In 2001, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer described Linux as “… a cancer that spreads to everything it touches.” This week, in 2016, Microsoft announced that it had joined the Linux Foundation as a platinum member.
The news should not come as a surprise as we have recently seen moves from Microsoft that show that the company has begun to see Linux as a platform that can work with Windows, but also that it has intentions to open source several of its software. 
In 2012, the company was one of the top 20 contributors to the Linux Kernel, representing 1% of all source code. In 2014, it open-sourced the .NET Core Framework, and the following year did the same with Visual Studio Code. It has also helped develop several high-profile open source projects, such as Hadoop and Samba. And of course, earlier this year it partnered with Canonical to port Bash to Windows.
According to Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, Microsoft's membership in the Linux Foundation means there will be "better collaboration with the open source community to deliver transformative mobile and cloud experiences to more people."
But there is another key detail in the news of Microsoft joining the Linux Foundation. As a platinum member, the company will have to pay an annual subscription of up to $500,000. That's enough money to fund the development, management, and promotion of the Linux Foundation. Other platinum members include: Cisco, Fujitsu, HPE, Huawei, IBM, Intel NEC, Oracle, Qualcomm, and Samsung.
It should be mentioned that the above news is not such an altruistic act on the part of Microsoft, which seems to have realized that the development of Linux is in the company's best interest, especially when considering Microsoft Azure.
