Microsoft has joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation continuing its push into the open source space, the latter has announced.
The Redmond giant has joined as a gold member – although their logo is yet to appear on the Foundation’s member list at the time of publication – alongside the likes of Accenture, Google, and Huawei.
Platinum members – Cisco, Dell EMC, IBM, Pivotal, SAP, SUSE and VMware – pay $500,000 per annum with a commitment to three years, compared to gold membership which is $100,000 per annum for three years. Yet, as the Foundation’s prospectus document from last year shows, while Microsoft hasn’t gone all in with platinum membership, the company still gets various benefits, as well as the expectation for something in return.
Microsoft gets access to Cloud Foundry’s Global Perception Study, which provides ‘vital information about awareness and adoption of PaaS and Cloud Foundry’, as well as the opportunity to offer an executive candidate for one of two gold seats on the Cloud Foundry board of directors. Gold members are “encouraged to participate in all aspects of the Foundation including code contributions, community development, user education, and Foundation related marketing activities,” the Foundation notes.
“Microsoft and the Cloud Foundry community are deeply aligned around our mutual understanding of enterprise business and technical requirements, and our commitment to help organisations modernise their applications without vendor lock-in,” said Corey Sanders, partner director at Microsoft in a statement.
“By joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation, we will be able to work with members to contribute to Foundation initiatives and bring a wider range of solutions to Microsoft Azure for our customers and the community.”
The decision from Microsoft to sign up to the Foundation is just the latest step in the company’s move away from the walled gardens of its past. Last year, the company joined the Linux Foundation as a platinum member to ‘better collaborate with the open source community’. It’s a brave new world, and as CEO Satya Nadella explained at BUILD last month: “The opportunity for us as developers to have a broad, deep impact on all parts of society, and all parts of the economy, has never been greater.”