> they're trying to look better and nicer, I think that's a misleading picture of where things are going. Seeing these releases as charitable work misses the p

> they're trying to look better and nicer, I think that's a misleading picture of where things are going. Seeing these releases as charitable work misses the point. They haven't open sourced any of their core many makers. Nothing of the Office suite got open sourced, and you still can't code for your game console without special permission. They do as many others, they open source what's already lost in an effort to stay relevant. It has been .net stuff (which was supposed to out-compete Java, but captured exactly zero mindshare outside the Windows ecosystem which is necessary to grow it at this stage), other developer stuff (not Visual Studio, mind you, but things like git and ssh where they tried to compete but lost), cloud (they need Linux on Azure to stay relevant) and web development. Much like Apple when they started out with OS X and released networking, printing and X11 stuff to get back developers. That worked out well for them but we haven't seen any more releases since then. Don't be tempted to view this in terms of good and evil, but in terms of where these products are in their life cycle. Time will tell if it's successful. I would guess they lost web development long ago and there won't be any mass exodus from PHP or Rails to .net, but they still have a fighting chance against Java, especially if Oracle continues to bodge it.