No way. Quote from Zooko:

“”"
My presentation on Tahoe went well. At the end a fellow named Zhuowei Li, who works on Microsoft Azure, raised his hand to ask a question. [...] “How do you keep track of all the users’s files, to see if they have some bad files like pornography or something in case the police ask for it?”.

“Well, uh…” I hesitated for a second, “in general, we don’t. [...]”

“But you have to!”, he exclaimed.

“What? Why?”

“Legal tells me that we have to keep a catalog of files such as pornography so for example if the FBI comes.”
“”" https://zooko.com/log-2008.html#d2008-11-13

There’s also Microsoft’s shameful role in the office document format standardisation effort. This was prolonged and global. An eloquent testimony on the costs of their strategy from India:
http://deepakphatak.blogspot.com/2008/05/this-is.html

Similar stories played out in many countries.

There’s also Microsoft’s involvement with the OLPC. If they had joined to make Sugar better, they would have won a lot of people over. Or even if they helped port Sugar to Windows and offered it as an alternative. But they didn’t. They moved in with the goal of displacing the primary OS of the OLPC, and getting Windows on there, no matter what the costs, treating the philosophy of the project with contempt, and without the slightest intention of listening to opposing voices. A good, if rather tortured, screed on the troubled project is here (worthwhile discussion in comments):
http://radian.org/notebook/sic-transit-gloria-laptopi

My issue was with your characterisation of wariness of Microsoft as due to a quaint “religious attachment to low-level operating systems”. It’s not. It’s due to a culture valuing self-determination and independence in opposition to the sociopathic culture of a corporation. I’m not talking about the many great people at Microsoft who are changing it from the inside. I’m talking about the continuing behaviour of the corporation.

(Links to the “sociopathic corporation” idea:
http://www.amazon.com/review/RAF8IGRQOON0E
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy
)

No one should argue that “mixing the best of different cultures is a good strategy”, but it’s not a love-in. It’s a wary approach against a history of hurt. It’s not a meeting of equals. It’s exploring how to coexist with a powerful corporation without getting wiped out.

Why? We’re through the looking glass now, it seems to me. Who would have thought, 3 years ago, that today you could buy Linux in the cloud, or Windows in the cloud, from Amazon?

All I’m saying here is that in this fungible environment, cultural cross-pollination can happen more easily.

What I have /always/ said is that mixing the best of different cultures is a good strategy.

Hmm. This is making a strawman of deep and serious differences. Microsoft may be slowly changing for the better, but it has been bad for very long. Not least for just this kind of disingenuous misdirection. Not like you at all.

True. I’m hoping, though, that an acceptable way can be found to provision the standard pure-Python modules which, outside of Azure, IronPython can happily use.