> It's just a means to an end.

This is the conclusion that most people don't ever reach. They assume that there is an altruistic element to things like open source within Microsoft (and other commercial organisations) and perhaps among the developers there is... giving back, helping out and all that.

But if Microsoft (or Google, FB, etc. etc) thought for one second that supporting, nurturing and building open source software and tools was affecting the bottom line negatively they'd drop it in a heartbeat: they answer to the shareholders and they only have one question - will this make more money?