Stop the planet, we want to get off. If there is anything we can say with certainty about 2016, it's that it has destroyed every statistic, theory, and possibility in its path. It was also a difficult year for some companies, and Microsoft did not escape the shrapnel, but it still made some very interesting decisions. One of them was announcing the arrival of the Bash shell on Windows 10, and now the Linux Foundation confirms the entry of the Redmond giant as a “platinum member”.
I read the official announcement four times. Then I checked the calendar: it's not April Fools' Day or the Day of the Innocents. Finally, I read the announcement again. Impossible. Ten years ago, this situation was impossible. “Cancer, tumor, disease.” License violations. The chances of collaboration between Microsoft and the Linux universe were nil. But the world has changed a lot in ten years. Too much. The desktop yielded prominence to the advance of portability and the power of the cloud. Users want to use their preferred tools and have their work environments adapt to them, not the other way around. The battle cry is “interoperability,” and those who don't interpret the message correctly bite the dust. Ladies and gentlemen, yesterday, Microsoft joined the Linux Foundation.
The Announcement
Microsoft made the announcement during the keynote of the Connect conference, while the Linux Foundation posted it on its official page (link below). This is undoubtedly a moment of great sincerity for all parties involved. The executive director of the Linux Foundation, Jim Zemlin, was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft “were not big fans” of the foundation; however, today we find the Redmond giant as a platinum member, which means donations with a base of $500,000 per year (the other platinum members of the foundation are IBM, Samsung, Intel, NEC, Oracle, Qualcomm, Fujitsu, Huawei, Cisco, and HP).
The news was accompanied by the release of Service Pack 1 of SQL Server, which normalizes functions across Express, Standard, and Enterprise editions (the only differences being the amount of RAM and cores each can use), and the first preview of SQL Server for Linux.
Google and the .NET Foundation
As if that weren't enough, Google confirmed its entry to the .NET Foundation. Although there is no doubt that on more than one occasion these titans have clashed (and will continue to clash), Mountain View already allows developers to deploy .NET apps on its Cloud Platform and offers a good amount of compatible resources, not to mention that Microsoft declared Google “one of the most active contributors” of the foundation.
Some messages on the Web suggest that all these combined news items feel like a general anti-Oracle maneuver. Maybe it's too soon to prove whether that theory holds up, but we're not going to rule it out. Microsoft in the Linux Foundation. The comments are yours.
