Microsoft has been swiftly moving towards being a more open company. For example, when CEO Satya Nadella told the audience at the Windows 10 preview event that Microsoft loves Linux, it wasn’t a surprise, but rather a bold statement for a company that at one point saw Linux as a threat to its business.

Now the company has announced that it will be open-sourcing its full server-side .NET stack and making it available for use on Linux and OS X systems, in addition to Windows. Now developers can use the .NET framework on three of the largest operating systems on the planet. Plus, Visual Studio Community 2013 is now available for free.

To achieve this, the company has been working closely with the Mono community. The community has been working to port the .NET framework to an open standard and now it has the backing of the creator of .NET.

Microsoft launched .NET 12 years ago and six million developers currently use the framework. Today’s news expands the reach of that framework by allowing developers to build their apps across the three largest operating systems on the planet, with a common code base.

Visual Studio Community 2013 is being offered for free with the full extensibility. That includes the over 5,000 extensions available for Visual Studio.

Finally, like the Windows 10 preview, Microsoft is offering a Visual Studio 2015 Preview and .NET 2015 Preview for download here.

➤ Opening up Visual Studio and .NET to Every Developer [Microsoft]

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