Ubuntu Summit 2023 is the annual summit of Canonical, which is responsible for the most popular GNU/Linux distribution on the computer market. This year it will be held from November 3rd to 5th in the Latvian city of Riga and will have a very special participant: Microsoft and its growing “Linux love” which he will show at various talks and workshops.

And what will the company we associate with closed, commercial and paid source do at one of the most relevant open source events on the calendar? Business, of course, promote your solutions on Linux… and on Windows (for Linux users). Even if it’s self-interested, we have to appreciate these associations, which indicate greater collaboration between the big tech companies and the open source communities.

And it’s been a long time since previous CEO Steve Ballmer defined Linux as “cancer”. Since the appointment of Satya Nadella as CEO Microsoft has changed its strategy. It’s been a decade since it included CentOS, Oracle Linux, Suse and Ubuntu as officially supported distributions in its public cloud offering, promising to offer “world-class support” for the open source system. And he complied. Today, about 25% of virtual machines in Azure are running Linux.

There are many more examples, such as the adoption of Android (a Linux-based system) as “their OS” on mobile devices, everything that came for developers from the .NET platform, or Linux-inspired Windows applications (copy the name too) such as Console Windows Terminal or WinGet package manager.

And the most interesting thing (directly) is WSL (Linux Subsystem for Windows), with which Linux fully entered Windows. Although some still think that using “real” Linux is better than Subsystem, there is no doubt that it is the biggest representative of Microsoft’s “love” for Linux. And again, it’s a ‘sweet’ interest. In order to use Windows and Linux interchangeably, we don’t need to leave Windows for some tasks, such as the development tasks that this app is specifically aimed at, where Canonical was the first to agree with Redmond to include Ubuntu.

Microsoft at Ubuntu Summit 2023

This means that Microsoft’s presence at the Linux event will probably be less surprising, where we will see the new Ubuntu 23.10 and other Canonical solutions, but also engineers from both companies together in workshops and discussions scheduled related to:

• Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL): “build amazing Linux environments right inside Windows”.
• Containers: “hacking .NET applications using Ubuntu”.
• .NET 8 LTS: “preview before the big launch”.
• Rounded table: “Skynet or Star Trek, what is the future of AI?”
• Safety: “improving security with .NET in Ubuntu containers”.
• Slides: “using Ubuntu’s new snapshot service at scale with Azure and AKS”.

What was said. Microsoft’s active role at the Ubuntu Summit 2023 shows a strategy of growing cooperation with the open source world.