What a difference two decades makes. Back in 2001, then-Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer called Linux “a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.”
In a recent interview with MIT, Brad Smith—Microsoft’s current president—expressed regret at the company’s past stance. Smith—who worked as one of Microsoft’s lawyers when the company still fought against open source—said that he and Microsoft had both been “on the wrong side of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century. The good news is that… if life is long enough… you can learn that you need to change.” Following open source acquisitions including Xamarin and GitHub, Microsoft plans to ship a full Linux kernel in a Windows 10 update to release later this month.
Source: opensource.com
