According to Phoronix , the lead developer of Systemd, Lennart Poettering, has left Red Hat and joined Microsoft to continue his work on systemd. Lennart has been with Red Hat for 15 years and also led the creation of the PulseAudio and Avahi projects.
Lennart has been instrumental to the modern Linux desktop. There has been no official official announcement about his job change, but there has been plenty of discussion about his whereabouts; others have made public comments on social media suggesting he has joined the Redmond company.
In response to these remarks, Phoronix said after a day of follow-up investigation, "It turns out that this is not a joke. The famous open source developer responsible for several well-known projects joined Microsoft and continued to focus on systemd development. Although some People may not always agree with his views or approach to something, but his enormous contribution to the Linux/open source world and his dedication to advancing the ecosystem over the years speaks for itself."
In fact, Microsoft has been recruiting some Linux developers and other well-known open source developer talent. Including the hiring of Guido van Rossum, the father of Python, and GNOME creator Miguel de Icaza, who was hired when Microsoft acquired Xamarin in 2016 but left Microsoft earlier this year; Nat Friedman, a member of Xamarin, was hired by the company Microsoft served as CEO of GitHub after the acquisition; Gen too Linux founder Daniel Robbins was also previously employed by Microsoft, and Steve French worked for Microsoft as a Linux CIFS/SMB2/SMB3 maintainer and a member of the Samba team.
And Microsoft has also hired a large number of upstream Linux developers, such as Matteo Croce, Matthew Wilcox, Tyler Hicks, Shyam Prasad N, Michael Kelley, and many other names that Linux enthusiasts/developers can recognize at a glance. Just earlier this year, another longtime Linux kernel developer, Christian Brauner, joined Microsoft. Christian Brauner worked on the Linux kernel, LXC, systemd, etc. at Canonical before moving to Microsoft.
The success of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is further validated with the popularity of Linux on Azure. Microsoft is working on Mesa as part of supporting various graphics/computing APIs on top of Direct3D 12, ensuring good Hyper-V support in the Linux kernel; and maintaining various internal Linux distributions like CBL-Mariner and Azure Cloud Switch. As a result, the company also continues to attract more upstream Linux developers, including some of the biggest names in the open source ecosystem. Currently, Microsoft Careers shows 663 job postings mentioning Linux.