At the second day of the Build 2016 development conference, the biggest news was that Microsoft is open-sourcing the Xamarin mobile development platform and integrating the tool into its Visual Studio IDE. “Today, we made targeting every device and platform a lot easier by making Xamarin available to every Visual Studio developer for free, including the free Visual Studio Community Edition,” blogged Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise Group. “We are also making available a free Xamarin Studio Community Edition for OS X. Developers worldwide can now easily create apps using an end-to-end mobile development solution?joining companies like Slack, Pinterest, Alaska Airlines and more. To enable even more choice and flexibility for developers, we announced a commitment to open source Xamarin?s runtime, libraries and command line tools as part of the .NET Foundation. Both the Xamarin SDK and Mono will be available under the MIT License.”
In related news, ZDNet is reporting that Wim Coekaerts, formerly Oracle’s Senior VP of Linux and Virtualization Engineering, is now working at Microsoft. At Oracle, Coekaerts was known as “Mr. Linux,” and his hire could be significant. Microsoft confirmed the news, saying, “Wim Coekaerts has joined Microsoft as Corp VP of Open Source in our Enterprise Cloud Group. As we continue to deepen our commitment to open source, Wim will focus on deepening our engagement, contributions and innovation to the open-source community.”
