As discussed in the preceding section, three decades of the Windows platform clearly indicates a closed source company. Interestingly, in the mean time, the industry was travelling in the opposite direction with the open source model.

After few years of resistance to the open source model, Microsoft was ready to align with the industry movement. Indeed, Microsoft initiated open sourcing more of its own technologies such as parts of the .NET platform. The Microsoft open-source strategy is focused to help their customers and partners to be successful in today's challenging heterogeneous technology world.

To make a safe landing, Microsoft's open source hosting website named CodePlex beta was launched in May 2006, with the official launch in June 2006. After a decade-long journey with CodePlex, Microsoft started moving its bigger open source initiatives into GitHub, because GitHub has become the industry's popular distributed version control and source control management system with a web-based hosting service. As a side note, GitHub's initial product version was released in April 2008.

Microsoft's CodePlex to GitHub strategy move boosted their growth and contribution in the open source space. It made them exhibit a stunning turnaround to the open source world; most importantly, backed up by Microsoft's serious support. You know what?, Now Microsoft is the top organization with the most open source contributors on GitHub. In fact, Microsoft beats Facebook, Docker, Google, Apache, and many other competitors.

Though Microsoft has been working on open sourcing strategy since 2006, a rapid increase has been noticed in recent years. Apparently, it might be because of the change in Microsoft's business strategy and senior leadership changes.

As mentioned in the previous section, it is pretty clear that Microsoft really does love the Linux platform. As a result, Microsoft is going to launch its flagship enterprise database product SQL Server in the Linux platform.

On seeking the last few years' of history of collaboration between Canonical and Microsoft, it is very clear that Ubuntu is one of the first Linux distributions to get an official endorsement to run on Azure. This is possible with a high degree of collaboration on many fronts among the engineering teams of both the firms. As a matter of fact, Azure-managed Big Data stack, HDInsight, is powered by the Ubuntu platform:

The scorecard seen in the preceding screenshot gives clear facts about Microsoft's Open Source strategy and the related industry contribution. The box in the top-left corner showcases that 20 percent of the operating systems on Azure are based on the Linux platform. With the collaboration effort, the open source operating system is already contributing a lot to Microsoft's bottom line.

Another dimension of metric is the rapid growth of the CodePlex membership. It leads to triple time growth in four years, between 2010 and 2014. This success got reflected in Big Data Hadoop eco system. As the result, there are contribution of 30K LoC (Lines of Code) and the effort of a team of more than 10K engineers.

In essence, Microsoft has so many motivational factors to contribute towards open source projects. It not only adds business value, but is also in alignment with the industry changes.