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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."
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.