Never trust anything Microsoft does .. ever. They got their start by thieving, they have a long history of screwing people/organizations .. the Gates foundation is involved in some extremely shady shit with their vaccines, and now that they cannot belittle and ignore Linux anymore, they are embracing it. But it is not for the benefit of anyone except Microsoft.

In the tech circles I like to follow, Gnome and KDE are not used, seen as bloated and insecure. Apache is eschewed in favor of nginx, or even the base httpd in OpenBSD (which is also an example of a project that did not have its roots in big money.) Although they get some funding today, they did not, for a long, long time.

I don't disagree with you: corps are definitely around and definitely contributing.. but they weren't always, and there are projects that are not unduly influenced by them. Going back to DOS and the Freeware/Shareware paradigm, there have always been developers who create their wares for free, and offer them for free, or at a small charge. Today, maybe you have to treat the path less traveled .. but it's out there.

I think it's also worth mentioning that, if you look at what these corps have TAKEN from the open source community, versus given, I think you'll find the are still owing! Minix, as an example, was secretly taken and deployed in almost all post-2007 Intel processors. OS X is re-hashed BSD. Playstations are also BSD based, the Switch.. etc.