Azure CTO Says Microsoft Loves Open Source. World Keeps Spinning
The latest sign of Microsoft's (MSFT) newfound interest in open source arrived at the All Things Open conference this week, where Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich declared in a keynote speech that Microsoft's new approach to open source is to enable, integrate and release open source code.
The latest sign of Microsoft‘s (MSFT) newfound interest in open source arrived at the All Things Open conference this week, where Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich declared in a keynote speech that Microsoft’s new approach to open source is to enable, integrate and release open source code.
As veterans of Microsoft’s long war against Linux and open source in the late 1990s and early 2000s will recall, the company’s mantra was once “embrace, extend, extinguish.” That meant adopting competing code or protocols into Microsoft products, encumbering them with proprietary extensions to create vendor lock-in and then killing them altogether once Microsoft dominated their market.
But we’ve come a long way since those days, according to Russinovich. Sporting a T-shirt that depicted Tux seated on a cloud, he told conference attendees in North Carolina that the company is now aggressively embracing open source.
He gave examples, including using OpenSSH for remote logins in Microsoft products and Hadoop products for Azure’s big data service, which is also based on Ubuntu Linux. In addition, the company is supporting dozens of open source projects, Russinovich said.
Russinovich’s speech comes a month after Microsoft announced it is using a Linux-based switch operating system to help manage Azure.
Did Linux Win?
So, does this all mean the open source (/free software) hosts have finally won the FUD wars? Not really. What has changed is the software ecosystem, not Microsoft’s core values. In the age of the cloud, Microsoft has more to gain than to lose from open source.
Embracing open source in the cloud space doesn’t mean a 180-degree turn for Microsoft. The Microsoft products that were at the center of the Linux community’s consternation 15 years ago are still closed source. Microsoft is just embracing Linux in the cloud because it makes business sense.
Yes, a Microsoft CTO giving a keynote at a big-name open source conference is remarkable. But the Windows source code is not going to be posted on GitHub anytime soon. It’s not the end of the world as we know it.
