The American government added some obscure law that forced POSIX compatibility on operating systems for certain grants, so Microsoft made their business OS POSIX-compliant.
In theory, nothing stopped you from downloading and installing up-to-date versions of common UNIX tools. Had Microsoft had the necessary foresight, they could've killed deverlopers' dependency on tools like Cygwin and Git Bash and Linux entirely for many pieces of software, but they were too busy trying to make Win32 the standard ABI.
Funnily enough, Win32 became the standard for proprietary software on Linux (thanks to Wine+Proton) while many Unix/Linux-based tools became the norm for development, even on Windows (git, Qt). How different things could've been!
> Win32 became the standard for proprietary software on Linux
This isn't even possible at all. You have software and standards. There's no single set of software nor a single set of standards. Saying something or somesuch is "the" standard is plain false.
I needed a way to avoid going to campus and fight for a DG/UX terminal.
It had nothing to do with FOSS fighting.