Microsoft and Open Source! Friends forever?

Microsoft hated open source in 2001, when then-CEO Steve Ballmer called it a cancer. Being an open source developer myself and advocate since dotcom era, I never liked Microsoft platforms (no offence to MS community).

Fast forward to 2020, Microsoft is now arguably the open source community's greatest champion, contributor and a user. Hit Refresh has worked. How did it happen?

The Past

Microsoft, until early part of previous decade (2010 - 2019) was known for proprietary softwares, mostly in workplace category (Windows, Office, Exchange etc) and few in enterprise category (SQL Server, IIS, BizTalk, Sharepoint etc). For application development, it had .NET Framework which is still tightly coupled with Windows OS and the only IDE was Visual Studio. Last decade was an astonishing transformation period for Microsoft led by tremendous growth in the areas of cloud and open source. Microsoft cloud services (also known as Azure) itself, is a success story. Today, Azure has not only become no.2 public cloud provider but big deals like Pentagon will surely take it closer to no.1 spot in future.

This post is not on Azure but on the open source adoption by Microsoft in last decade. Just visit opensource at Microsoft to explore open source that Microsoft teams have released and are collaborating with the broader community of software engineers. Microsoft's open source repositories are live on GitHub.

Microsoft's increased focus on Azure brought open source into Microsoft mainstream. When Microsoft started to position itself as cloud provider to move IT workloads to cloud, it turned out there were no pure Windows .NET applications. There were Java as well as Linux based apps. To succeed in the cloud, Microsoft had to support the software its customers want to run, and much of that software is open source.

The Strategy

In 2014, Microsoft's newly appointed CEO Satya Nadella, at public media event, said "Microsoft loves Linux". The strategic change was publicly announced.

In 2015, post Red Hat partnership -- which is kind of a big deal -- now Microsoft has its own version of FreeBSD for Azure, is partnered with Canonical to run Ubuntu on Windows, runs .NET Core on Linux, has its own Linux certification and contributes to the Linux kernel.

In 2016, Microsoft joined the Linux Foundation at its top-tier Platinum membership level. In 2019, it also joined Academy Software Foundation as premier member.

The Acquisitions

In Microsoft's long acquisition history few of major acquisitions in open source space were in last 5 years only.

• Revolution Analytics (developer of R-based analytic solutions)
• Xamarin (platform for building Android and iOS apps with .NET and C#)
• GitHub (world's largest source code repository)
• Citus Data (developer of the open source PostgreSQL)
• NPM (package manager for JavaScript development, via GitHub)

The Contributions

Microsoft open sourced .NET in 2014. It was major step in making it cross platform and towards broader community adoption. As a result, the community added support for the Mac, Samsung got it running on ARM processors, and Intel and Qualcomm made improvements to the compiler to make .NET run faster on their CPUs.

Notable OSS from Microsoft :

• .NET Core (cross-platform version of .NET Framework)
• Visual Studio Code (IDE)
• Roslyn, MSBuild, Blazor, NuGet and other tools for .NET Development
• Other SDKs that are not part of .NET, like Azure SDK
• TypeScript - a strict syntactical superset of JavaScript (not tied to MS platform)
• PowerShell - a task automation and configuration management framework
• Fluent UI
• EntityFramework

Microsoft’s Open Source business is strong! About half of VM images on Azure are now running Linux and many of Azure Marketplace solutions are based on Open Source. Microsoft's Skype service (acquired in 2011) runs on Linux. Microsoft owned LinkedIn relies heavily on Apache Kafka data streaming platform (open source).

The Future

Microsoft has embraced open source completely and has been able to attract serious developer community. I like Azure Architecture Center which is one-stop design guideline shop for wide range of software application development across platforms, not just Microsoft. Recently, I integrated Azure Active Directory through Microsoft Graph APIs for OAuth2 based social login and used Azure DevOps for CI builds. This year I'm looking to explore .NET core 3.1 to build cross platform microservices. Microsoft has announced merger of .NET Core 3.1 with legacy .NET Framework into .NET 5. However, NET 5.0 is not going to be an LTS (Long Term Support) release so stick to Core 3.1, an LTS release.

Looking at GitHub report, Microsoft seems to stepped into open source community in collaborative way, becoming part of the ecosystem and letting it evolve. If they try to take control, the community will turn away. They know it!

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