John and Slender basically nailed it. Let's take this hypothetical situation where something possessed Microsoft to do this wonderful branch you speak of. In a situation where Microsoft will not hide their understandable but blatant unwillingness to work with anything open source, they have two choices. They can either release their branch as closed source and proprietary, thereby violating the gpl. And don't think for a second that the outcry will be falling on deaf ears either. Microsoft has been a prime target for the guys over at the Free Software Foundation, and rightfully so, because Microsoft are very much defective by design, but I won't go on for hours about the reasons why. Their second option that wouldn't put them at risk of tarnishing their reputation would be to simply not want anything to do with anything open source. Only, sidenote, it doesn't seem like that's entirely true, it's said that their server is running on Apache, *ahem* if you wanna talk hypocrisy, that's it. They could've damn well run their server on, well duh, windows server? Granted there's Apache for windows, but that too is open sourced, and if they were as anti-open sourced as they say they are they wouldn't be practically endorsing it by using Apache. But enough rambling about that, just thought I'd point that out. Ok, back to the real situation. Even if Microsoft somehow wanted to work with open sourced software, making a synth is beneath them by a longshot. That's akin to asking Apple to make a braille display. It, just, makes, no, sense. Either way, what makes you think they'll carry through with it? You're old enough to have seen Microsoft through with their early synth efforts. You've probably seen every cop-out, every letdown. They were going to make a pretty damn good singing synthesizer which is rumored to have existed as a prototype in a beta of Windows Whistler which is what Windows Xp was *going* to be, only to abort it and trash it like it was nothing. Much later, they disappointed us with Microsoft Anna, and also by removing all the good Microsoft voices from Vista onward. And now they're pulling some half-assed prerecorded wave samples combined with some speech units on us and then calling it a synth! I mean just look at David! Turn that key echo on and press some letters and numbers, and you can clearly tell that the letter and number names are clearly not speech units. And while I still would've thought it was a cop-out if this wasn't part of the equation, what gets me and just makes me laugh is the half-assed attempt at trimming the samples, and that's a dead giveaway that they're not part of the speech units at all. Any true synth developer would dry heave the moment they so much as heard the prerecorded samples, but hearing some of the static that wasn't cut off the end of some of the samples is enough to wish the barf-bag was nearby if it wasn't already. Then there's the gear being used. I could clearly hear static. It's ironic that one of the biggest megamillion dollar fat corporations uses gear that is of the caliber of a lower end consumer-grade digital recorder or usb desktop mic. It's sad, and it honestly makes me wonder how much, or how little, money they allocate towards their apparent version of synth-creation. I'm sorry, but while they may be great with xbox accessibility, which don't get me wrong, I really do commend them for that despite all this, but I will not fall for anymore of their synth-creating escapades unless they pull something of the caliber of Google Wavenet out of thin air. My point? Simple, and I'll make it as clear as possible. Synth-making, is not, Microsoft's department.