I think the links are tangential to the openness. I think most agree that the watch debacle was bad, but what I (and from what I can tell others) may see from

I think the links are tangential to the openness. I think most agree that the watch debacle was bad, but what I (and from what I can tell others) may see from that is that the conspiracy theories of "M$ will close it back up as soon as they can capture the users" might have more weight to it than just conjecture, and is clearly out of the hands of anyone in DevDiv. Rebuilding trust is hard, and Microsoft is going to have a hard time reaching escape-velocity from EEE if there are things like this that continue to pop up. The other links where open source projects got moved into the private GH org (and causing issues with github sponsor money going towards the OSS contributors) is also pretty bad. The other divisions aren't helping with things like ads in the Windows start menu, etc. I'm sure there are other companies that would pull off an open-source heist if they could (I keep an eye on things like GraalVM license changes to see whenever that rug-pull might happen), but agree that because of its past, Microsoft is under a finer microscope than others and the perspective is clouded by what the rest of the company does. This all being said, I think C# and dotnet as technologies receive quite a bit of praise on HN and other platforms whenever they come up. The threads that make it to the front page about performance improvements and such are usually 80% praise.