I initially had the same reaction to the MIT license; but it sort of looks like the GPL (or AGPL) wouldn't have really prevented this behavior. Microsoft (it sounds like) is making the code available; they've just extended and renamed the project. They could have done exactly the same thing (fork, rename, release under the same license), with the same effects he's complaining about (free-loading the consulting time, confusing the community) if he'd made it AGPL.
I mean, consider an alternate timeline. It's clear MS had their own, strong vision for the project, that overlapped with but wasn't identical to his. Is it actually that much more considerate to show up with two dozen new developers suddenly flooding a single-maintainer project with pull requests, some of which completely restructure the code and re-orient it towards a new vision that the original maintainer might not want?
Either the maintainer is now doing loads of unpaid labor for MS, and is the bottleneck; or he ends up having to step back and let the new MS developers bulldoze the project and take it over anyway.
I think the better approach would have been to give the author a choice of what happens.
i.e. they could have emailed the author to ask:
1. "Would you rather us fork your project (new name), or would you rather donate your project to us under its original name, as well as give us the ability to rename it (which we will)"
2. "Would you like a $300 microsoft store gift card as thanks for writing some code we're planning to use?"
3. "Would you be open to providing a paid ($600 microsoft gift card) 1-hour consulting meeting to ramp our engineers up on your codebase? We won't actually listen since our engineers can in fact read, but we'll pay you"
4. "Also, just in case you don't know who microsoft is, we do have a careers page over here, and our team doesn't have headcount but other teams do <link>"
It sounds like microsoft didn't do any of that, which as you say is well within their right, but emailing to ask is polite.
My god, a gift card? What am I going to do, buy FoxPro and a month of Xbox Live? Honestly I'd prefer to get no email at all than that miserable offer. If the project is only worth a couple of hundred dollars to them they're probably better off not bothering.
I agree that Microsoft seems identify more with parasites, but they're no strangers to symbiotic relationships with viruses.
In fact they do distribute and contribute to lots of GPL software, including Linux. I can't be sure their involvement benefits anyone other than themselves, but theybdo at least participate.
I mean, consider an alternate timeline. It's clear MS had their own, strong vision for the project, that overlapped with but wasn't identical to his. Is it actually that much more considerate to show up with two dozen new developers suddenly flooding a single-maintainer project with pull requests, some of which completely restructure the code and re-orient it towards a new vision that the original maintainer might not want?
Either the maintainer is now doing loads of unpaid labor for MS, and is the bottleneck; or he ends up having to step back and let the new MS developers bulldoze the project and take it over anyway.
What would have been a better approach?