The Windows manufacturer was “on the wrong side of the story,” says Microsoft’s chief lawyer.
Over the past decade, Microsoft’s corporate culture has fundamentally changed in terms of open source. This is now confirmed by Brad Smith, who is the company’s chief lawyer as President. Speaking to MIT’s prestigious Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), Smith said: “We were on the wrong side of history,” reports The Register magazine.
Smith is referring to the turn of the century when “open source had exploded”. In summer 1999, for example, the Linux distributor and open source specialist Red Hat went public and started its triumphal march in the enterprise business. But two years later, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer described Linux as cancer in a now famous interview.
In retrospect, Smith can also see something positive in the whole development. “The good news is that you can learn (…) that if life is long enough, you have to change,” said Smith. Smith also contributed to the changes at Microsoft and, for example, during the years under Ballmer as the boss, tried to resolve the many major legal disputes at the time by mutual agreement.
And Smith, as chief lawyer and chief compliance officer, also played a large part in the move towards open source. Smith has been in this position since 2015, when Microsoft began to publish its .Net framework as open source. Since then, many cloud and developer tools have been added to Microsoft’s portfolio as open source. This also includes that thanks to the Windows subsystem for Linux, the Linux kernel is now distributed as part of Microsoft’s operating system.