Whoa! Microsoft turned .NET into an open source project

Holy cow. The Satya Nadella Microsoft is a huge shift from the Steve Ballmer Microsoft, and Nadella is aggressively moving the company forward on every front. Today, Microsoft announced that it is making its core development platform–.NET–an open source project, and that the .NET framework will eventually run on Linux or Mac OS X machines as well as Windows.

A Wired article states, “In theory, an open source .NET that runs on Linux and Mac OS will expand the use of Microsoft’s developer tools. Then the company can pull in revenue through other channels—through premium versions of its developer tools and through its cloud computing service, Microsoft Azure, a means of building and running software without setting up your own servers.”

The article also implies that the availability of container technology like Docker running natively on Linux is something that separates the two platforms, and makes Linux attractive for developers. However, there is speculation that Microsoft is working on its own native container technology to incorporate into Windows Server, and Microsoft recently partnered with Docker on an open source project designed to bring native Docker support to Windows Server, so–one way or another–containers will no longer be a differentiating factor in the very near future.

Are you a .NET or Linux developer? What do you think of the move by Microsoft, and how do you think it will impact developing software? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.