Microsoft is making huge gains into the hearts and minds of the Linux community, only a few years after describing it as software cancer.
Executive Director at Linux Foundation Jim Zemlin wrote in Linux.com that Microsoft moves to open sourcing the server side .NET stack and expanding it to run on Linux and Mac OS platforms were important.
“All developers will now be able to build .NET cloud applications on Linux and Mac. These are huge moves for the company and follow its recent acknowledgement that at least 20 percent of Azure VMs are running Linux,” Zemlin wrote.
He said that these sorts of changes made everyone keenly aware of how much the software business has transformed over the last decade.
Microsoft is redefining itself in response to a world driven by open source software and collaborative development and is demonstrating its commitment to the developer in a variety of ways.
A few years ago Microsoft was among the top 20 corporate contributors to the Linux kernel. It participates in the open SDN project, OpenDaylight, and the open IoT effort the AllSeen Alliance. This year Microsoft joined the Core Infrastructure Initiative focused on funding critical open source projects running the world’s infrastructure.
While Zemlin did not agree with everything Microsoft does the new Microsoft is a different organisation when it comes to open source.
Today most software is built collaboratively and open source development accelerate’s technology, which is why competition today is so fierce and things move faster than ever before.
Microsoft understands that today’s computing markets have changed and companies cannot go it alone the way they once did, Zemlin said. He didn’t seem to mention that Microsoft makes a bundle of money out of Linux and hardware and the like.
