The Surprising Open-Source / Linux Microsoft Announcements Made So Far This Year
It's certainly been an interesting year for Microsoft with many Linux/open-source related endeavors announced this year. Here's some of them:
- Earlier this month Microsoft announced Azure Cloud Switch, what is technically Microsoft's first Linux distribution/platform. Azure Cloud Switch is run within their data-centers for software defined networking.
- Microsoft committing to VP9 support within their new Edge web-browser. Besides VP9, WebM is coming as part of that and they're also evaluating Opus audio support too.
- Visual Studio 2015 brought Linux targeting support.
- Microsoft released a Linux client of Visual Studio Code, a web-focused integrated development environment.
- As part of their Visual Studio targeting Linux/Android/iOS, Microsoft has become interested in the Clang compiler while they still continue developing their proprietary Visual C/C++ compiler stack and even working on Clang improvements. Microsoft also open-sourced their Debug Engine that ties into LLVM's LLDB. They've also been working on an LLVM-based .NET compiler.
- Microsoft will start supporting OpenSSH with their PowerShell. As part of that, Microsoft began sponsoring OpenBSD.
- Microsoft made available Office for Android.
- Microsoft continues open-sourcing parts of the .NET stack that in turn get happily ported to Linux and even FreeBSD. They've also opened up code like the MSBuild Engine.
- Continued work on Hyper-V for Linux.
- Microsoft's .NET compiler team switched from CodePlex to using GitHub. CodePlex is Microsoft's open-source repository service.
- Microsoft Open Technologies (MS Open Tech) was merged back into the company itself (Microsoft).
2012 - Microsoft: The Unlikely Sponsor Of Linux
It will be interesting to see what other open-source/Linux announcements Microsoft could still have before the end of the year; 2015 has certainly been super exciting so far!
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