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Microsoft Now a Linux Foundation Platinum Member

Microsoft has been on the Linux bandwagon for a while, and many of the development tool offerings announced at this week's Connect(); event prove that the company is in it for the long haul.

Microsoft has joined the Linux Foundation, as a Platinum member. The company announced its membership at the Microsoft Connect(); event this week. Along with Microsoft's membership in the nonprofit organization, Microsoft Azure architect John Gossman has joined the board of directors.

The Linux Foundation is an advocacy organization focused on fostering open source development projects as well as Linux education programs. The Linux Foundation's executive director offered a positive statement about Microsoft's new role.

"Microsoft has grown and matured in its use of and contributions to open source technology," said Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation, in a released statement. "The company has become an enthusiastic supporter of Linux and of open source and a very active member of many important projects. Membership is an important step for Microsoft, but also for the open source community at large, which stands to benefit from the company's expanding range of contributions."

Microsoft has contributed to various Linux Foundation-sponsored projects, including "Node.js Foundation, OpenDaylight, Open Container Initiative, R Consortium and Open API Initiative," per the announcement.

Microsoft further demonstrated its close Linux relationship with its Visual Studio development environment solutions, which includes a release candidate of Visual Studio 2017 for Windows, a preview of a mobile app dev suite called Visual Studio Mobile Center for Android, iOS and Windows, and a new Visual Studio for Mac preview that was built from scratch to support the Mac platform.  

Microsoft also announced other Linux-related work: a preview of SQL Server on Linux; Azure App Service support for Node.js, PHP and ASP.NET Core containers on Linux.

Microsoft's Linux collaborations have been piling up in recent years. The company delivered .NET Core 1.0 as open source code. It enabled the Linux Bash shell to run on natively on Windows 10. It released PowerShell as open source code for Linux and Mac. In addition, Linux distro provider Red Hat even has a team located on Microsoft's Redmond campus headquarters. Microsoft now claims to be "a leading open source contributor on GitHub," an open source code repository.

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

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