[CRConrad]

> it's fairly clear to me that the author failed the interview.

What's important here is how he "failed the interview": He was probably never going to pass it. They'd already "failed" him beforehand for being an Open Source freak; the whole charade was just to string him along.

[intern4tional]

Microsoft employs many people that are open-source advocates. Someone's perspective on that would not impact their status in an interview.

If anything, the reason feedback took forever to him was because someone may have asked for an exception to the interview failure so they could hire him. Large companies are behemoths and things do go wrong, mistakes are made, and Microsoft did own up to it in this case (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/winget-install-le...) but open source did not play a part in it.

Source: myself, I worked at Microsoft in a past life and did many interviews. No one cares about someone's stance on open source anymore.