[peterwwillis]

It's kind of funny how Open Source is now a strategic initiative of many big tech companies. They open source projects for a variety of reasons: 1) to attract tech talent, 2) to "build a community" (aka get customers to become unpaid tech support), 3) to increase quality by increasing eyes on lines of code, 4) to reduce cost of maintenance by allowing the community to provide development work, 5) contributing back to existing tools allows companies to re-use technology rather than having to roll their own, 6) defeat competition by releasing a supported product for free.

The last one is a really powerful move for a software company. Normally, people will use your software if it's free, but if there's performance or other limits, it decreases the number of potential users. External open source projects then pick up the user base you might have acquired later. By open sourcing your own product, you effectively eliminate the need market for the external projects, giving you back your user base (which helps your community, potentially leads to sales, etc).

For some companies this would be cutting things very close in terms of profit margins, but Microsoft has plenty of other income that it doesn't need to worry about an occasional loss. It has way more to gain from leveraging this product in all its other tech offerings, even if they made zero money off enterprise support.