Microsoft President Brad Smith Acknowledges They Were Previously Wrong On Open-Source

While Microsoft executives in past years have called open-source/Linux a "cancer" and other FUD, current President of Microsoft, Brad Smith, acknowledges they were wrong in those past remarks.

Microsoft has certainly changed attitude in recent years with their numerous open-source projects to having Linux developers on their payroll to their recent acquisition of GitHub... Heck there's even the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

Brad Smith has served as the President of Microsoft since 2015. He held a virtual talk / fireside chat today with MIT CSAIL on various technology topics.

Some of his most interesting comments were on the topic of open-source to which he said the following:

"Microsoft was on the wrong side of history when open-source exploded at the beginning of the century and I can say that about me personally. The good news is that, if life is long enough, you can learn...that you need to change. Today, Microsoft is the single largest contributor to open-source projects in the world when it comes to businesses. When we look at GitHub, we see it as the home for open-source development, and we see our responsibility as its steward to make it a secure, productive home for [developers]."

We'll see what happens next for Microsoft and open-source. Thanks to the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab for hosting the interesting talk.