Microsoft Takes Platinum Membership at The Linux Foundation

[engine]

Microsoft is joining The Linux Foundation with Platinum membership, joining Cisco, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huawei, IBM, Intel, NEC, Oracle, Qualcomm, and Samsung at that same level.

This really is part of major shift by Microsoft in recent times.

At its Connect 2016 developer event in New York City today, Microsoft announced it is joining The Linux Foundation. And the company isn’t joining just to say it did: Microsoft is joining at the Platinum level, the highest level of membership, which costs $500,000 annually. John Gossman, architect on the Microsoft Azure team, will sit on the foundation’s Board of Directors and help underwrite projects. Microsoft Takes Platinum Membership at The Linux Foundation [venturebeat.com]

[lammert]

Microsoft is drifting away from their Windows only approach. Since a year their Visual Studio 2015 development suite is capable of cross compiling applications for Android, MacOS and iOS and they announced two days ago that a future release of Visual Studio will be available as native application on MacOS.

It looks like their focus has shifted from desktop/office to cloud/azure where the platform to connect to Azure doesn't matter. In that vision Linux, Android and MacOS are just as important as Windows. Giving away Windows 10 for free to Windows 7/8 owners already showed that end-user operating systems aren't their money maker anymore.

Besides that, more Microsoft employees are contributing to open source projects than Google employees. It is really amazing which silent transition the company has gone through in the last few years. Seems to be one of the best kept secrets in the industry :)

[mack]

Microsoft really reminds me of IBM, that's not really a good thing. Serious lack of direction and meandering from one market to another. They really need to figure out where they see their future.

Mack.

[3zero]

A complete shift in direction from Microsoft, I wonder where their core business will come from in the future

[ergophobe]

Just read that and came here to start a thread. Should have known engine woudl beat me to it.

I did not realize that Ubuntu was part of Windows 10 and from my quick read, I don't really understand it. It's not the base OS. Is it included like a VM or do they just mean that everything but the kernel is included - so you have bash and vi etc?

[ergophobe]

This explains it
[msdn.microsoft.com...]

interesting

[mack]

Windows is running Ubuntu user-mode binaries provided by Canonical. This means the command-line utilities are the same as those that run within a native Ubuntu environment. Installation of Bash on Windows is just a few clicks.

A few years ago that block of text would simply have been an oxymoron, Now it's one of the strangest phrases in the history of humanity.

Mack

[ergophobe]

The friend who tipped me off to this - a longtime Sun/Oracle employee with Win10 on his personal computer - activated it and said he's suddenly so happy with Windows because all of his *nix command line goodness is available.

[Libre]

@Mack You are totally right, it's the most strange thing I have heard in a long time. Personally it feel really wrong and I don't know if I am happy with this move!

[Made In Sheffield]

Glad to see this move. Very surprising and very encouraging!

[smilie]

Microsoft is drifting away from their Windows only approach. Since a year their Visual Studio 2015 development suite is capable of cross compiling applications for Android, MacOS and iOS and they announced two days ago that a future release of Visual Studio will be available as native application on MacOS.

It looks like their focus has shifted from desktop/office to cloud/azure

More or less agree with this.

MS is thinking they've got business market lock for another 10-15 years. It takes a while for companies to switch to non-MS products.
They'll milk that market.

And they are failing in Windows OS, latest Windows 10 is absolute garbage. I've spent 3 hours on the weekend to un-windows10 one PC that was perfectly fine before, and that turned into a complete and unusable clusterFX of a slowness with 10. Even Firefox was shot by MS (clever move MS, but too clever), and its Edge was better but still took minutes per tab. What a disaster. Had to put OpenOffice and Thunderburd on that machine too. MS never again.

I am sure that's a sentiment of thousands of people out there who got the "free" forced upgrade and struggled like it is 1995.

But if they can redirect enough people to cloud/azure and make them pay monthly fees - that would be Big billions and a next step in MS idea of "computing".

But why would a sane person want that?

PS. I already own 10+ windows boxes, none of them are going windows 10. Despite all the malware MS isn't blocking. And as things look, I'll be putting some version of *nix on them to get another 5 years.

They are seeing a sign on the wall that they can't keep Windows monopoly any longer, as people just code around artificially installed corporate barriers.