Microsoft has a whole new perspective on the world and the open-source community, and as such it’s now re-integrating one of its subsidiaries that was charged with testing out open sourcing Microsoft technologies.
Microsoft Open Tech was a start-up subsidiary created three years ago as an attempt by Microsoft to engage with the wider developer community, try out open-sourcing some of their proprietary technologies, and be a test-case for a new approach for the company. It looks like the start-up has achieved all of these goals and as such it’s now being re-integrated into Microsoft to evangelize its message of openness.
In truth, the internal culture at Microsoft has changed substantially since the Open Tech start-up was created. Mainly pushed by the new CEO, Satya Nadella, the way the company relates to the technology field as a whole and to open-source has seen a dramatic shift and Microsoft is quickly becoming an important player in the field. How dramatic is that shift? So much so that only a short while ago, Mark Russinovich said that open sourcing Windows was “definitely possible”.
And the company has also seen a number of recent successes with open sourcing its technologies. From small parts of Bing, to the core of .NET to its dev tools from Visual Studio, Microsoft engineers are now involved in more than 2000 open source projects across GitHub and CodePlex.
It’s great to see the company embracing openness and a new way of doing business and so far it looks like the community has responded in a very positive way.
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