The meeting took place a week before Bill Gates retired from Microsoft, and the topic was open source software.
It was the summer of 2008, and for years, the open source community had viewed Microsoft as public enemy number one. Seven years earlier, CEO Steve Ballmer had referred to Linux as a “malignant cancer,” and as recently as the previous summer, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith and licensing chief Horacio Gutierrez had told Fortune Magazine that Linux violated 235 of its patents, implying that it would soon demand royalties from any big business using the open source OS.
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