Microsoft’s open-source era still comes with an asterisk
Microsoft’s open-source era still comes with an asterisk
https://www.makeuseof.com/microsofts-open-source-era-still-comes-with-an-asterisk/
Publish Date: 2026-05-30 15:30:00
Source Domain: www.makeuseof.com
Microsoft’s relationship with open source has one of the strangest redemption arcs in tech. This is the same company whose former CEO, Steve Ballmer, once described Linux as “a cancer,” a line so cartoonishly hostile it still follows Microsoft around like an embarrassing yearbook photo. Two decades later, Microsoft talks about Linux with heart emojis, builds tools developers actually love, owns GitHub, maintains its own Linux distribution, and has open-sourced parts of Windows Subsystem for Linux to the point where one of my editors has stopped picking between Windows and Linux and started running both on the same machine.
The interesting question is not whether Microsoft has changed, because it has. The better question is why it changed and how much of that change survives when open source no longer serves the business plan.
From “cancer” to contributor
Ballmer would not approve (the board did)
Credit: MicrosoftOpen / YouTube
To understand the present, it helps to remember how openly hostile the old position was. Ballmer’s famous comment was only a headline version of a broader posture. The company covertly funneled over $100 million into SCO Group’s existential copyright attack on Linux, claimed in the media that the open-source operating system violated 235 unnamed Microsoft patents without ever publicly identifying them, and weaponized its legal department to force Linux-based…
