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Head of Oracle Linux Moves To Microsoft (zdnet.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Wim Coekaerts, formerly Oracle's Senior VP of Linux and Virtualization Engineering, has left Oracle for Microsoft. Many of you may know of Coekaerts as "Mr. Linux" as he delivered the first Linux products, transitioned Oracle's programming staff from Windows to Linux desktops, and turned Oracle into a Linux distributor with the launch of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone, Oracle Linux. Mike Neil, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President of the Enterprise Cloud, told ZDNet, "Wim Coekaerts has joined Microsoft as Corp VP of Open Source in our Enterprise Cloud Group. As we continue to deepen our commitment to open source, Wim will focus on deepening our engagement, contributions and innovation to the open-source community."
Not this time. I think this is an acknowledgment that they need to rethink what's important, and it's not the OS anymore. It's the Cloud (both, IaaS and PaaS), where AWS is the biggest competitor and the one to beat, reason why Azure is so strategic for Microsoft. They need to have expertise and business solutions whatever underlying OS the customer may choose. If Linux, they need to have an outstanding support for it in Azure and across all their offerings.
We may think this is the same old Microsoft, but I believe they are going through one of their biggest reinventions to date.
At the personal tech. level, however, not even the pretense of being FOSS-friendly is there.
Small steps, friend. As a "personal" user of Windows, as well as a developer, I can't tell you how excited I am to see the .Net framework open-sourced, Xamarin made free, Visual Studio given a powerful free version, and just the many other changes that have been made recently at the company. These have huge implications for the amount of small-scale, well functioning open-source projects that can start to exist for Windows now.
Yeah, Microsoft isn't quite matching RMS's level of enthusiasm for FOSS, either in the enterprise or on the personal computing level, but I think the behemoth has to move at a slow pace, at least for now, to shake off all the rust that has accumulated under Ballmer's reign. I like what I'm seeing so far, and I'm excited to see where it goes.