There was a time when Microsoft was considered to be one of the fiercest rivals to Linux, especially because of an important growth in market share that the open-source software, in general, and the open-source operating system, in particular, were recording, but Redmond is now more interested than ever in such technology.

In the past two years, Microsoft has been working to get closer to the Linux community, and today the company has announced that it’s joining the R Consortium founded by the Linux Foundation.

In an announcement today, Microsoft claims to be one of the biggest supporters of the R language for statistical data analysis, explaining that, together with its partners, including the Linux Foundation, that is, it can push innovation further in the field of data science.

A leading supporter of the organization

As a member of the R Consortium, Microsoft will provide funding, technology and know-how to the organization to assist the R user and developer communities, the company explains.

“This includes both technical and infrastructure projects such as building and maintaining mirrors for downloading R, testing, QA resources, financial support for the annual useR! Conference, and promotion and support of worldwide user groups. We are excited to help foster the continuing growth of R and the community of people that drives its evolution,” Joseph Sirosh, Corporate Vice President, Information Management & Machine Learning, Microsoft, says.

This isn’t the first move that Microsoft makes in the field of data science, as the company has recently purchased Revolution Analytics to continue research in this business. At the same time, Redmond has also announced that R will be part of SQL Server 2016 when it ships later this year, again becoming one of the leading supporters of the new language.

Other members of the R Foundation include Microsoft and RStudio (both platinum), HP, Mango Solutions, Google, Oracle, and Ketchum Trading (all silver).