It's really mind boggling with all of the money they earn why they can't fund a sort of "open source skunkworks" where a team is dedicated to building open sour

It's really mind boggling with all of the money they earn why they can't fund a sort of "open source skunkworks" where a team is dedicated to building open source tooling that can create a symbiotic relationship with the dev community. And of course, be back-fed into their own products. Microsoft does this sort-of with language development (C#) and VS code on the software side. Now imagine a Microsoft "VSCode Box" or "VSCode portable", i.e. a hardware device they could sell that builds upon the OS work. In my example, Microsoft has the software side but not the hardware. Currently Apple has the hardware side but not the software.