From the White House to (no kidding) Microsoft, open source shined in ’09

“The struggling economy turned out to be favorable for Linux and
open source, as IT teams scrambled to do more with shrunken
budgets. And throughout the year, the open source community saw
milestone events and emerging trends that will likely continue into
2010 and beyond.

“Perhaps the most shocking event was Microsoft’s submission of
code for inclusion in the Linux kernel under a GPL license that
Microsoft once tagged as a threat to capitalism itself. But it was
not so much an olive branch as it was a brain freeze: Microsoft had
inadvertently included some open source code in the virtualization
drivers it eventually submitted for the Linux kernel and was more
or less left with little choice.”

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