Communism and Cancer
We can be as objective as possible and still come to conclusion that Microsoft hates Linux far more than it hates Apple.
Apple, you see, is a competitor; Linux is a threat to Microsoft’s world view, and nothing is going to change that except failure.
Nowhere is this sentiment more clear than the classic Ballmer quote in 2000, describing Linux as having “the characteristics of communism that people love so very, very much”. Now, Ballmer is neither ignorant nor naive. He certainly saw Joe McCarthy and the Red Scare throughout his childhood, and was already at Microsoft for several years when the Cold War ‘officially’ ended.
Forward to 2009, when Microsoft (now firmly under the hand of Red-Scare Ballmer himself) surprised everyone by announcing the contribution of 20000 lines of GPL-licensed code to the Linux kernel. Hard to believe? Well, yeah…MS was hoping for some good will, but it came out very quickly that all they were doing is covering their asses.
You see, Hyper-V (a Microsoft virtualization product that allows users to run Linux under Windows, rather than migrate to a completely free system) uses GPL-licensed components linked to closed-source binaries — an egregious violation of the GPL.
Microsoft predictably released an ingenuous statement that it was all about sharing and working together…though, as my racist wife-beating uncle used to say, you can never trust a commie. Especially one that’s going to give you cancer.