US Edition 
We love open source, says Microsoft
A senior Microsoft executive has admitted that the company’s previous criticism of open source software was ‘a mistake’
Microsoft has often been critical of some elements of the open source technology community. In 2001, Steve Ballmer, the company’s chief executive, described Linux, the open source operating system, as a “cancer” that threatened his company’s intellectual property, while in 2007, Microsoft accused Linux and other open source providers of violating more than 200 of its patents.
But Jean Paoli, general manager of Microsoft’s interoperability strategy team, is attempting to build bridges between the two communities, and acknowledges that Microsoft’s stance in the past has not always been helpful.
“We love open source,” he told Network World, an industry publication. “We have worked with open source for a long time now.”
He said that Microsoft’s distrust of open source in general, and Linux in particular, was “really very early on” in the process, “a really long time ago”, and that Microsoft had understood its mistake.
Paoli said that Microsoft was committed to open standards, and had embraced a number of schemes to help promote open source initiatives.
He said that Microsoft had been heavily involved in the creation of OData, an open data protocol which aims to “free” data from applications, while its Azure team, which is exploring the benefits of cloud-based software and services, has also released software development kits for those coding in PHP and Java, rather than Microsoft’s proprietary .NET platform.