Microsoft's Love-Hate Relationship with Open Source

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As part of its strategy to embrace open source, Microsoft began to support thousands of open standards and open source environments such as Linux3 and Apache Hadoop4 (Hadoop). It collaborated with many open source organizations and contributed to several open source projects. Open source contact points were set up across the company and it regularly sponsored open source events. "I think it clear that Microsoft has finally turned a corner and is now increasingly following a path towards greater acceptance and support for open-source. This is a GIGANTIC step forward. Microsoft is leading by example and sending a strong message to their legions of developers that open-source need be feared no longer and that publishing open-source code benefits everyone," said Richard Turner, an expert technologist who had worked at Microsoft for ten years.

While Microsoft's efforts to become pro-open source were commended, some open source watchers questioned how a company that mostly generated revenue from licensing software, could project itself as an advocate of open source. Ron Schnell (Schnell), an open source user and manager of the Technical Committee that managed Microsoft's consent decree with the US government, said, "Personally, I think that the chapter on Microsoft on open source has yet to be written. We need to see a lot more contribution from them to say they are a friend of open source." Critics felt that Microsoft's foray into open source was just a tactic to gain control of other companies involved in development of open source products and so maintain their monopoly in the software world. It remained to be seen how Microsoft integrated into the open source community about which it had never been positive, they contended. According to Brian Proffitt (Proffitt), an open source journalist, "I think Microsoft -- much to their own dismay, I suspect -- has come (or is coming to) the conclusion that interoperability with open source technology is their best chance to succeed in the world. Don't get me wrong, they still want to win, and they are still not above resorting to litigation to try to slow the competition down while they catch up. But in the long term, I believe that they are going to genuinely learn to play by FLOSS [free/ libre and open source software] rules."

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3] Linux OS is a free and open source OS which is free to download, edit, and distribute. Linux was developed with the assistance of developers from around the globe.
4] The Apache Hadoop is an open-source software framework that allows processing of large data sets across a network of computers using a simple programming model. It is developed by the Apache Software Foundation, a US-based non-profit corporation that supports the Apache community of open source software projects.

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