Chapter 5: The Influence of Open and Inner Source on Software Delivery Performance

20 years ago, on June 1, 2001, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the following in an interview with the Chicago Sunday Times:

"Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches."

(Greene T. C. (2001))

His concern was not only Linux but open source licenses in general. Now, 20 years later, Microsoft is the single largest contributor to open source in the world, beating Facebook, Google, Red Hat, and SUSE. Not only do they have many open source products, such as PowerShell, Visual Studio Code, and .NET, they also ship a complete Linux kernel with Windows 10 so that you can run any distribution on it. Microsoft president Brad Smith admits that "Microsoft was on the wrong side of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century" (Warren T. (2020)).

If you look at the top 10 companies that contribute to...