Microsoft was virtually the last major IT company to discover the Internet (despite what Bill Gates would tell you in the second edition of his autobiography). Now, after years of describing Open Source as a "cancer", Microsoft has discovered that they and Open Source are bestest buddies.
Director of business development, intellectual property and licensing at Microsoft, David Kaefer, said open source had bolstered innovation in a distributed fashion.
He called the open source software movement a very powerful force in the industry.
"I think one of the exciting things about the open source software movement is it actually brought together a very distributed group of developers," he said, speaking at Business of Innovation,a Valley Speakers Series event held at Microsoft's Silicon Valley offices.
In fairness, some of the Shared Source licences are quite reasonable, and some even qualify as truly open source, but with Microsoft you always have to be on look out for the bait-and-switch. Just because a Shared Source licence is described by Microsoft as "open" doesn't mean it is.
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