Microsoft’s Surprising Open‑Source and Linux Contributions in 2015

In 2015 Microsoft made a series of surprising open‑source and Linux‑related contributions.

Edge browser added support for the VP9 video codec, originally developed by Google.

Microsoft announced the open‑source release of its Chakra JavaScript engine.

PowerShell gained OpenSSH support, and Microsoft contributed OpenSSH code to OpenBSD.

.NET core components were open‑sourced and ported to Linux and BSD.

MSBuild engine was open‑sourced.

Microsoft released Azure Cloud Switch, a Linux distribution running inside its SDN data centers.

As part of its Azure strategy, Microsoft continued contributing Hyper‑V code to Linux.

Visual Studio 2015 added the ability to build Linux applications, though the IDE itself did not run on Linux at that time.

Visual Studio Code was made available on Linux and released as open source.

Microsoft contributed significant improvements to the Clang compiler and open‑sourced its debugging engine.

Microsoft began developing LLILC, an LLVM‑based .NET compiler, showing rapid progress.

Office applications for Android were released, bringing core Office functionality to phones and tablets.

All of these projects were hosted on GitHub instead of Microsoft’s former CodePlex platform.

The Microsoft Open Technologies division was merged back into the main Microsoft corporation.

The year was unusual for Microsoft, and regardless of one’s opinion of the company, its 2015 open‑source and Linux activities set the stage for even more developments in 2016.

Source: Phoronix – Author: Michael Larabel – Translation by LCTT (https://linux.cn/article-6774-1.html) – Translator: wxy