Get over it: Microsoft is a Linux and open source company these days (Opinion column)

In 2001 then CEO Steve Ballmer declared: "Linux is a cancer." Later, Microsoft sponsored SCO's copyright attack on Linux; claimed that Linux violated unnamed Microsoft patents; and forced Linux-based Android vendors to pay for dubious patent claims. Bill Gates and Ballmer's Microsoft wanted to see Linux and open-source software (OSS) dead and buried.

They did it because, as Microsoft's Halloween documents show, they believed "OSS poses a direct, short-term revenue and platform threat to Microsoft, particularly in server space."

They also realized that open source was better than any number of developers they could get to live in Redmond, Washington. "The ability of the OSS process to collect and harness the collective IQ of thousands of individuals across the Internet is simply amazing. More importantly, OSS evangelization scales with the size of the Internet much faster than our own evangelization efforts appear to scale."

Microsoft's answer? "OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market."

For Microsoft, this was a tried-and-true method of squashing its enemies. You know it best from the phrase Paul Maritz, then Microsoft's executive vice president of the Platforms Strategy and Developer Group, used in 1998 to describe Microsoft's answer to Netscape as "embrace, extend, extinguish."

But pay attention, folks. The most recent of those stories is ten years old. Maritz left in 2000. Gates stopped doing day-to-day work at Microsoft in 2008. In 2021, the billionaire was pushed off Microsoft's board for having an affair with an employee. Ballmer? He quit being Microsoft CEO and resigned from the board in 2014. They're history. And so are their anti-Linux and OSS ways.

Embrace, extend, extinguish also failed against the open source method, and – this is the important bit – Microsoft knows it.

So when Satya Nadella took charge of Microsoft as its new CEO and said: "Microsoft loves Linux," that wasn't just lip service. He knew that to make money, Microsoft had to really embrace, and not extinguish, open source.

Nadella told Wired back in the day that he wasn't interested in fighting old battles. Linux has become a vital part of today's business technology. "If you don't jump on the new," he said, "you don't survive."

As TechCrunch reporter Ron Miller put it: "Microsoft went from a company trying to compel customers to buy an all-Microsoft, all-the-time kind of approach to one that recognized it was important to work across platforms and to partner widely."

That meant making friends with one-time enemies such as Salesforce, and not just loving Linux but incorporating Linux into its products – Linux is the top guest operating system in Azure – and hiring leading Linux and open source developers such as systemd architect Lennart Poettering and Python creator Guido Van Rossum.

Today, you think of Microsoft as a big deal, that it's just behind the FAANG companies on the stock market. What you don't remember is when Ballmer quit in 2014, Microsoft's stock had fallen over 40 percent. When Ballmer announced he was leaving, Microsoft's stock price was $34.47. On July 8, 2022, it was $267.66.

Get the picture? Microsoft has become more valuable than ever because it finally figured out that it was better to join Linux and open source than to fight it. If you still think Microsoft is the enemy, think again.

Sure, Microsoft isn't perfect. For example, there are serious legal and ethical questions about how its subsidiary GitHub is using open source code in its commercialized Copilot AI-based pair-programming service, and it has made some missteps as with .NET Foundation late last year.

However, you can find fault with any major company using Linux or open source software.

All things considered, it's well past time to stop being so harsh on Redmond. Stop judging Microsoft on what it did a decade ago and judge it by what it's doing today. ®

OTOH, it's almost impossible to not have to deal with microsoft to some degree.

You are so right. I have a dual boot rig (too lazy pretending to be paranoid to make a proper VM for the Windows partition). Libre Office has its limitations. For serious Word Processing (which I rarely do now) WordPerfect for Windows is much better (Microsoft gave Corel money decades ago to stop making the heavily touted, premature Linux version), and Excel handles larger spreadsheets even in the Excel 2013 incarnation that I now use as I despise Microsoft's rental/cloud approach. I like my cloud within MY control, thank you.

Of course, numerous specialty websites work better in MS environments.

> Linux is a better operating system in every way these days. It has more hardware compatibility, flexibility, and general usefulness.

I spend every day in all three OSes: Linux, Win10, MacOS. Time-wise, it's about 65% Linux, 25% Win10, 10% MacOS, mainly because I spend most of my time in xterm/Bash and Firefox, both of which are best in Linux. Win10 has the required Office365 apps (Outlook, mandated by my employer) and a couple webapps that work best in Google Chrome on Win10. MacOS has the MS-Teams native app and Chrome for conf-calls over Teams or Zoom, which are most stable by far on the Mac.

FWIW, I could not do what I need to do, exclusively on MacOS or Win10 -- they don't support the kinds of work I do most of the time. OTOH, I would not be happier with only Linux -- I could do it, but it would have annoying side-effects. Having the other environments for the things they do better is how I prefer to work.

Win10 has the required Office365 apps (Outlook, mandated by my employer) and a couple webapps that work best in Google Chrome on Win10. MacOS has the MS-Teams native app and Chrome for conf-calls over Teams or Zoom, which are most stable by far on the Mac.

Interesting. Outlook does have a web-enabled version that you can run from any OS. Also, Teams and Zoom both have a Linux client. While the Teams client is iffy (sux big time), Zoom seems fairly stable.

"You are right. It is a fairly expensive setup. I buy a desktop PC and run it for 10+ years before upgrading. I like having a full sized tower with slots and available 5.25” and 3.5” bays for capacity and upgrades should they become invented within the ten-year period. I am three years in and for raw capacity my setup ranks in the top 2% (”aircraft carrier”). I didn’t spring for a fancy graphics card as my work/personal use doesn’t require serious gaming (MAME with my son is all I do for that) or 3D modeling/animation."

You could build your own for about $600, not inclgd the OS. I do not do gaming and have no need for a dedicated graphics card, so in building this PC I went with the $100 (in 2019) Ryzen 3200G which you can easily overclock to 4.0Ghz. However, I could not get my 3200ghz memory (64GB) to run close to that speed when OC'd so I stuck with 3.6Ghz. All the drives are SSD, with the OS on a Silicon Power 512GB NVMe M.2 PCIe Gen3x4. Thanks be to God that I was able to but and build this, which has been much used for His purposes.

Yeah, when I’m away from my workstation I use the web version of Outlook and Teams, typically using Chrome browser on whatever OS I have at hand. I haven’t had occasion to use the Linux client for Zoom, but I’ll agree that the Linux Teams client sucks. Having all three OSes at hand, I try various combinations until I find what works best. I just want to get work done.

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