More than a decade ago, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer branded Linux as a cancer to the computer industry. As the years passed and came up to this point in time, it looks like Microsoft is now slowly embracing the linux open source mantra.
Microsoft’s Codeplex open source community is shifting its effort by moving big projects over to Github almost more than a year ago.
Microsoft has been open sourcing a lot of things lately. The company launched an open sourced Visual Studio Code last year, as well as a lot of other projects — including things like Microsoft Edge’s JavaScript engine, Xamarin SDKs and PowerShell. At its GitHub Universe conference today, GitHub revealed some interesting data as part of its “Octoverse”.
This culture shift played a huge role to this trend. This is due to Satya Nadella’s way with handling Microsoft with the help of open source advocates like Scott Hanselman which pushed the company to open source some of Microsoft’s top tools.
Here’s a new twist to the story. Github has reported that Microsoft has the most open source contributors amounting to more than 16,419 contributors which surpasses both Google and Facebook according to data from Octoverse 2016.
Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code also made it into the list of top repositories with the most open source contributors with 5,855 contributors:
Microsoft has started to focus on open sourcing software for at least a decade and increased their efforts, it is unsure if they will do the same with their major products as well.
Microsoft will probably continue releasing more open source projects in the future. Visual Studio’s code has been successful so far with more than 2 million downloads and installs.
The open source community embraces the presence of Microsoft and contributions.
In line with this endeavor, microsoft has made other apps and tools available to linux and macOS. Recently released on macOS and Linux was PowerShell. Microsoft also brought Microsoft Edge’s JavaScript engine, ChakraCore to macOS and Linux earlier this year.
It looks like Microsoft really loves Linux. Where will it lead in the future?
