Microsoft has come a long way since 2001 when then CEO Steve Ballmer called Linux "a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches", but the software company still finds it difficult to shake off its reputation as an enemy of open-source software.
For starters, Microsoft is a platinum member of the Linux Foundation, a gold member of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, and a platinum member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation - which hosts the popular open-source container deployment platform Kubernetes.
In what was hailed as one of the most significant of Microsoft's open source moves, Rich Turner, senior program manager at Microsoft, announced in July this year that Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) would soon become a fully supported feature of its flagship Windows 10 operating system.
Then, at the recent Microsoft Connect 2017 developer conference, Microsoft made another open source announcement: it had joined the MariaDB foundation as a platinum member. MariaDB is a popular open-source MySQL fork; and the MariaDB Foundation aims to address one of the common problems with open-source projects - attracting and enabling new contributors by lowering the barriers to entry.
Monty Widenius, CTO of the MariaDB Foundation and co-creator of MySQL, said that in the past year MariaDB had received more community contributions than MySQL had received in its entire lifetime.
Sustaining this kind of outreach required money and by joining the foundation, Microsoft would help this work to continue.
MariaDB on Azure
Microsoft also announced that it would offer MariaDB as a managed service on its Azure cloud platform.
Tobias Ternstrom, Microsoft's Principal Group Program Manager, Database Systems Group, said that Microsoft was also "bringing MariaDB to Azure", joining Azure database services for PostgreSQL and MySQL on Azure "to provide more choices to developers".
This, he added, was an illustration of how "we are broadening developer choice, joining communities, and helping make the platforms we work on together better".
"I am very proud of the direction we are taking at Microsoft with a strong belief both in the fundamental of openness as well as our desire to support our customers where they are, on-premises and in Azure. We are committed to working with the community to submit pull requests with the changes we make to the database engines that we offer in Azure.
"It keeps open source open and delivers a consistent experience, whether you run the database in the cloud, on your laptop when you develop your applications, or on-premises," Ternstrom said.
Microsoft's corporate VP of communications Frank Shaw said the company makes significant contributions to a host of open-source projects and has open-sourced several core Microsoft technologies apart from Windows.
According to Show, since open-sourcing .NET Core in 2014, over 60% of contributions come from outside Microsoft, 34% of downloads of .NET for developers are new to Microsoft, 40% of virtual machines on Azure are Linux; and with more than 16 000 Microsoft employees contributing to GitHub on a regular basis, the company was one of the top GitHub contributors in the world.
In addition, Microsoft's open-source editor Visual Studio Code had some 2,6 million active users, who Shaw said, were using the editor to build cross-platform apps.
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