Releasing 60K patents to Open Source ecosystem for some of which Samsung used to pay $6bn -- suggests that Microsoft has a bigger concern than making money. And the concern could be: not being left out during the transistion to next generation technology. And only way to catchup with next tech is be part of public dev community.

The important thing is that Microsoft quickly realised the fact that "Proprietorship works good only if you're a monopoly in the market" while Apple hasn't realised this yet.

They've conquered Enterprise ecosystem. Pacing up with Cloud ecosystem already. Now they've slowly started establishing a good rappo with Open-source and dev ecosystem.

It's an incredibly smart move on their behalf.

Let's face it, Microsoft has been just as "proprietary" as Apple over the years. However, it has much more at stake in terms of it's software adoption, which would be comparable to Apple's focus on hardware adoption. They both play a little bit with both, but it's clear (at least, imo) as to what their primary focus is.

The thing missing from Apple? PCs and laptops you can pull apart, upgrade and stick with past the life of the initial purchase.

The thing missing from Microsoft? Unix, baby. Even though macOS is a flavored version of Darwin, it's as close to a true Linux/Windows "hybrid" that we've ever had. The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) , I feel, was our first clue of how much they wanted to bring the Bash Shell into the mix.

Now, with the purchase of Github - followed by many teams abandoning it at that point, screaming "Sell Outs!" - they honestly needed to prove their worth in the world of open source development, and this seems to be a great start.

They still have a long way to go before people trust them again. Yes this is a nice gesture. No I don't fully trust them.