Adopting open source in your organization

Recently, Microsoft went from calling open source "a cancer" to being the biggest contributor on GitHub. Edward Thomson explains how Microsoft, one of the unlikeliest software vendors, began to embrace and even extend (but not extinguish) open source software and how you can begin using and contributing to open source software in your organization.

Microsoft has historically been prone to hyperbole around open source. (Executives have called it “a cancer” and compared it to communism.) Only five years ago, it seemed unlikely that Microsoft would deign to use open source software, but now there are more contributors to open source on GitHub from Microsoft than any other organization. Microsoft’s Visual Studio team recently abandoned its outdated biases around open source, adopting the Git version control system and building tools to support it, even though Git competed with Microsoft’s own version control systems. Edward Thomson explains how the Visual Studio team convinced Microsoft to embrace and extend open source (without extinguishing it), covering the mistakes they made along the way, and outlines how you can convince your organization to use—or better still, contribute to—open source software.