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In the early days of Microsoft’s history, developers protected their source code as a trade secret, and most tech companies and other organizations developed their code by themselves. But open source had revolutionized the creation and use of software. Increasingly software developers were publishing their code under a variety of open-source models that allowed others to incorporate, use, and contribute improvements to it. This enabled broad collaboration among developers that helped accelerate software innovation.

When these developments began, Microsoft had not only been slow to embrace the change, we’d actively resisted it, including by asserting our patents against companies shipping products with open-source code. I had been a central participant in the latter aspect. But over time, and especially after Satya became the company’s CEO in 2014, we began to recognize this was a mistake. In 2016, we acquired Xamarin, a start-up that supports the open-source community. Its CEO, Nat Friedman, joined Microsoft and brought an important outside perspective to our leadership ranks.

By the start of 2018, Microsoft was using more than 1.4 million open-source components in its products, contributing back to many of these and other open source projects, and even open sourcing many of its own foundational technologies. As a sign of how far we’d come, Microsoft had become the most prolific contributor to open source on GitHub, 14 a company that was the home of software developers around the world and especially of the open-source community. In May, we decided to spend $7.5 billion to acquire GitHub.

Excerpted from pages 276 to 277 of ‘Tools and Weapons’ by Brad Smith and Carol Browne