People are so quick to wipe away any wrongdoing from Microsoft as soon as they get thrown a bone, there's some interesting psychology here.

Also Microsoft is doing all kinds of abusive things to their users in Windows 11.

No we don't.

I would say no because microsoft seems to have a magical ability to over-complicate systems, UIs, etc. Not to mention the fact that they were out to crush Linux not so many years ago (through proxies even!). Trusting them to make good, unix-like choices seems ill-informed.