Microsoft seems to be undergoing a huge sea change towards acceptance and promotion of open source software, and moving into a devices and services model for revenue as opposed to a software licensing model. It seems that most of the open source community still thinks they are "up to something" but I'm starting to believe that they are genuinely becoming a much better company than they were under Ballmer and Gates.
Either way, I'm happy to see them putting their money where their mouth was, literally.
MS has always been pragmatic. The shift is happening because they have gotten into the cloud business, with a primary focus on the infrastructure tier (Azure).
This means that as long as someone is renting compute time from them, MS don't really care what is running higher in the stack.
Burning CPU time and memory bandwidth is what ssh does on purpose to make things secure. So from this perspective, ssh seems like a great match for them making more money.
Azure is so terrifically overpriced for compute, so it stands that they'd love people using it even if they ran stuff that actively went against Windows. Azure's prices are more than double Google Cloud Compute. Up to 5x the price. Azure could resell GCP and still make a hefty margin.
I agree with much what you wrote, but why is this cause for happiness? It's basically the end of programming as a profession should every company go that way.
I was referring to "moving into a devices and services model for revenue as opposed to a software licensing model" - which I think is likely.
If every company starts doing this (using open source!), the majority of software will be written and maintained by volunteers begging for donations from said companies.
What will be left is devops jobs, "full stack" engineers, i.e. all jobs where you can't really focus on developing software.
Very few interesting jobs may remain in Microsoft Research.
The other possibility is that if every company starts doing this (using open source!), the majority of software will be written and maintained by employees of said companies.
This is already the case for many projects, isn't it? In the case of OpenBSD, several of the core developers are either owners or employees of companies that use OpenBSD in their operations. Some of these companies are infrastructure providers, some are device / appliance vendors, some are consultancy shops...
Either way, I'm happy to see them putting their money where their mouth was, literally.