A Microsoft engineer noticed something was off on a piece of software he worked on. He soon discovered someone was probably trying to gain access to computers all over the world.
being able to silence all system services to detect that bump
being able to run stuff in different ways, without a core system component (with and without systemd, as that backdoor only used data when sshd was started via systemd)
having people be perfectionist about performance measurements
having devs test upstream code not shipped to normal distros
being so good microsoft pays people to work on software for it
And if he was a postgresql dev working on linux but employed by the cheesecake factory it would mean that the cheesecake factory saved linux? or was that rather due to that clever dev, and helped by the platform he worked on?
No matter how much you wouldn't like it, there's fallacy in your statement, either that single individual singlehandedly saved everyone without community and such, or Linux was saved by everyone, Microsoft included, i mean, going to such lengths in mental gymnastics just to exclude some corporation, albeit evil one, is funny i must say, in my opinion it's either single individual, or everyone included, no need to specifically exclude someone just because they evil or something, and yes, if cheesecake factory hired someone, they shouldn't be excluded too