Open source: Microsoft admits it was on wrong side of history

Ballmer memorably called Linux “a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.” In an interview with MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Microsoft president Brad Smith said that Microsoft had been “on the wrong side of history when open-source exploded at the beginning of the century.”

Smith continued: “Today, Microsoft is the single largest contributor to open-source projects in the world when it comes to businesses. When we look at GitHub, we see it as the home for open-source development, and we see our responsibility as its steward to make it a secure, productive home.”