Run the Microsoft distro
Rumours are rife but how far will Redmond go to embrace Linux…
Despite its easy integration with WSL, in October 2021 Visual Studio Code became the site of a battleground between Microsoft and the open source community. The controversy centred around the release of .NET 6. The tech giant had originally hinted it would include a feature to allow developers to modify source code while an app is running and immediately see the results.
Microsoft provoked a backlash due to its lastminute decision to include this feature in Visual Studio only – a paid product primarily designed to run on Windows. Ultimately, Microsoft bowed to pressure from both the open source community and its own employees to grant a pull request to enable this feature with VS Code, but events like these beg the question: can a commercial company like Microsoft ever fully embrace open source?
Microsoft opens up
During the late ’90s, Microsoft released SFU (Services For Unix), which included some GNU utilities. Given that these were covered by the GPL, Microsoft lived up to its obligations and offered selected components under the same open source licence.
It wasn’t until 2004 that Microsoft released a product as open source of its own volition: WiX (Windows Installer XML). The licence used was the Common Public Licence, later superseded by the MS-RL (Microsoft Reciprocal Licence). This licence has received the approval of the Open Source Initiative but the Free Software Foundation does not consider it to be compatible with the GNU GPL.