[bubble_talk]

If Microsoft hadn't embraced open source around the time Satya Nadella took over, by now they would have probably imploded and become irrelevant (I mean in the sense of how Bing is more or less irrelevant to most website owners even though it apparently makes a lot of money).

Its not as if they decided to open source Windows XP.

[teh_klev]

> If Microsoft hadn't embraced open source around the time Satya Nadella took over

Microsoft were already well down the road to "embracing" open source before Nadella took over as CEO. The movement inside the company began around 2006 with folks like Scott Guthrie, Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack, Rob Conery and others pushing for more openness. Two open source licenses were created by Microsoft to accommodate such works (MS-PL and MS-RL[0]). When ASP.NET MVC was released in 2009 it was open-sourced and shipped with the MS-PL license.

As with any large organisation it takes some time to build up the momentum to change their behaviour and strategy.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Source_Initiative#Micro...

[pedrow]

Also don't forget Rob Mensching[0] in 2004.

[0]:http://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2004/4/5/windows-installe...

[teh_klev]

Thanks, I forgot about Rob. I'm sure there's loads of others I've missed, Jon Galloway for example.

[bubble_talk]

Your comments would actually make sense if, say, Microsoft wasn't simultaneously going after Android phone makers to impose an "Android tax" during that very same period [1].

This is like saying: "I was really getting into open source. But I also wanted to contradict myself whenever it was convenient and profitable, as long as no one noticed. Its not really my fault that my left brain doesn't know what my right brain is doing as I am a large organization". While Microsoft may indeed be so big as to have such a dysfunctional brain, the rest of us don't suffer from such debilitations.

[1] https://www.digitaltrends.com/android/is-android-being-stifl...

[teh_klev]

I'm not defending MS but....

"however Google has not been willing to indemnify Android device makers against infringement claims"

Kinda says to me that Google clearly know exactly what they're doing apropos patent infringement. I'm not saying it's ideal, but at the end of the day MS are legally permitted to defend those patents (at the very least have working implementations as opposed to the usual patent troll nonsense).

Also that's a six year old article full of speculation from the dying days of MS's attempts at getting into the phone biz. Life has moved on and Android has hardly been extinguished.