- Colonialism consisted in annexing territory, forcing them to use your flag, sing your anthem, and work for you under penalty of violence.
- Neocolonialism consists into forcibly indebt countries, so they direct all their productive efforts into paying you a never-ending debt. A country can keep its flag, its anthem, its culture, can celebrate its independence day... but for economic purposes it is indistinguishable from a colony. This is done by gaining influence over those countries, so they act in the best interest of a foreign power: lobbying.
The idea of Microsoft is to allow open source to happen, but to happen in terms that are favorable to them. Like having people work with their OS, their tools, their APIs, their cloud, use their authentication services, etc.
This is achieved by gaining influence over the governance of high profile open source projects. Either by having their full time employees collaborate into an open source project, or by directly buying companies, like the case of Github. In either case, in the end, the idea is to obtain control over open source projects to steer them into a direction that benefits Microsoft.
As a mentioned earlier, the modus operandi is to either infiltrate projects or buying a company. When they've decided to acquire companies, the results are more aggressive and more visible, and are in my opinion not good:
- Skype: Linux version is largely unmaintained relative to other versions, UX is inferior.
- Xamarin: Standalone Windows IDE was abandoned, now you should use Visual Studio. Xamarin Studio for mac was rebranded Visual Studio for Mac. No Linux version is planned despite community requests.
- Minecraft: Java client development left behind with inferior investment, no feature parity with native Windows client.
- Microsoft R Open / MRAN: Encourages people to adopt a vendor specific flavor of R, and use vendor specific repositories, moving away from R and CRAN.
And for Github, I would not be surprised if it starts getting coupled with Microsoft products, like Azure, Visual Studio, etc... to the detriment of other tools.
Even if it doesn't happen at all, I am not over punishing Microsoft for what it did in the past. Without provocation, they attacked noble and altruistic developers sacrificing man years of their own personal time to the benefit of open source software, providing this generation with the tools they use today to put food in their table. Like the Linux kernel team. Microsoft called Linux and open source licenses "cancer". Never forget.