The real reason Microsoft open sourced .NET

With its engineers involved in more than 2,000 open source projects, you’d have to agree that open source has more than a foothold at Microsoft these days. Most recently, for example, the browser team made the Chakra JavaScript engine that powers both Edge and Internet Explorer open source, for a very practical reason.

Node, the popular JavaScript runtime, currently works only with Google’s V8 JavaScript engine. With Chakra now open source, Microsoft can take the fork of Node that it created to run on Chakra and contribute it back to the project – which means developers who use Node will have the choice of using it with Edge as well as with Chrome, opening up a much bigger market for Microsoft’s browser technology.