- In a recent MIT event, Microsoft president Brad Smith said that Microsoft was on the wrong side of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century
- The company will ship a full Linux kernel in a Windows 10 update that will release later this month
Microsoft has finally said that it was wrong about open source. The tech giant’s president Brad Smith has said that the company now believes that they were wrong about open source. In 2001, Microsoft’s then CEO Steve Ballmer described Linux as a “cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. ”
In a recent MIT event, Smith said that Microsoft was on the wrong side of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century. He added that the good news is that, “if life is long enough, you can learn … that you need to change.”
Full Linux kernel in a Windows 10 update
Microsoft has been adopting open source in the recent past by making PowerShell, Visual Studio Code, Microsoft Edge original – JavaScript engine open source. It also acquired Xamarin to aid mobile app development and GitHub to maintain the popular code repository for developers.” Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion in 2018.
Smith further stated that at this moment, Microsoft is the single largest contributor to open-source projects in the world when it comes to businesses. When the company looks at GitHub, it sees it as a home for open-source development. He added that the company has the responsibility as its steward to make it a secure, productive home.
The company will ship a full Linux kernel in a Windows 10 update that will release later this month. It also moved to the Chromium browser engine for Edge last year. It is also partnering with open-source communities to create PowerToys for Windows 10.
