Microsoft has officially joined the Linux Foundation

Microsoft has announced that it is joining the Linux Foundation as a Platinum member. This comes as a surprise as former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer had called Linux a ‘cancer’ 15 years ago. Over the past few years, Microsoft has built Canonical’s Ubuntu distribution into Windows 10, brought SQL Server to Linux, made the core parts of its.NET platform open-sourced and partnered with Red Hat, SUSE and others. “This may come as a surprise to you, but they were not big fans,” Linux Foundation Executive Director, Jim Zemlin told TechCrunch. Built on top of Xamarin Studio that the company acquired earlier this year, the company had said, “At its heart, Visual Studio for Mac is a macOS counterpart of the Windows version of Visual Studio.” The IDE is designed to feel familiar to a macOS user, while still offering the cross-platform and cloud-based development capabilities of its Windows counterpart.