Comment by digitalzombie

I dunno about that.

They're still charging and threatening people for Android patents without really telling anybody what patents they hold over Android.

I think they realize they can make money via open source now and they might do this for future product. Threaten people via patents or some kind of trojan horse.

While it's great we have another programming language and platform option but their actions so far in the past and present isn't so great.

They also tried to make a Hadoop clone that failed miserably so now they team up with Hortonworks.

Perhaps that opening sourcing their VM they can have big data projects like Hadoop and such. Oracle have big sway over Java and JVM. Perhaps that's what Microsoft wants. People might forget about Oracle and JVM but I still remembered and it really sucks for Apache.

In general, I'm not taking this bet and I'll wait on it.

Also with my current skill set which is mainly open source, it is fine not dealing with Microsoft. Unless they have a better market share and momentum in some niche market like big data with Hadoop, spark or whatever I wouldn't even think about touching their open source stuff.