I don't think they're courting the hackers. I think they've realized they're on a slow and steady path towards irrelevancy. They have the office market. Yay. I

I don't think they're courting the hackers. I think they've realized they're on a slow and steady path towards irrelevancy. They have the office market. Yay. I bet that's growing at, what, 2% a year? Maybe? They have home pc's as well. Great. But where it matters? Mobile, cloud, start-ups - all the new, cool, exciting, future stuff - they're basically absent. And the new CEO knows that. So they open-sourced .NET, the compilers, everything. First-class support for OS X and Linux. Is that because they like it? No, I doubt it. It's to stay alive and relevant in the next 10-15 years.