I think it’s lost on the kids how many people came to open source because they hated Microsoft. That went on for a dozen years at least. That’s the same time period when Eric Raymond and Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman and a dozen others would have public debates on which flavor OSS should have. Those people all were visionaries, and wrote like it. We had long talks about gift economies too, which even showed up in sci-fi (Kim Stanley Robinson, for one).

Linus is the most practical of the three, which is probably why we still talk about him more than the other two. But we wouldn’t talk about any of them if “practical” was the only adjective we had for them.

If you want to celebrate Microsoft becoming open source as an ally, knock yourself out. But the older people still don’t trust Microsoft (see also the Scorpion and the Frog), so it’s more of a war trophy. This is probably as “beaten” as MS gets, but they can always wake up.

I am suitably middle-aged and FOSS supporting to find your insinuations offensive. I didn’t say anything about supporting Microsoft, just stating some facts that are hard to argue against (and I note that you don’t argue against them). I think that jumping to conclusions about others is nasty behaviour.