Nothing should be built with a Microsoft product as its foundation. It's not even a mystery how such endeavours end.
Said by someone who writes Flutter for a living :/
I'd rather get paid than build towards an ideal bunny world of free as in free beer software.
developers developers developers
Plus, for the former you can still get paid. You don't need proprietary software for that.
Now for developers, they are recruited to build software under the guise of freedom, while their users care not about the men who die for the cause, and only appreciate the free stuff.
The argument that you can still get paid developing free software is obtuse. Source code is a very valuable tool to protect intellectual property (which is a recognized legal asset despite what stallman would like to be the case). If you sacrificie your source code advantage by making it public (which is a requisite for free software, put down your "Free software isn't open source" paragraph gun), then you give away most of your capacity to make money out of your skill. Furthermore, open source development and closed source development are two very different skillsets, so you kind of get locked in to a worse paid form of software (with the exception of the top 0.01% of developers who might net evangelizing positions at actual proprietary companies like Guido Van)
Also what do you have to say to the open-source projects that take a "dual licensing" approach, like how Google profits from creating their own proprietary browser Chrome that has more features than the open-source Chromium? Isn't it practical for companies to freely provide an open-source version with fewer features and sell a better, proprietary version? I havnen't done any of this, but to me it sounds like there's plenty of ways to make money developing open-source software.
The issue is that you give away your source code to your clients and competitors, who can then save money by not paying you.
If you don't give them source code, whether by distributing binaries or access to a server which holds the code, you can recoup the investment by ensuring clients only get the benefit of your software when they pay.
It's a similar dilemma in the pharma industry, yes you can free the patents and publish the synthesis method, but who is gonna pay the researchers?
Finally Chrome is more of a byproduct of google's efforts to scrape the internet, turns out that in order to figure out what a website is showing a user you need to pretty much develop a full fledged browser. The goal of google was never to develop a browser.
Critically, Google doesn't sell or charge for Chrome access.
Their monetization model is making software free (as in beer) in exchange for advertising. Again, that funky word free.
Regarding imitating that model, you and me are not google, and will more likely fail than not if we were to pursue that model.
Paul Maritz also explained to Intel representatives that Microsoft’s response to the browser threat was to “embrace, extend, extinguish”; in other words, Microsoft planned to “embrace” existing Internet standards, “extend” them in incompatible ways, and thereby “extinguish” competitors.