Microsoft has issued a GitHub page documenting how developers can contribute to their Node.js on Azure offering. Microsoft is primarily looking for developers who can:
- Help answer questions on StackOverflow and MSDN
- Submit issues
- Give them feedback at feedback.azure.com
- Suggest changes/help fix the team’s docs on azure-content
- Directly contribute to the source code
- Create packages for the community to consume
Microsoft’s strategy to push its products and services on every platform extends beyond just its consumer offerings; the strategy also flows through its cloud services as well. Microsoft realizes that there is a vast pool of innovations happening in the open source software stack through projects such as Node.js. The company is positioning itself to be very welcoming of this new wave of enthusiastic software contributors. That means allowing different, perhaps even competing, technologies to run on its Azure cloud platform.
Microsoft’s new ‘openness’ is arguably in stark contrast to its past, where in the company predominantly pushed its technologies and were typically opaque about the development of its software stack. Historically proprietary projects such as the .NET framework have now become open source, and available to being consumed on competing platforms. Even Microsoft’s language development such as the newly updated C# 6.0 and Javascript superset Typescript is now happening transparently on GitHub. Microsoft is now openly welcoming feedback from the developer community.
Microsoft is undergoing a fundamentally necessary shift and projects such as these, where open sourced feedback is being encouraged, is further proof of that change.
