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Head of Oracle Linux Moves To Microsoft (zdnet.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the on-a-whim dept.

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."

8 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. And Microsoft thinks this will help? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Wim will focus on deepening our engagement, contributions and innovation to the open-source community."

    Because he's done so well at that at Oracle

    1. Re:And Microsoft thinks this will help? by FatdogHaiku · · Score: 2, Funny

      I read "deepening our engagement" and the first thing that comes to mind is they found some lube...

      --
      You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
  2. Year of Linux on the Desktop (tm) by OffTheLip · · Score: 2

    Finally.

  3. Ahhh... Nostalgia... by Rydell · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You know what struck me while reading this story submission? I decided to go read the comments from the previous slashdot stories linked in the article summary that dated back to 2004-2007. The number of quality comments back then that were devoid of SJW b.s. or other political nonsense completely unrelated to science and technology. Whipslash, how do we bring all those commenters back to the site? That's what we need right now.

  4. Re:Seen this before? by Natales · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  5. Re:Seen this before? by Burz · · Score: 2

    I should have also mentioned that Hyper-V is the Azure hypervisor, which is competing with Xen used by AWS. Both hypervisors are the "bare metal" type.

  6. Re:Seen this before? by dontbemad · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  7. Re:Seen this before? by ThatsNotPudding · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Ahh, those heady feelings one has during the Embrace phase...