​Why Microsoft Is Turning Into An Open-Source Company

Microsoft now has its own BSD Unix operating system, supports Ubuntu as a subsystem on Windows 10, and recently open-sourced the Xamarin software development kit. This is not Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer's Microsoft.

I know it's very, very hard for some of you to believe it, but Microsoft really and truly is well on its way to becoming an open-source company.

Let's go through the list if? Microsoft has just launched its own version of FreeBSD for Azure. So, what do you say? Who uses FreeBSD? Well, you've probably heard of a little company called Netflix. Then, there Citrix, Array Networks, Gemalto. and Netgate, which already have Azure virtual devices on the market.

Earlier this year, Microsoft and Canonical partnered to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10. Why? Because it makes it easier for developers to write programs for Ubuntu cloud Azure. You know, Ubuntu, Linux Azure favorite of users.

Before that, Microsoft bought Xamarin, the program cross-platform mobile application development. Xamarin always had a lot of open code in it, but Microsoft has pushed even more that way by their Xamarin development kit (SDK) open software outsourcing, runtime libraries and command line tools. The reason Redmond crew to do this? Creating applications twice, once too often. This movement causes C #, Microsoft expects competitive with Objective-C, Swift, or Java in the mobile space.

These are only Microsoft most recent movements. Microsoft .NET Core in 2015 led to Linux; with the support of Debian GNU / Linux in their cloud Azure; and establish their own Linux certification. Current CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, Microsoft has claimed that Linux likes. Heck, Microsoft even has its own distribution, specialized Linux: Switch Azure Cloud.

What all these movements have in common mean? They are designed for a Microsoft enterprise open source profitable.

Microsoft is not only becoming a cloud company, although that too is turning to open-source profits too. Look where revenues come in 2016. Microsoft server products and cloud services make the most money with 20 percent of total revenue. Microsoft Office, which is becoming a cloud service, ranks third after the games. Windows? It is just over 10 percent.

Now it is running in the cloud? I'll tell you: It's open source operating systems and server applications. To quote Mark Russinovich, chief technology officer of Microsoft Azure, "Obviously, if they are not ready for Linux, Windows will only and that's not practical." He added that one of every four instances in Azure virtual machines are Linux and the number is increasing.

Open source has become the dominant paradigm of development. While people used to talk about open source and free software in terms of religion or cancer, depending on which side you were on the open source real reason it is that it has won hard financial sense.

As Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, said, open source "development is enabling faster development with higher quality and lower cost-sharing. This is causing the software value chain to change." Microsoft gets this.

And it's not just software. The barrier between hardware and software is being deleted. As Zemlin said:

Hardware functions are increasingly being abstracted into software. You can see this in software defined networking (SDN), server virtualization, and the cloud. This has put a lot of pressure on hardware vendors. More and more specialist hardware has been replaced by open source software running on generic x86 boxes. 

So, it is that almost all technology companies, including Microsoft, is moving towards open for code development.

Of course, Microsoft is not code-opening Windows or Office. Those who have huge sunk costs and are still profitable. However, for any future project? It will be all open source all the time. And as Windows and Office move to the cloud, would not be surprised if a bit back in Microsoft data centers running Linux or FreeBSD him.