Microsoft’s open-source era still comes with an asterisk

Microsoft’s relationship with open source has one of the strangest redemption arcs in tech. This is the same company whose former CEO, Steve Ballmer, once described Linux as “a cancer,” a line so cartoonishly hostile it still follows Microsoft around like an embarrassing yearbook photo. Two decades later, Microsoft talks about Linux with heart emojis, builds tools developers actually love, owns GitHub, maintains its own Linux distribution, and has open-sourced parts of Windows Subsystem for Linux to the point where one of my editors has stopped picking between Windows and Linux and started running both on the same machine.