From CNN.com: “For most of its corporate life, Microsoft Corp. has built its software monopoly — and earned billions — around the idea that software should be sold, not given away, and that the blueprints ought to be shielded by a high-security fortress of technical safeguards.
The company’s very public campaign against the idea of freely sharing its software blueprints, called source code, came to a head early last summer. Microsoft’s notoriously outspoken chief executive, Steve Ballmer, told a reporter that a competing “open-source” system called Linux was “a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual-property sense to everything it touches.”
These days, Microsoft is singing a slightly different tune.”
