There aren't many people who have bought MS software for years and are now excited to use a fork or their own build. Even assuming that some other mega corp comes along and offers world class support/service and their own fork, it still probably wouldn't hurt MS much.
Most small companies would have released their code as GPL (versus MIT as the case here) to limit the risk of a fork fragmenting everything (not being able to merge forks back in or make everything compatible). But in Microsoft's case, because of their size, few companies could hope to make a better version than MS. Further, MS makes money in lots of ways and this isn't a zero-sum game for them. They'll profit immensely from a more open ecosystem. Companies such as IBM, Apple, Google, and Oracle already have proven it's possible to be profitable with open source.
The entirety of Oracle's dabbling in "open source" has been by shaking free software products out of the rotting carcass of Sun Microsystems and - in many cases - adding those products to the grave (see also: OpenSolaris, OpenOffice, various others). The exceptions - namely MySQL (which wasn't a Sun product) and Java (which is still doing reasonably well) - are few and far between.
Oracle Linux certainly exists, but I'm certainly not about to hold that monstrosity on any sort of pedestal.
As for the others, yeah, they're making money on FOSS (and not killing said FOSS in the process), though such free software tends to be integrated in very much proprietary end results (like OS X / iOS and the vast majority of Android distributions).
MySQL got worked into MariaDB. Don't think many people are recommending you use the Oracle version much anymore.
And Oracle Java has also died on every platform that is not Windows. OpenJDK took over the Unix space, and Google has Dalvik and the ART implementing the JRE.
Virtualbox still exists. I guess. It has not done anything in about half a decade, though.
OpenJDK is unofficially ported and built for numerous platforms. But OpenJDK is Oracle's JDK. To contribute to it, you sign Oracle's contributor's license agreement.
Oracle's no golden example as a leader in open source (let alone libre software), but they demonstrate the probable trajectory for the Microsoft projects at this point: a healthy, cohesive community of developers (developers!) using the technology in an ever increasing number of projects and platforms.
>Virtualbox still exists. I guess. It has not done anything in about half a decade, though.
What do you mean? I use VirtualBox for lots of stuff and it gets regular updates... it's also faster than VMWare in most benchmarks I've seen. Perhaps you're thinking of something else when speaking of 'not doing anything'?
I listed MySQL as an "exception" because of it not being a Sun product, regardless of whether or not it's dead.
However, there are still plenty of environments using MySQL (and I'd know; I maintain quite a few such environments). MariaDB is an obvious migration path, of course.
It is funny. At some point Redhat said "screw those guys" and started obfuscating its patches to the kernel (Oracle Linux was based on RHEL's code which was open source) to make it harder for Oracle to apply and create the (what was seen as) a competing Enterprise Linux Distro.
There aren't many people who have bought MS software for years and are now excited to use a fork or their own build. Even assuming that some other mega corp comes along and offers world class support/service and their own fork, it still probably wouldn't hurt MS much.
Most small companies would have released their code as GPL (versus MIT as the case here) to limit the risk of a fork fragmenting everything (not being able to merge forks back in or make everything compatible). But in Microsoft's case, because of their size, few companies could hope to make a better version than MS. Further, MS makes money in lots of ways and this isn't a zero-sum game for them. They'll profit immensely from a more open ecosystem. Companies such as IBM, Apple, Google, and Oracle already have proven it's possible to be profitable with open source.