Today is just full of surprises. While Microsoft embraced Linux and integrated the same into Windows 1o a while back, it never shared its intentions of joining the ‘Linux Foundation’ as a platinum member, before today. The Redmond giant will now promote the non-profit tech organisation while shelling out over $500k annually for its membership.
However, the second surprise revealed on stage the Connect(); developer conference in New York was that Google is joining Microsoft’s open source effort ‘.NET Foundation.’ The tech behemoth has been added to the fold as a member of the Technical Steering Group, where it joins the likes of Microsoft, Red Hat, Unity, Samsung, and JetBrains. The addition of Google to this open-source initiative will further “help bring greater innovation to the .NET platform,” says Microsoft in the official blog post.
Commenting on Google joining the .NET Foundation, Chris Sells, Lead PM for Google Cloud Developer Tools, says,
We’re very happy to add .NET support to our list of supported frameworks on Google Cloud Platform. Enterprises moving their existing Windows and .NET workloads to the cloud or those targeting .NET Core can find what they need to build great apps for Google Cloud Platform.
For those unaware, the .NET framework is one of the core development platform required to develop apps for Windows. Thus, to improve standards of open source software development and collaboration around the framework, Microsoft set up an independent organization in 2014. Called the .NET Foundation, it hosts all of its twenty-four projects online which are accessible to the developer community who want to help strengthen the future of the .NET ecosystem.
And Google, the Mountain View-based tech giant, who is also an arch-enemy of the Redmond giant has been an active contributor to .NET projects for the past two years. Google is of the opinion that “.NET is a key component in the modern enterprise,” and their infrastructure including their cloud platform has first-class support for .NET as well as Windows Server. More than 200 of its cloud services offer support for .NET Libraries. Also, the tech behemoth has build support for its cloud platform in Visual Studio and Powershell as well.
Chris Sells, Product Manager, Google Cloud also shares his excitement on Google becoming a part the Linux Foundation as under:
Google is already an active contributor to .NET, including heavy involvement in the ECMA specification for C#. Joining the Technical Steering Group for the .NET Foundation expands our participation. We’re excited to work with the industry to contribute to .NET as an excellent open platform for developers in the enterprise.
In addition, Microsoft was also proud to announce that one of the technical steering group’s members Samsung is showing further support for the open-source platform with the preview release of .NET Core support for the Tizen operating system and their Visual Studio Tools for Tizen. The Korean tech behemoth will start shipping .NET support to its Tizen-powered devices, including phones, smart TVs, etc some time in 2017.
Overall, the addition of two humongous tech behemoth to extensive open-source initiative could prove fruitful in the long run.
