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.

Or glue two regular mice together and break one button.

Nuke the doomsday clock!

Where are the "Functional Science" awards? You gotta have Paradigm Envy, no?

And how about the Procedural Awards, and the Goto Awards? I hear the Goto team racks up a lot of air-fare.

Do we want to stoop that low with language spin?

Re: "object-oriented computer science" -- Where is the "science"? Where are the theories, the metrics, and the independent repeats to verify?

Christianity = everyone encouraged to help the less fortunate and free to decide who is less fortunate

Care to cite where the Bible tells people to only help the deserving poor?