вот хорошо замечено:Some things can be tax write-offs and actually help *save* the company money. Some things can be brought up in court cases as evidence of acts supporting such endeavours even if they just gave the money to a random OpenSource project that they have no intention of using. Some things can be a random bone thrown to try to garner PR from something that is quite literally a drop in the ocean to MS to a project that isn't really competing directly with any of their major offerings. You don't see them putting a few thousands dollars, say, towards Eclipse, or Gnash, or Samba, or any other of a million and one OpenSource projects that they have contact with or use.