The article is making a big deal that he works for Microsoft but also says he’s been doing this back since his days working at Google. It never says that this work is part of his official job at Microsoft, though, and I don’t know if we could even know that unless it’s part of his job title. Do we know that Microsoft hired him to do this or could it just be this has been his longtime passion project and he’s doing it outside of his work responsibilities, and he just happens to currently work for Microsoft as his day job?
Microsoft has been working with a number of open source projects for some time now. It shouldn’t be that surprising anymore.
Yes, that’s why I thought this article was odd that they seem to be making a big deal out of it
If you browse the LKML (Linux Kernel Mailing List) for 5 minutes, you’ll probably see a bunch of microsoft.com email addresses, and it’s been that way for years. I understand why it bothers some people, but also Linus (and a couple others) approve everything that actually gets merged, whether it’s from a microsoft employee, or a redhat employee, or anyone else. Even if microsoft wanted to pay employees to submit patches that would hurt the kernel, the chance that they’d actually be approved is so low it wouldn’t be worth their time.
To be clear, I wasn’t thinking Microsoft was sabotaging Linux; if they’re contributing officially I assume it’s because they’re also using it or want to increase adoption of something they’re creating by making it widely available.
I figured you were being genuine, but there’s usually a few people who point at Microsoft’s “embracing” of Linux as the first step in the “embrace, extend, extinguish” trope, and see any involvement by Microsoft as nefarious. When the reality is just that Microsoft’s Azure cloud services are a much larger share of their annual revenue than Windows, and Linux is a major part of their cloud offerings.
