I'm an Open Source Engineer, working for Microsoft, living in Cyanogen Inc's former hq/office.
I don't know anything about this deal, but I adore how small Silicon Valley sometimes is.
I don't know anything about this deal, but I adore how small Silicon Valley sometimes is.
Search the mailing list for "microsoft" (which picks up e-mail addresses) compared to "windows" to see where MS involvement picked up.[1]
A lot of Microsoft's involvements in open source are via MS Open Tech. See their website for more information about their contributions.[2] While this doesn't show checkins, here are their blog posts about Cordova.[3]
[1] http://callback.markmail.org/search/?q=list%3Aorg.apache.inc...
Ten years ago my head would have imploded reading that. I remember distinctly balmer saying that linux was a cancer.
That's kinda been my vision for how Linux may succeed on desktops/laptops. The GPL'd Linux kernel with almost everything else closed source. I realize I'm just describing Android.
My job is kind of awesome - I'm basically at a full-time hackathon, juggling my MacBook, Windows Notebook, a bunch Cloud solutions, some IoT devices and whatever our hardware teams come up with.
The team is brand new - and we're still hiring. Hit me up (felixrieseberg.com / @felixrieseberg) if you're interested!
The short answer is that there are divisions in the company with a direct imperative to open source things, so if your manager is willing to encourage this (easy enough to figure out), the answer is often yes. Like almost every company, we tend to open source tools but not products (e.g., yes to Orleans, but no to the game it supports, Halo), so from there it's a matter of finding a group that has such tools, or is open to developing them.
Felix (who works for my old boss -- hi Felix!) is a special case. He works for a team called strategic engagements, whose job (I hope he'll correct me if I'm wrong) is specifically to engage with the public, usually on their own terms, which often involves non-MSFT tech. _That_ is an uncommon job, but if you want to talk to people in the group, just ping me when you get here and I'll put you in touch with the dev manager for the group.