February 14, 2013, 7:33 AM — Microsoft has made public its embrace of open source, evolving from being essentially a proprietary software company to getting involved in multiple open source efforts. These have included participating in the Apache Software Foundation and forming the CodePlex open source project hosting site and the Outercurve Foundation (formerly CodePlex Foundation) to bridge open source and business communities. In 2012, the company unveiled Microsoft Open Technologies, a subsidiary focused on advancing Microsoft's investment in open source, standards and interoperability.
Recently, Microsoft announced an integration between the popular open source Git-distributed revision control system and the company's Visual Studio development tools. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill interviewed Gianugo Rabellino, senior director of open source communities at Microsoft Open Technologies, about the company's latest perspectives on open source.
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InfoWorld: What's been your outreach at this point?
Rabellino: Open Technologies was launched officially on April 16, so as the first anniversary approaches, there are a number of topics that we are involved with that I think it would be interesting to talk about. The most recent that we launched was VM Depot, [providing] open source images for Windows Azure.
InfoWorld: What are these images of?
Rabellino: We have images for the major open source frameworks, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, You name it. If there is a popular open source application, it's probably there. The 100th image was released on a hardened version of Ubuntu.
InfoWorld: Will Microsoft ever make Windows open source?
