The thing about open source is that you can just fork it. You don't need to trust them.
If the question is actually "Can we trust Microsoft with an Open Source Community?" then it get's more interesting.
If the question is actually "Can we trust Microsoft with an Open Source Community?" then it get's more interesting.
There is also the issue of sheer code size/complexity that means even if you have the code, do you have enough people to verify it or is it a case of just waiting until it breaks/gets exploited? That second point is a larger issue of open source nowadays, not just Microsoft.
It gets a bit more fishy when that company does stuff like lobbying governments to make their shitty open source document format the standard, etc
Same thing for Nvidia, big browser projects like Chromium, and Android. Many Chromium forks died because they couldn't keep up with upstream, except for ungoogled-chromium.
Free software is committed to sharing values.
Hell, you could have a GPL project that is developed entirely behind closed doors, as long as you always give users a copy of the source code when you release a new version.
That's not always true, particularly for things where a company is the primary developer.
You can prevent takeovers by using GPL license with no CLA.
Any open source project can only thrive if the community puts the effort in. Choosing GPL does not prevent or even lessen the risk that a company will decide to stop putting forth the effort.
Look at MariaDB. It was forked from MySQL once oracle decided they didn't want to invest heavily on a competitor from their product.
In the same vein Percona built a succesful product and company on top of MySQL
True, but it prevents the scenario where a company makes a well supported closed version leaving the rest of the community at a disadvantage in terms of development resources.
Suppose a project has 10 commercial developers and 2 hobbyist developers. The company decided to close source and the open source version is forked. The commercial version now has 10 developers while the open version has 2. That's going to be hard to compete. Now if the same project was GPL with no CLA and the company decided they don't want to contribute to open source, they'll cease contributions but there is no closed fork. The project still exists with 2 people working on it but no competing project. Users will stick with the open version as long as it is viable.