Re: "spent some of that dosh on documenting the hardware so that Penguinistas"
It's never enough, is it?
Microsoft is a SOFTWARE company playing in the hardware space. It seems a lot of their software efforts are working in conjunction with Open Source. It's a strategy that can benefit both MS and the open source community.
So we have more harping that "MS is again trying to screw everyone 'cuz they don't have open source drivers for their hardware". Seems to me that you are whining that MS has produced a nice piece of kit, and you want to use it to run Linux. And you can't wait for the eventual drivers to be written / reverse engineered (who knows, maybe MS will eventually do it).
Microsoft is a business. They are no longer the ascendant monsters that haunt your nightmares. They are a company trying to keep relevant in a time of great disruption across the computer (hardware and software) industries. Do they always play nice? No. Same goes for Apple and Google. Do they want to make money? Sure. At least their software play can show some immediate benefit for the company. "Generating goodwill" is the sort of paffle that folks who want somebody ELSE to spend THEIR money throw around.
If you don't like what they are doing, DON'T buy or use their products.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
