covering the week's top tech stories
with a slight linux bias back in 2011
2001 microsoft ceo at the time steve
ballmer
famously branded linux a cancer that
attaches itself
in an intellectual property sense to
everything it touches
but microsoft has admitted it was wrong
about open source
after the company battled it and linux
for years at the height of its desktop
domination
now the pigs are flying because
microsoft's current president brad smith
believes the company was wrong about
open source
he says microsoft was on the wrong side
of history when
open source exploded at the beginning of
the century and i can say that about me
personally
smith has been at microsoft for more
than 25 years
and was one of the company's senior
lawyers during his battles with open
source software
he adds the good news is that if life is
long enough you can learn
that you need to change microsoft has
certainly changed since the days of
branding linux a cancer
the software giant is now the single
largest contributor to open source
projects in the world
beating facebook docker google apache
and many others
others microsoft has gradually been
adopting open source in recent years
including open sourcing powershell
visual studio code and even microsoft
edger's original javascript engine
microsoft has also partnered with
canonical to bring ubuntu to windows 10
and it acquired xamarin to aid mobile
app development and github to maintain
the popular code
repository for developers microsoft is
even shipping a full linux kernel in a
windows 10 update
that will release later this month and
it moved to the chromium browser engine
for edge last year
microsoft is also collaborating with
open source communities to create power
toys
for windows 10 and the company's now
open design philosophy
philosophy may mean we'll see a lot more
open source efforts in windows
in the years to come
you