Consider people's reaction to people selling boot leg DVDs vs torrenting a movie. Although people may consider both morally incorrect the corrupting profit motive results in the former being seen far more negatively. In the current situation there is also the matter that the Microsoft is still perceived rightly I think very negatively and open source authors very positively. Also in a David v Golliath situation nobody wants to be seen rooting for the giant.

Personally I would be concerned about insert corp here accidentally stealing code from an open source project then years later going after the open source project for copyright infringement regarding the code they in fact stole from the open source project.