Accepting the money from Microsoft would, in itself, do not harm. But Microsoft typically demands a price for its sponsorship, a price that implies a change in the nature of the event. The price might be, let someone from Microsoft give a speech. The price might be, don’t say that proprietary software is evil. The price might be, present Microsoft sponsorship in a way that inhibits
you from denouncing Microsoft’s software as unethical.

Microsoft announced on Friday that it would be joining the Apache Software Foundation, one of the leading organizations in the open-source world. Microsoft became a platinum sponsor of the ASF, which costs $100,000/year and is the highest level of sponsorship that the foundation offers.

TechFlash's confession about finances through sponsorship .

Few will have noticed, but Microsoft's Jim Kellerman just announced that he and a Microsoft colleague have "been cleared to contribute patches again" to Apache, and specifically to the Hadoop project.

Windows shows that it not only brings security problems to Apache but also to battery chargers

Microsoft's software licences may lack a legal basis and Apple is tickled for breaking the law as a sacred, secret and specially-blessed hypePhone gets out of Apple's hands again

"We occasionally discuss Microsoft’s very clear plan to ’steal’ free software projects from GNU/Linux and bring them over to Windows. The OSI ‘invasion’ was merely a first step. At the moment, Microsoft is trying to grab Apache..."

Microsoft pays Apache to promote Windows at the expense of GNU/Linux

Most people in the free software world know two things about Apache. The first is that its name derives from the fact that it was a “a patchy server”, built out of patches to the earlier NCSA HTTPd Web server. The other is that in terms of market share, Apache knocks Microsoft's IIS into a cocked hat. Unfortunately, neither of these statements is true.