But they were leaked, in bits and peaces. ADEX, Rex 84 etc. I suppose now we can all safely assume that these are not pure imagination, but simply contorted parts of the real story.

It's suprisingly more common than you would think. Really depends on the state. They'd be strung up in the northeast for sure, but 'Castle Doctrine' states are usually a little bit more reasonable about giving leeway to people in their home when armed men kick in the doors.

Have you seen Win10?

The leash has been shortened very significantly compared to Win8 times.

Once a bunch of people spend all that on alcohol and/or drugs, what are you going to do about them?

More importantly, what are you going to do about their kids?

Have you considered that, if it did get past the lawyers, then they are respecting it to the extent the law requires them to?

One thing of note is that this particular acquisition is not DevDiv, it's Azure ML. But Azure ML is, in some ways, even more F/OSS friendly - at least I don't know anyone else in MS running Linux servers in production for user-facing services, and it's where a lot of ex-MSR guys (like, from those labs that were closed) ended up. It's also where all the Python stuff now is.

Then again, after Satya's takeover, there was a strong push from top down to stop treating open source in general and Linux in particular as pariah, in all divisions. In no uncertain language, like "we've been acting stupid about this for a while now and let competitors eat our lunch; time to catch up while we still can". The recent slew of announcements, from .NET Core officially supported on Linux, to most open MS projects migrating to GitHub, is the outcome.

FWIW, I didn't think I'd ever hear a Microsoft lawyer utter the words "GPL is actually kinda cool" while explaining to developers the company's new open source policy in his official capacity. Yet, here we are.

Long and hard? Yes. But this kind of thing makes it worth it (and also shows that, perhaps, it's not quite all that long if you go fast enough).

And Python and R can work together (rpy2), with Python being the glue.

The forked version is still GPL.

There's one other aspect to it that is obvious when you see who the people on MS side talking about this are. It is, effectively, an acquisition by the Azure ML division - the sole purpose of which is to get the "big data" people to come to Azure and pay for burning CPU cycles.

You mean like this?

Granted, it's actually targeted for Titan, but yeah...

Yeah, you're right, you can't really fix stupid.

Do you know what a "Dixiecrat" is?

Doesn't sound like it. None of you "Lincoln was a Republican!!!1!1" idiots do. Well, either that, or your cynicism knows no bounds.

Or you can refuse to get into the hash table.

I always found it quite amusing that it's much easier to immigrate to US as a relative (and I don't mean someone really close like a spouse or a child, but e.g. parents?) than it is as a skilled worker. Of all the countries that I've looked into, US is the only one like that. All others (of interest to me) had shorter immigration tracks through work than through family.