Meet Bill Gates, the Man Who Changed Open Source Software

“But at the same time, Microsoft realized how powerful the free
software movement could be, and the company was exploring ways it
could make nice with the ever-growing community of developers who
used open source. For two years, Sam Ramji had served as head of
open source strategy at Microsoft, and every three months, he met
with Bill Gates and other execs to show off various open source
technologies put together by a small team of Microsoft
engineers.

“But that afternoon was different. At the invitation of the
company’s chief legal minds — Smith and Gutierrez —
Ramji sat down with Gates, chief software architect Ray Ozzie, and
a few others to discuss whether Microsoft could actually start
using open source software. Ramji and Ozzie were on one side of the
argument, insisting that Microsoft embrace open source, and
Gutierrez offered a legal framework that could make that possible.
But other top executives strongly challenged the idea.”

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