Meet Bill Gates, the Man Who Changed Open Source Software

Cade Metz | Wired | January 30, 2012

From the outside looking in, it appears that Microsoft has indeed turned the corner. The company recently added two open source platforms to Windows Azure — its new-age web service for building and hosting applications on the net — and it’s actually contributing open source code to these projects — as well as others. These aren’t minor open source projects. They’re big name projects with huge followings: Node.js and Hadoop. This would not have happened in the past.

Microsoft changed because of people like Sam Ramji and the man who hired him, Bill Hilf — not to mention Bill Gates. But the change also reflects a much larger movement across the tech industry. As more and more applications move from local data centers to “cloud” services such as Amazon Web Services and, yes, Microsoft Azure, the economics of software are shifting. In the past, businesses paid companies like Microsoft for software and loaded it on their own servers. Now, businesses pay to use online services instead. In offering open source software atop Azure, there’s a clear way for Microsoft to actually make money...

Open Health News' Take: 

This is a terrible title for an otherwise good article about Microsoft's acceptance to a certain degree of open source software. And, as noted in the article, this reticent acceptance was driven by Bill Gates. Despite the title this article is worth the read.--RAM