AFAIK the main MS product is still a closed OS that's basically malware that forces upgrades to new version and can't do basic things others OSes have been capable of for many years now. With the occasional pieces of software they open they're just buying support of open-source community and getting devs they don't have to pay.
Current builds of Windows 10 only have one major flaw from a user's perspective - the potential for the telemetry that Microsoft collects (and then uses to ensure that future updates actually improve things) to be more detailed than people might like. It's supposed to be anonymised, but that doesn't necessarily mean that someone couldn't reconstruct the missing parts if they tried. However, I don't think they're collecting any more data than Google or Apple or Samsung would collect when you use a smartphone, even if loads of smartphones use Android, which is approximately open.
The forced update from older Windows versions was only a real issue because it broke quite frequently for the first month until they patched it and because people kept closing the notification box without clicking the 'no' button. It shouldn't have been automatic until it was reliable, but then there's no good way to test something on millions of configurations and something breaking ten times in a million is enough to generate a big noise when the install base is as big as Windows'. Regarding smaller Windows updates becoming forced, that's mostly because a huge portion of Windows complaints and bug reports were coming from people who'd disabled updates because they were annoying
I'm not sure of anything I've ever needed to do that I'm unable to do on recent versions of Windows that I can in Linux as my text document of things I want Windows to include is now just things that I can't do in Ubuntu, either.
If you're claiming that Microsoft making more of their software open is just them trying to buy goodwill and gain free developers, then it's very hard to say that this doesn't also apply to every other for-profit company that makes use of and creates open-source stuff, and it's not practical to say the likes of Red Hat are bad for open-source.
Gates giving money to charity is basically him saying he's so rich he can't even spend the money and so he'll rather buy some publicity and an image of a good folk. It has nothing to do with software ethics but it seems to be working very well to somehow convince people he has good intentions.
Fair.
If you're asking me to choose the lesser evel, I'd rather choose none, whatever it means. But I understand people can often justify wrong choices this way.
I, for one, would rather Microsoft bought out GitHub than GitHub made me pay to contribute to open-source software or just simply disappeared one night without warning and made me lose all the stuff that's only on there.
Well then it's gonna be forked because you know, you can do this. I'll leave for the fork then. Or should we rather let the perfect be the enemy of the good and say if we can't achieve 100 % victory it's better to not try at all?
GitLab is more resilient against running out of money and everything going away forever than GitHub, but it's not like they can do a database dump and let another site mirror it if they go bust. Not everything on the site is open, even though the infrastructure it relies on is.
Yeah, let them play it. We're talking about development which requires some more responsibility.
Thunderforge was talking about development. He's an OpenMW developer and was describing his own situation. I'm in a similar boat - despite being someone who'll go for the open-source version of something when it's equivalent, the thing that drew me to OpenMW was its potential to free Morrowind from the shitty programming of Bethesda Softworks engineers and allow greater modding capabilities.
For whatever the cost? Josef Mengele probably wanted to just make the best medical research he could too.
I sort of have the feeling that we're in a post-Godwin's-law society now as there are a bunch of people openly defending what the Nazis stood for, but lots of the unethical 'medical' research they did was mostly focused on how much you could torture someone before they died and the scientific method was employed so poorly that the data gathered was worthless. Anyway, I'm going to ignore the bad example, because otherwise there's a decent point here.
The main problem with this point is that so far,
there has been literally no cost and it's not certain that there ever will be. With Microsoft owning GitHub, we've gained the guarantee that it will only ever stop being what we need if it's actively sabotaged, and while there's a bigger risk of it being actively sabotaged, it might still be something that never happens.
Overall it sounds like you've accepted that MS can simply buy you and have already given up. You might rather want to get involved in proprietary game development then - they target the largest platforms, hire the best devs, have the best of everything without caring about the consequences or the context other than market.
Unless people literally take to the streets and have a communist revolution, corporations will always be able to buy what they want and it's foolish to pretend otherwise. Any version control system where we have a central repository hosted by a for-profit entity is as risk of corporate meddling, so in a few months, something eviler than Microsoft buys GitLab and sticks everything behind a paywall with literally no warning or a non-net-neutrality country suddenly has all its ISPs announce that they no longer support Git traffic. This is business as usual for businesses, but that doesn't mean that everyone except you is jumping out their chairs to go and sell their souls.