Microsoft Might Finally Be Committing To Open Source

Nikhil Sonnad | Quartz | July 23, 2014

Microsoft is known for keeping its programming secrets to itself. But under CEO Satya Nadella, the maker of proprietary behemoths like Windows and Microsoft Office is starting to show up in the world of open-source software, whose code is public for anyone to see, borrow from and tinker with.  Late last year Microsoft finally made itself an account on Github, now the de-facto platform that software writers use for sharing and working on open-source code. “Microsoft has changed as a company and is becoming more open in the way that we collaborate with others,” the account’s description reads.

Microsoft has actually been doing open source in some capacity for a while. It releases many open-source projects on its own CodePlex platform, though this is far less popular than GitHub. It has also had a scattered presence on GitHub for some time: MS Open Tech, a wholly-owned Microsoft subsidiary that works with open source, has its own account, as does Microsoft’s Azure cloud-computing platform.

But the company as a whole has never been as fully committed to it as big-tech peers like Google and Facebook. (Apple, though, is similarly reticent.) And never has the entire organization’s commitment to open source been so explicit. This might just be the beginning of Microsoft’s efforts...