Whoops, sorry for the very confusing typo, and thanks for noting it! Corrected now. That's what I get for commenting on HN when I should have already called it a night... :-)

With the typo corrected, yes I do prefer proportional fonts (and as mentioned especially Trebuchet MS), and all the editors I use support them. I just find them much more readable to my eyes than monospaced. Except in a terminal where apps assume monospaced font - so that's where Consolas shines.

The keyword I used was "unlikely". The point being that it would be a coordinated effort between Microsoft and some other company (Monotype), increasing the unlikelihood, because it would require joint effort. Regardless of Microsoft's market cap, it would still have to deal with the lawyers and royalty concerns of its partner, it couldn't just unilaterally decide to open source it without negotiations. Given the nature of font design, Microsoft may not even have access the "source" for Consolas today, and maybe/probably only licenses the final TTFs from Monotype. (Plus, it's an old enough font that whatever "source" there may exist would only be glyphs in various proprietary formats and build tools/chains that would require conversion to tools more appropriate to open source.)

Yes, Microsoft has the resources to do all of that, given enough time and it becoming enough of a priority, but the likelihood of that becoming a priority one would directly assume is related to how much effort that would take. It would likely take a lot of effort.