Ryan Waite presents a detailed history of Microsoft’s evolution in the open source landscape, emphasizing its role in AI, cloud, and developer tooling–from Linux kernel contributions to the launch of VS Code, GitHub, and global-scale AI platforms.

Microsoft’s Open Source Journey: From Linux Contributions to AI at Scale

Introduction

Over the past decade, Microsoft has gone from a skeptic to a leading open source contributor, especially in cloud and AI. This transformation is marked by significant milestones including Linux kernel contributions, launching the Visual Studio Code editor, acquiring GitHub, and building enterprise platforms like Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and hosting AI at massive scale.

Key Milestones

2009: Linux Kernel Contributions — Microsoft contributed over 20,000 lines of code (notably Hyper-V drivers) to the Linux kernel under GPLv2, signifying a new approach to collaboration. By 2011, Microsoft became a top-five contributor to Linux.
2015: Visual Studio Code Launch — The release of Visual Studio Code (VS Code), a free open source cross-platform editor, rapidly rose to global prominence, supporting over 50 million developers in conjunction with Visual Studio.
2018: GitHub Acquisition — Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub reinforced its commitment to open source and developer empowerment. GitHub reported over a billion contributions in 2024, a significant portion driven by generative AI and open source projects. The GitHub Copilot Chat extension was also released as open source.

Open Source at Scale in Azure and AI

Open source, cloud, and AI now intersect deeply at Microsoft:

Cloud-Native Infrastructure: Microsoft Azure is a top public cloud contributor to the CNCF, and open source projects like Kubernetes, Prometheus, and PostgreSQL are foundational to Azure services. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and managed PostgreSQL abstract operational complexity, enabling users to focus on innovation.
Enterprise-Grade Platforms: COSMIC, Microsoft’s geo-scale container platform, powers Microsoft 365 and underpins some of the largest AKS deployments worldwide. It integrates tools like KEDA for autoscaling, Prometheus, and Grafana for monitoring, blending open source with robust enterprise features.

Azure and OpenAI: Powering ChatGPT

OpenAI’s ChatGPT leverages Azure infrastructure (AKS for orchestration, Azure Blob Storage, Cosmos DB, and managed PostgreSQL for storage and data) to serve hundreds of millions of users weekly. With only ~12 engineers, OpenAI is able to manage unprecedented demand by utilizing Azure’s managed open source services, which provide global scale, low latency, and high resilience.

Microsoft’s Open Source Contributions

Microsoft actively builds and contributes to upstream open source projects, integrating lessons learned at scale back into the community. Notable projects include:

Dapr: Simplifies cloud-agnostic, distributed application development.
Radius: Lets developers and operators define and map app services/resources across clouds.
Copacetic: Enables patching container images without rebuilds for rapid security fixes.
Dalec: A tool for creating secure OS packages and SBOMs.
SBOM Tool: CLI for generating SPDX-compliant software bills of materials.
Drasi: Corrects to data changes with a query-driven workflow engine.
Semantic Kernel & AutoGen: Open-source frameworks for building collaborative AI applications and multi-agent systems.
Phi-4 Mini: A compact, edge-optimized AI model.
KAITO: Manages and automates AI workload deployment on Kubernetes.
KubeFleet: Orchestrates applications across multiple Kubernetes clusters.

Open Source Philosophy at Microsoft

Contribute upstream first, then integrate into products
Collaboration spans customers, partners, and competitors
Focus on transparency, compliance, and sharing operational best practices

Open Source + Azure: Enabling Innovation

Microsoft’s open source journey has made Azure a destination for both open source solutions and innovation. Open source tools, enterprise scale, and AI capabilities come together to power products like Microsoft 365 and ChatGPT, validating the approach of blending open source flexibility with Azure’s reliability and performance.

Conference and Community

Microsoft continues its commitment by participating in events like Open Source Summit Europe 2025, sharing insights and building relationships within the open source community.

References:

TechRepublic: ChatGPT’s On Track For 700M Weekly Users Milestone
Azure Blog: Microsoft’s open source journey: From 20,000 lines of Linux code to AI at global scale

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