> The biggest difference now is all the stuff they give out for free.
No, it doesn't actually matter, it's not a financial issue. Open sourcing their libs is good because it gives developers access to the sources of libraries which they use daily. This in turn will make debugging much easier and will also help with understanding what is actually happening when you call some function.
I left MS-land a decade ago, but when I worked with MS tools I'd have gladly paid serious money for access to the source code (that was in C++, I hear debugging is easier in C#), but that wasn't an option. Now they offer access to the source code, which is the important part, and for free, which is kind of nice but very important.
No, it doesn't actually matter, it's not a financial issue. Open sourcing their libs is good because it gives developers access to the sources of libraries which they use daily. This in turn will make debugging much easier and will also help with understanding what is actually happening when you call some function.
I left MS-land a decade ago, but when I worked with MS tools I'd have gladly paid serious money for access to the source code (that was in C++, I hear debugging is easier in C#), but that wasn't an option. Now they offer access to the source code, which is the important part, and for free, which is kind of nice but very important.