I wonder for what reason Microsoft funds them. Their Hyper-V extensions are not as complete as Linux. There's no Microsoft-supported port of .NET. I can't think of any services that run on *BSD from Microsoft, cloud or otherwise.
I don't know if this explains all the funding. But there definitely was a year where the employees at Microsoft voted to give funding to FreeBSD. I don'w know if it's a thing, but apparently Microsoft had this thing where every year, or quarter, employees could sort of nominate and vote on open source projects that Microsoft would donate to[1]. And FreeBSD one year won some funding out of that.
But yea, I'm not sure if they have a reoccurring donation to FreeBSD or not. Looking at the FreeBSD Foundation, they are listed as sponsors for 2025/2024/2023. So my guess is that they do have some form of reoccurring donation.
My thought process was that it is such a small amount of money for Advertisement or marketing to have your logo on some prominent Open source project to at least try and redeem / make themselves look good.
I wonder if this is a very, very, very long-term holdover from the Hotmail team having some expertise, and Microsoft wanting to be able to offer something a bit nix-y that wasn't Linux
