I know that the Tux Brigade and open source diehards like to paint Microsoft as some great big bad monopolistic company that is out to destroy everything Linux and turn open source into a bad word; and for the most in the past this might have truly been the case.
Not so much any more though as Microsoft has been making some interesting moves when it comes to open source and Linux, and it doesn’t involve any nuclear options but instead the company has been embracing many of the fantastic products that have come out of the open source movement.
The most recent example of course is the company’s support of Node.js with their Azure cloud initiative as well as supporting Hadoop at the expense of their own large data project, Dryad.
Much of this change of heart is laid out in a new post from Wired and places all of the credit for the move to embrace open source at the feet of the last man you would probably expect – Bill Gates
From the Wired article:
At the invitation of the company’s chief legal minds — Smith and Gutierrez — Ramji sat down with Gates, chief software architect Ray Ozzie, and a few others to discuss whether Microsoft could actually start using open source software. Ramji and Ozzie were on one side of the argument, insisting that Microsoft embrace open source, and Gutierrez offered a legal framework that could make that possible. But other top executives strongly challenged the idea.
Then Bill Gates stood up.
He walked to the whiteboard and drew a diagram of how the system could work, from copyrights to code contribution to patents, and he said — in no uncertain terms — that the company had to make the move.
For Ramji — who would spend more than three and a half years as the company’s chief open source strategist — the moment Bill Gates stood up was the moment Microsoft turned the corner on its approach to free software. “He was given little to no credit by the open source community — or anyone in the tech industry — for really understanding open source and why it can be important, how it can be a competitive advantage, and why when your competitors start to use it, you have to too. He really got it, and in that moment, he taught us all.”
Microsoft may have done a lot of things wrong but there is no denying the fact that when the company decides to change course it doesn’t mess around and woe be to anyone who stands in their way or tries to stop them.
via GigaOM
