Microsoft Corp.’s human resources department is stepping up its game. Five months after losing one of its division heads to Salesforce.com Inc., the software giant has reportedly poached a key executive from Oracle Corp. who earned the nickname “Mr Linux” for his efforts to promote internal adoption of the open-source operating system.

According to ZDNet, Wim Coekaerts convinced the firm’s leadership to switch all its developers’ desktops from Windows to Linux back in 2004 and later played a key role in the creation of its first software products for the platform. Oracle now even offers its own distribution, which isn’t particularly popular among organizations but continues to be supported nonetheless a decade its initial release. Coekaerts’ broad experience with the operating system should come handy in his new role as the corporate vice president of open-source software for Microsoft’s cloud business.

Redmond has become deeply involved with Linux since CEO Satya Nadella took the reins two years ago, even going as far as creating a custom version to power the networking infrastructure that supports Azure. And over on the frontend, the software giant added support for several popular distributions of the platform over the past few quarters, most recently Debian. Microsoft’s efforts to provide better support for the operating system are part of a much broader open-source initiative that also encompasses its multi-billion-dollar software development business.

The company yesterday announced that it’s releasing the code for Xamarin, the cross-platform application framework it acquired earlier this year, under a free license. Microsoft hasn’t specified what parts of its open-source strategy will move under the direction of Coekaerts, but his efforts will likely touch upon every major aspect at some point as Redmond works to increase the adoption of free software among the enterprise crowd.

Image via Pixabay