Microsoft Announces Open .NET Core 1.0 at Red Hat Summit

Back in 2014, Microsoft announced that it was open sourcing its cross platform .NET runtime platform, and the full open sourcing of .NET has been proceeding ever since. In tandem, the company has been open sourcing other key platform tools, such as the Visual Studio MSBuild tool.

Now, Microsoft's open programming initiatives have advanced again, as the company announced the general availability of .NET Core and ASP.NET Core 1.0. 

Microsoft announced the moves at, of all places, Red Hat Summit. Why would that happen? One of the motivations in open sourcing .NET and other platform tools is to build bridges between .NET infrastructure tools and Linux and Mac OS X. Red Hat made clear that it is fully supporting .NET Core on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The .NET Foundation, will be the steward of overall .NET development. Red Hat has joined the foundation.

For years, .NET was one of many Microsoft technologies that was focused in a proprietary way to keep the Windows platform fully protected by moats. Visual Studio and .NET have been core components in Microsoft's strategy for a long time, and it's good to see them becoming open. CEO Satya Nadella (shown above) has steadily been opening up such closed platform components, as he realized that Microsoft's platforms must play nicely with others. Nadella has said that he "loves Linux" and has reported that nearly 30 percent of Microsoft's Azure cloud is already Linux-based

In conjunction with its announcements, Microsoft officials also said that Samsung is joining the .NET Foundation. That means that one of the biggest players in the Android space is now in the .NET camp. Stay tuned for more on this front.