I think a lot of people have had their feelings about MS improved by their OSS contributions (myself included, and I'm not even a dev).
Of course it's not a binary thing for most people of flipping from "MS bad!" to "MS good!", some already liked MS and like them even more, some still hate them, still say "why should I trust them given their history / given they're not 100% lovely even now", but still surely a bit less hate than if they were still acting as they did 20-30 years ago.
I've no idea if my gut feeling is more or less right than yours, Id imagine companies as big as MS do actually do research to see how things like this affect public perception (not just for end users/businesses but also for tech workers), but I'm not aware of any research being made public on the PR benefits (or lack thereof) from contributing to open source stuff.
Of course it's not a binary thing for most people of flipping from "MS bad!" to "MS good!", some already liked MS and like them even more, some still hate them, still say "why should I trust them given their history / given they're not 100% lovely even now", but still surely a bit less hate than if they were still acting as they did 20-30 years ago.
I've no idea if my gut feeling is more or less right than yours, Id imagine companies as big as MS do actually do research to see how things like this affect public perception (not just for end users/businesses but also for tech workers), but I'm not aware of any research being made public on the PR benefits (or lack thereof) from contributing to open source stuff.