Enemies no more: Red Hat, Microsoft embrace at Hatters’ summit

The years of bitter acrimony between open source (Linux) Red Hat and (proprietary) Microsoft are formally over, believe it or not. Red Hat even renamed one of its Microsoft-related blogs “http://redhatloves.net”

At the Red Hat Summit in San Francisco on Monday, the two tech rivals unveiled Microsoft products that include Red Hat Linux support. And later this week Microsoft will demo how its SQL Server will run Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat returned the favor, adding Microsoft support to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat and Microsoft announced last year plans for closer cooperation, but the new products that Microsoft chose to announce at te Red Hat event make the business relationship final.

From proprietary to embracing open source, Joseph Sirosh, Corporate Vice President of the Data Group at Microsoft, explained Microsoft’s thinking in a blog post:

“This week at Red Hat Summit in San Francisco, we’re making several new announcements that highlight our commitment to customer choice and to the ecosystem, both for the enterprises of today and tomorrow. Our commitment means that companies can leverage our open, flexible, enterprise-ready cloud to accelerate their digital transformation – and that developers can build differentiated applications enabled by the cloud using any language, tool or platform.”

Microsoft launched 1.0 versions of Net Core and ASP, opening up Microsoft .Net to Linux developers.

Sirosh described the Red Hat-Microsoft news and related announcements as “a huge accomplishment for the entire open source ecosystem – with more than 18,000 developers representing more than 1,300 companies contributing to .NET Core 1.0. The new version also includes the first release of the .NET Standard Library, which will enable developers to reuse their code and skills for applications that run on servers, the cloud, desktops and across any device including Windows, iOS and Android.”

What’s it all mean?

“Net Core provides a modular subset of the company’s .Net Framework programming model and is intended to to promote code reuse and code-sharing.,” explains InfoWorld.

“ASP.Net Core is for building cloud-based, internet-connected applications including web apps. These technologies have transformed “

Net also is open to MacOS application builders.

“The move has been seen as a bid to entice non-Windows developers into the .Net camp,” InfoWorld adds. .”Net Core 1.0 is being supported on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution.”

Not stopping there, Microsoft is opening up its Azure cloud platform for Red Hat’s OpenShift, ZDnet reported.

Red Hat was embraced for Azure after other Linux varieties were added.

Its template on GitHub “will make it simple to deploy Red Hat’s OpenShift on Red Hat Enterprise Linux in Azure, so developers can quickly develop, host, and scale applications in Azure with Red Hat’s self-service, container-based platform,” ZDnet added.

But as Wired noted, Microsoft is not embracing open development and Red Hat out of love.

“Microsoft’s motivation for supporting Linux and releasing open source software isn’t altruistic,” Wired reported Monday.

” t’s necessary for the company’s survival. Over the years, Linux has edged out Windows Server in the web server market, and coders have flocked to open source programming languages and frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Python, and Google’s Go language to build the next generation of applications.”

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Enemies no more: Red Hat, Microsoft embrace at Hatters’ summit