Last March , Microsoft decided to free their own code for their windows calculator, made it open source and published it on Github. Lately, Microsoft has been working towards improving their relationship with the Linux community, like that time they open sourced over 60.000 patents to improve linux.

When they did this, Microsoft commented that they wanted to  receive fresh perspectives on behalf of the developers, as well as a growing participation to define the future of their calculator - yes you read correctly, all that for their calculator - written in C++ language.

This is just a simbolical act from what Microsoft has already been doing for open source lately, however, what is most curious about this is the fact that it has gained popularity so quickly that this month, the project has been the most popular of all in github,  quickly rising to 14.000 stars.

Thanks to the fact that Microsoft released the app source code, there are many developers that can use their code not only for their own project, but to learn and evaluate and suggest improvements.

This is the beauty of open source. and the community has proven to be very interested in benefiting the chance to demonstrate the importance of static analysis, even in small projects like this one.

This is such, that a small group of developers has already found a significant amount of suspicious code and bugs in the simple tool, from memory leaks all the way to information that the calculator sends randomly to the MS servers.

The code was licensed and open sourced under an MIT license, that is very permissive when it comes to software manipulation and code reusability. It is compatible with many copyleft licenses - including GPL - and this is why it's the most popular license of all Github.