I remember a time, way back, around 2010 maybe?, where Microsoft was referred to as "M$" in this place and generally perceived as an evil corporation o.O

Most likely more a difference of venue. I saw lots of that on Slashdot. Less of it on Digg or Reddit. Virtually none of it here, but it seems to be making a resurgence in the form of "Macroslop" and related epithets

Both things can be true. VSCode did help us get to the point where I can use it on Linux, MacOS, or Windows and have a lot interoperability. It's the typical cycle. All it takes is a couple people to get their hands on managing the code to turn anything into garbage.

Lol, yep! That actually goes way back before 2010. It probably started in the early 90's, at least

Yup, and windows was generally called 'mustdie' back then.

This was later—into their We U+2764 Open Source era. M$ and stuff dates from like the mid-late 90s. In the late 2010s was when they started publicly acknowledging that open source exists, acquiring GitHub, and releasing things like .NET Core and Visual Studio Code, and a lot of people in the open source camp did a "pointing soyjaks" and forgot that the Halloween Documents existed and that EEEing open source was already in their playbook.

I still remember when he got hit with a pie on the face in the 90s [0] and the internet celebrated and made games. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No%C3%ABl_Godin

[1] https://www.mobygames.com/game/2921/pie-bill-gates/

Completely unrelated to that incident, there was xbill:

http://www.xbill.org/