Someone taught me long ago to always think about revenues when talking about Microsoft.
It was a quite right perspective.
Steve Ballmer point of view is pretty much like "why should we waste billions spent in R&D to give them to competition for free?".
We cannot expect Microsoft to fully release the sources to anyone like open sources, because it would cripple their source of revenue.
Let's take a look at the linux like philosophy:
Software is not the source of income, but it has to be bundled with additional services like support in order to generate income.
In fewer words, software developed by the community and services sold by the companies. That's it.
Would anyone spend large R&D budgets in this environment? I don't think so.
The best we can expect to Microsoft is to extend the shared source initiative and to release older/non critical sources in some occasions, keeping hidden the critical stuff.
Is it so bad?
I come from the Java community, where they thaught us at university one principle: Information Hiding, or "don't look at the code, look at the documentation".
Is it so bad to follow this principle?