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by chubot 2715 days ago
This is not new -- Steve Ballmer understood this viscerally (ahem) over 10 years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs

Granted, they weren't releasing much open source then, but it was all free to use, and the quality was far above open source alternatives (e.g. think the Visual Studio debugger vs. GDB wrappers).

I think they just naturally figured out that there's zero advantage to keeping developer tools closed source.