Microsoft has learned to stop worrying and love the Linux open source operating system---at least to a certain extent. But it wasn't that long ago that the tech giant took a horribly tone-deaf approach to the revolutionary open source project.
Witness this Microsoft video from the year 2003, in which Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer make fun of Linux while, um, dressed as characters from The Matrix. It could be the most mind-bogglingly misguided Microsoft misstep ever caught on film. Yes, there have been many---so very many---but this one is worthy of fireworks. And it's our Fourth of July gift to you.
In the video, then Microsoft CEO Ballmer has morphed into "Steve-o"---a bald, paunchy version of Neo, that hunky hacker from The Matrix movies who works to save humanity from virtual reality. Steve-o has been captured by a pair of Matrix agents, and much like in the Hollywood movie, they sit him down in a windowless room for interrogation. They want him to cough up what he knows about Morpheus, played by, well, a leather-clad Bill Gates. Warning: that's a sight that can never be unseen.
The agents have a file on Steve-o. But they can't get to it. It sits on a black laptop that runs on Linux, and when the agents try to open the file, the system stalls. All they see is an error message and a Linux penguin logo. "I need you to write a new device driver and recompile the kernel," says the Agent Smith stand-in. And Steve-o smirks.
But Linux would have the last laugh.
Ballmer didn't just mock Linux in cheeky corporate videos. In the early aughts, he went so far as to call Linux a cancer. He said it was an OS fit for communists. Linux, you see, was a threat to Microsoft's core business, which relied on selling software, not giving it away, and Microsoft did everything it could to squash thing, much as it had done with the Netscape web browser.
But unlike Netscape, Linux survived. In fact, it changed the world. It now powers the billion-dollar Microsoft competitor Red Hat, and it provides the foundation for so much of the internet, including all the largest services, from Google, Amazon, and Facebook to Twitter and LinkedIn. If you build a web service today, odds are you build it with Linux.
Linux has become so powerful that Microsoft has almost completely changed its ways. Just a year after its Matrix spoof, Microsoft called on Linux man Bill Hilf to lead its open-source software lab, where he and his team explored way of dovetailing Microsoft tools with Linux. By 2012, the tech giant had welcomed Linux unto its Azure cloud computing service, and it was among Linux's top corporate contributors. What's more, the tech has embraced other major open source projects such as Hadoop and Node.js. There are even reports that Microsoft is developing its own open-source programming language.
The company is doing its best to erase its past treatment of the open source world. Now, if it could only erase that leather-clad Bill Gates from our brain.
