Microsoft’s recent investment in Cyanogen adds to the companies recent embrace of open source which has included open sourcing the .NET framework and supporting the Docker community. This growing embrace has been a classic case of open source working for a company that only understand proprietary approaches, as outlined in Eric Raymond’s classic book The Catherdral and the Bazaar. MS has chosen to work more closely with open source communities entirely based on the practical implications, rather than principle. This is opening the company up to new, large groups of developers, but time will tell if their tepid, wait-and-see approach is successful.
