Linux foundation is a non-profit organization, which focuses on promoting, protecting, and standardizing Linux by hosting important workgroups, events, and online resources. The focus is on the growth of Linux and sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds, supported by leading technology companies and developers from around the world.
Linux foundation focuses on generating original content that helps in the understanding and advancement of Linux. It is founded in 2007 by the merging of the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and the Free Standards Group (FSG), headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Linux foundation currently has 185 Corporate members including prominent technology corporations such as Cisco, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC, Oracle, Qualcomm and Samsung and developers from across the world.
On November 16 2016, Linux Foundation announced that Microsoft has joined the organization as a platinum member. For a while, Microsoft has already been engaged in open source projects and communities. This has been evident when Microsoft made .Net Core open source and made it cross-platform. Google became a member of .Net Foundation where it joins others such as Samsung, Unity and Red Hat. Google has allowed its developers to deploy .Net applications to its cloud platform, which supports .Net libraries. Others like Samsung is also opening up their platform with the support for .Net such as Samsung who is releasing .Net developer tool for Tizen, which developers can use to build .Net apps for IoT devices around the world which runs Tizen. The devices include millions of Samsung TVs, wearable devices and mobile devices.
One of the recent advancement is addition of bash shell on Windows. There are many more open source projects that Microsoft has engaged in. A few of them are Visual Studio Code, ChakraCore, TypeScript, RxJS, GitHub etc. Microsoft is the largest contributor to open source projects on GitHub over the last year.
Linux and Windows have often felt like they were at logger heads with each other, but Microsoft has moved forward a long way with announcement of new products, which supports Linux. The next release of SQL server will support Linux and Docker. Microsoft already supports multiple Linux OS on Azure cloud public platform and infrastructure for several years and has announced that they will increase the support for Linux.
As customer demands for choices increases, Linux managed to meet the same with more number of developers. With the usage of bash shell in Windows, developers can use Microsoft OS, instead of switching to a Linux OS. Microsoft has also made .NET core open source and now Google uses it in their cloud platform.
As more and more products are becoming open source and Microsoft is supporting Linux in many scenarios, developers are now attracted more as they can work for a common goal. When more developers wok for a specific project, it will benefit both the clients and the customers. The software world is converging, which benefits people at all levels and makes development easier. The customer is the ultimate winner.
