David Kaefer, director of Business Development, Intellectual Property and Licensing at Microsoft, said open source had bolstered innovation in a distributed fashion, and he called the open source software movement a "very powerful force in the industry."

"I think one of the exciting things about the open source software movement is it actually brought together a very distributed group of developers," Kaefer said, speaking at "Business of Innovation," a Valley Speakers Series event held at Microsoft's Silicon Valley offices.

Microsoft does have a stake in open source, he said. "Certainly, it's not as big a bet as a company like IBM would be making in open source."

Microsoft has partnered with the open source community, linking up with companies such as JBoss, SugarCRM and XenSource, Kaefer said. And it is leveraging open source in its Open XML Translator project, which will enable its Office suite to support the OpenDocument Format standard.

Emphasizing Microsoft's intention to be more open, Kaefer said, the company is doing more to open up its protocols and license formats, such as its Office format. The company's Shared Source program, for its part, allows access to its code.