Microsoft’s new love affair with the open source community appears to be expanding beyond mere partnerships and collaborations and into strategic acquisitions. ZDNet is reporting that former Oracle senior VP of Linux and virtualization engineering, Wim Coekaerts is leaving his post at Oracle to take a position at Microsoft.
For those unfamiliar with the name, Coekaerts is a pretty big deal within the Linux community, perhaps because he ironically shifted Oracles former dependence on Windows based systems to Linux desktops in the past. Also, during Coekaerts time at Oracle he helped navigate the launch of Oracle Linux, which, for all intents and purposes was a Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone.
Mike Neil, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of enterprise cloud, spoke with Steven J. Vaughn-Nicolas of ZDNet confirming Coekaerts new hire. Based on the conversation is appears that Coekaerts new focus and title at Microsoft will be corporate vice president of open source with ties to the company’s Enterprise Cloud Group.
Microsoft spent much of its developer conference this year extolling the benefits of it new partnerships and collaborations with the open source community, through initiatives such as supporting Unix with Bash shell integration and bringing Ubuntu Binaries to Windows 10. Coekaerts hire appears to be more than coincidence, as it’s becoming evident that Microsoft’s efforts with the open source community will only increase over time.
