More pie please...

Well, to me this looks like MS is recognizing the market sector of open-source software and the ability to charge for support thereof. Other companies are doing so with open source.

So if MS can get people to contribute applications to their open source platform, in the future maybe even roll their own Linux-based OS distro, then MS can be the company who has "their" open-source distro and software deployed into corporations, competing with the likes of Novell, RedHat etc. And while the software is free, there is also paid support, which equals more pieces of the pie and both a wider grasp by MS and additional income.

If they do this right and proper, they probably figure they may have both Windows Server and Linux-based Server OS's.