Microsoft has surprised many open source supporters by registering itself as a member of the Linux Foundation. This new step was quite vital for the Redmond company to prove its support for community-based solutions.
At its annual Connect(); developer conference on Wednesday, Microsoft announced that it is joining the Linux Foundation as a Platinum member. The development is aimed to “better collaborate with the open source community” and deliver flexibility to developers.
“By collaborating with the community to provide open, flexible and intelligent tools and cloud services, we are helping every developer deliver unprecedented levels of innovation,” Scott Guthrie, cloud and enterprise executive vice president, Microsoft told the attendees at the developer convention.
Highest level of membership
Interestingly, Microsoft chose the highest level of membership that costs $500,000 annually. This move brings the software giant closer to the other ten Platinum members, namely Cisco, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Huawei, IBM, Intel, NEC, Oracle, Qualcomm and Samsung.
The Linux Foundation has welcomed Microsoft’s debut to its list of members. The non-profit organisation considers that this critical step by the Windows maker will enable “transformative” experiences for the masses.
“By becoming a Linux Foundation Platinum member, Microsoft is better able to collaborate with the open source community to deliver transformative mobile and cloud experiences to more people,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, in a joint statement.
Massive open source contributor
Although Microsoft was initially infamous for supporting proprietary solutions against open source technologies, it recently became a massive open source contributor. The company is already leading the list of GitHub contributors that also includes some popular open source contributing concerns like Facebook and Google.
Just earlier this week, OpenAI also picked Microsoft to deploy its Azure as the primary cloud platform for various artificial intelligence (AI) developments. That partnership would give the Satya Nadella-led company an option to get expanded in the world of AI with some open source support.
Microsoft is presently powering open source projects like Project Springfield, Project Olympus, CoreRT and Azure Container Service. Also, the company offers Ubuntu support on its Windows 10 platform and .Net Core for Linux distributions to empower the developer community.
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MS have to prove themselves as far as I am concerned, I openly admit I have no love for their company nor the recent incarnations of their desktop OS. I will never run Winblows 8.x nor 10 platforms on any of my own systems, to me that is an infection and I never subject my own systems to that!
My 2 cents worth.
if you go forward, you have to jump together Dr DC Shetty like
[…] community. In last November, the Redmond company brought Linux to its Windows 10 platform and even joined the Linux Foundation. Those developments are so far neither fruitful for the open source community nor the proprietary […]
[…] as a ‘Premium’ sponsor. The new development emerges months after the Redmond company entered the membership agreement with the Linux Foundation and is another significant effort to have a good faith of open source […]