You haven't been following Microsoft much lately, have you? They are contributing to Open Source, including jQuery, contributing to and implementing the current HTML 5 proposed standard, and increasing interoperability. They recently announced the termination of OLEDB for SQL Server and just last week, and a SQL Server ODBC driver for Linux.

>Not just Microsoft, but Apple too. And possibly Google and a few other vendors. Ebay has a similar model, too - but at least their API was free, and there was a number of third party software vendors (selling apps that run with Ebay's engine), but that was six years ago, I don't know how they behave today.
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>It's "our model is the only game in town" story.
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>>>That's the view from the other side. I was describing the side which said "you'll have to buy all your tools from us, and sell your wares through us, because we're the only game in town". Of course, they only say so, and publicly pretend that the open source side doesn't mean much.