Microsoft has officially joined the Linux Foundation

This one’s a biggie. Yup, Microsoft has announced that it is joining the Linux Foundation as a Platinum member. This comes as a surprise as former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer had called Linux a ‘cancer’ 15 years ago. Things have changed. Microsoft has slowly started adopting open source, making it one of the top organisation with the most open source contributors on Github. Over the past few years, Microsoft has built Canonical’s Ubuntu distribution into Windows 10, brought SQL Server to Linux, made the core parts of its .NET platform open-sourced and partnered with Red Hat, SUSE and others. That says a lot. “This may come as a surprise to you, but they were not big fans,” Linux Foundation Executive Director, Jim Zemlin told TechCrunch. “There will be some skepticism, but that will be from a smaller group. There is an anti-establishment sentiment in open source. That’s natural. Whenever a major corporation goes open source, that’s what happens. But Microsoft has been walking this talk for a very long time now.” Microsoft recently announced that it will be bringing Visual Studio for Mac. Built on top of Xamarin Studio that the company acquired earlier this year, the company had said, “At its heart, Visual Studio for Mac is a macOS counterpart of the Windows version of Visual Studio.” The IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is designed to feel familiar to a macOS user, while still offering the cross-platform and cloud-based development capabilities of its Windows counterpart. Windows and Mac developers will be able to share and contribute to the same projects with the new software.