A couple of days ago, Microsoft announced that it contributes somewhat 22,000 lines of code to the open source community. This probably comes as a surprise to the community, since it is well known that Microsoft is not particularly fond of Linux and, to speak more widely, open source software. The code is released under GPL v.2 and it is drivers that make Linux perform better when used as a guest OS under Microsoft's virtualization technology, Hyper-V, that is used in Windows Server 2008.
However, today the story that circles the internet is that Microsoft was actually obligated to release those drivers under the GPL v.2 license. The truth is that Stephen Hemminger -a network engineer that works for a company that produces open source routers- discovered that parts of code of a network driver in Hyper-V are compiled against GPL code, which constitutes a GPL violation. Hemminger contacted Greg Kroah-Hartman, who works for SuSE, to deal with this "silently", since SuSE (Novell) has a partnership contract with Microsoft. So, the marketing magic happened and Microsoft now seems to be the good guy that donates code to the community.
At least, that's what happened until today. The truth is now out.
