Microsoft admitted that it was wrong for years war with open source and now applauds and supports it.
Microsoft has been fighting Linux for years, from the beginning of its commercial existence even at the height of its dominance in desktop machines. In fact, in 2001, the former CEO of Microsoft, Mr. Steve Ballmer, claimed that the operating system "Linux is a cancer".
Microsoft's current president, Mr. Bard Smith, believes that the company was wrong about open source source). "Microsoft was on the wrong side of history when the logic of open source made a splash at the turn of the century," Smith said in a recent conference at MIT . Smith is not from yesterday. He has been with Microsoft for more than 25 years and was one of the company's senior lawyers during its battles with software open source.
Microsoft, always according to Smith, has changed from the days when he thought of Linux as a cancer. It is now the single largest contributor to open source projects in the world, beating Facebook, Docker, Google, Apache and many others.
The truth is that Microsoft has been gradually adopting open source in recent years, with examples of PowerShell , Visual Studio Code and JavaScript Engine. Microsoft also partnered with Canonical to bring the Ubuntu in Windows 10, acquired Xamarin to help develop mobile applications and GitHub to maintain the popular code bank for developers.
And not only these. Microsoft will bring a full Linux kernel in a Windows 10 update that will be released later this month. It also works with open source communities to build power toys for Windows 10.
The company's new open design philosophy could mean that we will see much more open source efforts in Windows in the coming years.
