Microsoft, an expertise corporation on one occasion recognized intended for its antagonism to the uncluttered foundation software archetype, crooked to encirclement the methodology in the 2010s. Since the 1970s through the 2000s underneath CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Microsoft looked at the conception and sharing of collective code, later to be known as free and open-source software, as a risk to its corporate, and both directors spoke undesirably contrary to it. In the 2010s, as the business turned in the direction of the cloud, entrenched, and mobile work out—pieces of machinery powered by open-source advances—CEO Satya Nadella led Microsoft towards open source adoption. However, Microsoft’s traditional Windows business continued to grow throughout this period generating revenues of 26.8 billion in the third quarter of 2018, while Microsoft’s Azure cloud revenues nearly doubled its revenue (BRIGHT, 2018). Microsoft open-sourced some of its code, including the .NET framework and Visual Studio Code, and made investments in Linux development, server technology, and organizations, including the Linux Foundation and Open Source Initiative. Linux-based operating systems power the company’s Azure cloud services. Microsoft acquired GitHub, the most significant host for open source project infrastructure, in 2018. Microsoft is among the site’s most active contributors. This acquisition leads a few projects to migrate away from GitHub (Github, 2019). This proved a short-lived phenomenon because by 2019 there were over 10 million new users of GitHub
The paradigm of freely sharing computer source code —a practice known as open-source—traces back to the earliest commercial computers, whose user groups shared code to reduce duplicate work and costs (Radits, 2019). Following an antitrust suit that forced the unbundling of IBM’s hardware and software, a proprietary software industry grew throughout the 1970s, in which companies seek to protect their software products. The technology company Microsoft was founded in this period and has long been an embodiment of the proprietary paradigm and its tension with open source practices, well before the terms “free software” or “open source” were coined. Within a year of founding Microsoft, Billie Gates wrote an open letter that positioned the hobbyist act of copying software as a form of theft (Radits, 2019)
Microsoft successfully expanded in personal computer and enterprise server markets through the 1990s, partially on the strength of the company’s marketing strategies (Radits, 2019) By the late 1990s, Microsoft came to view the growing open-source movement as a threat to their revenue and platform. Internal strategy memos from this period, known as the Halloween documents, describe the company’s potential approaches to stopping open-source momentum. One strategy was to distinguish in which Microsoft would adopt standard technology, add proprietary extensions, and upon establishing a customer base, would lock consumers into the proprietary extension to assert a monopoly of the space. The memos also acknowledged open source as a methodology capable of meeting or exceeding proprietary development methodology. Microsoft downplayed these memos as the opinions of an individual employee and not Microsoft’s official position (Radits, 2019).
While many significant companies were working with open-source software in the 2000s (Radits, 2019), the decade was also marked by a “perennial war” between Microsoft and open source in which Microsoft continued to view open source as a scourge on its business (Radits, 2019) and developed a reputation as the archenemy of the free and open-source movement (Radits, 2019) Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer likened Linux to a kind of cancer on intellectual property. Microsoft sued Lindows, a Linux operating system that could run Microsoft Windows applications, as a trademark violation.