Credit: Stormy Peters

Microsoft has hired Stormy Peters to run its Open Source Programs Office. Peters, a long-time open-source advocate, announced her hiring on Twitter on August 22.



Peters most recently was a senior manager of Red Hat's community team, a role she has occupied since November 2016, according to her LinkedIn profile. Her profile says she left Red Hat in August 2019 and joined Microsoft as Director of the Open Source Programs Office in August 2019. She is based in Berthoud, Colorado.

IBM announced plans to buy Red Hat in October 2018.

Until late 2015, Red Hat was noticeably absent from the list of Linux distributions that Microsoft supported on Azure. (Others already there at that time included Ubuntu, CentOS, Oracle Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE.) Microsoft and Red Hat ended up finally announcing a deal -- which involved a patent agreement between the two companies -- in November 2015. In 2017, the pair extended their partnership with by adding native support for Windows Server containers on Red Hat's OpenShift Container Platform, Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Azure and SQL Server on OpenShift. At Build 2019, Microsoft and Red Hat added some additional integrations to their partnership.



Peters is the founder and director of Kids on Computers, a nonprofit that sets up computer labs in schools for impoverished children. She also was on the Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) Selection Committee from 2015 to the present.



Peters' Wikipedia profile notes that as of 2008, Peters became the executive director of the GNOME Foundation and was a board member of the GNOME board of directors from 2011 to 2012. In 2010 she went to Mozilla.

Microsoft is continuing to invest more in open source. Just this week, the company announced it would be part of the Confidential Computing Consortium, which is being managed by the Linux Foundation.