Upvoted, but with a caveat I wanted to throw out:

> 20 years ago Microsoft was making strategic acquisitions to quash the viability of free software; today they're making strategic acquisitions to be at the center of it.

I think you've run afoul of the very confusion RMS is talking about in TFA. They're not buying into free software, they're buying into open source. Most of what MS is doing in the space is using Apache-style licenses. I'm not going to say Microsoft is bought into Free Software until I see VSCode being distributed under the GPL. (It's currently MIT.)