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What we’re talking about is the notorious Halloween Documents, a series of confidential Microsoft records regarding free software and open-source software. The documents were leaked by open-source software advocate Eric S. Raymond in 1998. Those documents identified open-source software, and in particular the Linux operating system, as a major threat to and suggested tactics Microsoft could use to disrupt the progress of open-source software.
The former CEO of the enterprise from 2000 to 2014, Steve Ballmer, was known Email List for his secretive nature when it came to software building. Nonetheless, things have changed since then. His replacement, Satya Nadella has a whole different philosophy which changed the stance of Microsoft’s openness, or lack thereof, by 180 degrees. If it hadn’t been for that shift of perspective, we wouldn’t talk about this acquisition today.

As a matter of fact, Microsoft’s investment in Github had started a few years before it even acquired it. According to a case of “Microsoft acquiring GitHub is a good thing,” the former company genuinely tried to win over the dev community multi ways: It open-sourced all of the .NET frameworks on GitHub It built out rich, system-level Windows features to bring a rich Unix shell to the platform to make development easier Github began and continues to maintain one of the best open-source code editors available for every platform out there It became the largest contributor to open-source on GitHub.
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