Microsoft surprised everyone at its Connect developer event recently by announcing that it had become a Platinum member of the Linux Foundation. The firms haven’t seen eye-to-eye for years, fuelling a decades-spanning rivalry.
Microsoft appears to be taking a very different approach to things under the leadership of Satya Nadella. It’s been slowly embracing the open source community through various initiatives such as becoming a top contributor to GitHub, launching the open source and cross-platform application framework .NET Core 1.0, and introducing Ubuntu to Windows 10.
Becoming a platinum member of the Linux Foundation means Microsoft has committed itself to donating at least $500000 per year for the advancement of open source projects. The corporation will in turn benefit from this since it wants to improve its Azure cloud platform by providing developers with more choice when it comes to the tools they utilize.
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On a broader note, Microsoft believes its newfound Linux membership will lead to a higher rate of collaboration and innovation in a diverse ecosystem. The move is part of a larger push towards taking advantage of the shift towards intelligent cloud services and mobile experiences.
Microsoft also took the opportunity to announce that Google had become the latest member of its .NET Foundation’s Technical Steering Group. Even Samsung is joining in the fun, releasing a preview of its Visual Studio Tools for Tizen which developers can use to build .NET apps for the OS.
Microsoft further showed off previews of its own in the form of Visual Studio for Mac, the next edition of SQL Server database with support for Linux, Azure App Service on Linux with support for containers, and Linux-based Docker containers and Windows-based environments.