It is still a smoke screen but at least one (short) step to the right direction. It will help some application development but doesn't make any change how MS thinks business. They still have a long way to go, even Sun published in 80's how they think the system works not just API's. Fortunately I see them buying / hiring more "open source" and it will change the culture in MS, maybe slowly but.. They can keep the control same way as Linus does for kernel but have the benefits of much wider group of developers and even designers. There is nothing wrong charging of product, Linux world does that, but if they put the pressure to developers they will lose. Not that it makes any difference to MS but even I might develop for Windows if the development systems would be free, see, for example, the Intel development licenses.