According to The Wall Street Journal, Microsoft is investing $70 million in Cyanogen, the startup behind Cyanogen Mod, an increasingly popular—and very open—incarnation of Google's mobile operating system. The investment would make Microsoft a minority investor in a round of funding that puts Cyanogen's value in the high hundreds of millions, the WSJ says.

Both Microsoft and Cyanogen declined to comment on the matter, but it's yet another sign that under new CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft is intent on embracing open source software—even open source software that may appear to compete with its own products and services. This is how most young tech companies operate—open source now serves as the foundation for so much of the internet—but this is relatively new territory for Microsoft. The company realizes it must embrace open source—software that's freely available to the world at large—in order to compete.