Friend or Foe

Also in today's edition: Are We There Yet?, Closed-Minded Open-Source & Zee5 Explores AI

Linux is cancer. That’s what Microsoft’s former CEO Steve Ballmer famously said about the open-source operating system. Microsoft’s anti-open source stance was to protect its intellectual property. A U-turn on this came about when the software giant released some of its products under public licence and joined open-source foundations.

Released in 2014, Windows Installer XML was the first Microsoft software to be available under a public licence. In 2008, Microsoft co-founded the Open Web Foundation with other tech titans such as Google, Meta, and IBM. Microsoft officially joined the Apache Software Foundation the following year.