Embrace, extend, extinguish is a tactic more aggressive than using open source but not contributing much back. Maybe you've forgotten how strong the MS dominance became in the late 1990s. Governments (US and EU) were going after MS -- not just aspects of their privacy agreements (as with Google today), but threatening to divide MS into separate corporations. Friendships were broken when people changed sides.

This was before the current tumult caused by the internet and mobile computing. It kind of seemed, back then, that things were going to just continue as they had been, only more so, and everything would be built on top of Windows.

This reaction (over-reaction?) to MS, then, comes from historically-rooted fear. It's a powerful emotion, and sometimes it can be correct.

You know, maybe there's an argument that the Unix world has a persecution complex, because there have been license and freedom debates since the very beginning. Here's an illustrative fragment: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/10/origins-of-geek...