This month, Github announced that Microsoft's CoPilot product will be allowed to train on all projects hosted on Github, unless the owners of the projects toggle a certain setting off before 24 April 2026. This continues the trend of Microsoft's long arc to own software development from the ground its planted in. A saying I've learn in startups is “the company culture starts with the founders” and well, I guess that makes Microsoft a bit venal.
The software canon of the 20th century includes many titans pushing the proverbial convenience builder up the machine-language hill. Rear Admiral Grace Hopper invented COBOL, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson collaborated on the C language, Guy Steele invented Lisp, and Brendan Eich invented JavaScript. All of these gifts are for the sake of making software easier to write in order to leverage the capacities of better and better hardware.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen came on the scene in the 1975 with Altair Basic, which extended the ubiquitous BASIC language from 1964 by adding an interpreter. This development was fantastic, but we must remember this innovation came about from Gates and Allen periodically participating in the hobbyist meetups to learn the tricks of the trade, experimenting with new concepts, and learning freely.
The point in bringing this up is the infamous 1976 letter titled “An Open Letter to Hobbyists”, where Gates shows us his true colors. He asserts that those very same hobbyists that helped him are now getting a free ride by using his Altair BASIC without paying their dues to his company. He cites how musicians are paid royalties for record sales, and writer royalties for their books. And as such, Gates refused to publish the source code of their flagship product, preventing the code from being entered into libraries for low-income hobbyists to checkout and upload onto their machines.
The century continues with Gates's Microsoft Corporation battling Netscape in the Browser wars, with more battles over who owns JavaScripts development in a shared web. It's messy stuff because these corporations hate each other yet want their customers to enjoy a common web. Microsoft creates JScript, their own interpreter for JavaScript, while pushing Mosaic out of the picture. Mozilla comes onto the scene to break it up with the ECMAScript conventions through the dark ages of Javascript of the 2000s, but that's a different story.
“Microsoft loves Open Source” was a 2009 PR rebrand of their hate for competitive OS “cancer” (their words) known as Linux, a free alternative to Windows during the time when Windows Vista was continuing to perform poorly. So they committed to Open Source, the way Microsoft does, by buying out fiefdoms of Open Source that fit into their empire, like villages on the steppe being collectivized. Eventually, in 2018, Microsoft got what it wanted with the acquisition of GitHub, arguably the most publicly visible website where Open Source code is maintained. There were promises of maintaining the space for this development, despite the mass exodus to GitLabs.
Now we are at juxtaposition: Gates's company built on open domain knowledge now plans to hoover up any and all code (ignoring licenses!) on a platform for Open Source for their Copilot tool. We should expect another letter from Microsoft in 6 months saying we must stop committing code freely without Copilot's permission to evaluate it first. Microsoft's dark heart, branded with embrace-extend-extinguish, continues to beat the same rhythm it has since 1976. Embrace original ideas, extend it for the next stop, and extinguish it once goals are met.