NEW YORK—At its first Connect event in 2013, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2013. In 2014, it announced the open sourcing of .NET, and in 2015, the open sourcing of the Visual Studio Code editor. The big news this year? Microsoft, the company that has built an empire on proprietary, closed-source software, has joined the Linux Foundation as a platinum member.
Microsoft has been a big contributor to Linux over the past several years, primarily focusing on improving support for its Hyper-V hypervisor. Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, said that in becoming a member, "Microsoft is better able to collaborate with the open source community to deliver transformative mobile and cloud experiences to more people."
Microsoft's increasing commitment to open source has been met with some cynicism (and please, beloved commenters—try to refrain from "embrace, extend, extinguish" posts, as the very concept is preposterous when it comes to Linux), but with projects such as Visual Studio Code and .NET, is starting to win hearts and minds. The company does appear to be a reasonably good open source citizen, not merely publishing source code repositories that are occasionally updated from an internal development branch, but actually performing development in the open, accepting community contributions, and seeking community consensus when it comes to new features.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Arik on Thursday November 17 2016, @01:47PM
"Microsoft's increasing commitment to open source has been met with some cynicism (and please, beloved commenters—try to refrain from "embrace, extend, extinguish" posts, as the very concept is preposterous when it comes to Linux)"
Spoken like an idiot who has no functioning memory or knowledge of history.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 17 2016, @05:56PM
yep. all these slaveware peddling whores are now posing as open source tech writers now that they have no choice. so now we get these stories that act like they are supporters of foss or foss users/gurus when in fact it's just a thinly veiled hit piece or an article designed to sabotage. hopefully gnu+linux users are smart enough to know better.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Thursday November 17 2016, @08:13PM
Actually, I though it was written by someone who didn't bother to make his <sarcasm> tags blatantly visible.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.