If that’s the goal, probably a silly way to go about it. The people who care about FOSS won’t forget about their reputation, and most of the people who don’t care about their reputation don’t know anything about FOSS.
They probably only got clearance from their lawyers (or IBM’s lawyers) just now.
A lot of proprietary software includes bits from other proprietary software that they don’t have the rights to open-source. And untangling and removing those bits takes time and effort.
Cool, but why’s that all of a sudden?
Laundering their reputation by open sourcing defunct historical code
If that’s the goal, probably a silly way to go about it. The people who care about FOSS won’t forget about their reputation, and most of the people who don’t care about their reputation don’t know anything about FOSS.
Probably Microsoft is trying to “save” some of its reputation after adding ads to Windows 11 one more time
They found a new 0-day exploit
They probably only got clearance from their lawyers (or IBM’s lawyers) just now.
A lot of proprietary software includes bits from other proprietary software that they don’t have the rights to open-source. And untangling and removing those bits takes time and effort.