Microsoft has pledged to open-source its .NET development platform in an ambitious push to gain a foothold on the majority of web servers running Linux. The move marks a historic milestone along the Redmond giant’s efforts to shift away from its image as the poster child of proprietary software.

Microsoft’s affair with the open-source community dates back to the late stages of Steve Ballmer’s reign, under whom the company abandoned efforts to develop a homegrown alternative to Hadoop and then made the decision to partner with Hortonworks Inc. over more proprietary distributors. The operating system maker’s participation in the movement has only grown since the forward-moving Satya Nadella took over as CEO in February, having since released its WinJS library under a free license and added support for popular Linux flavors to its infrastructure-as-a-service platform.

And in April, Microsoft spun off the Roslyn component of .NET into an independent foundation that shifted responsibility over the compiler package to the broader user community. The move to open-source the rest of the framework brings the initiative to a full circle, with the company planning to the release code for the entire server-side portion of the development stack– from the ASP.NET 5 down to the Core Runtime and Framework – over the next few months

Microsoft is also consolidating the free versions of its popular development environment into a single full-featured product dubbed Visual Studio Community, which is rolling out in conjunction with a preview of the platform’s next iteration that is set to bring even bigger changes to the table. Most notable is the addition of expanded framework support across iOS and Android, another step forward towards Nadella’s vision for cross-platform applications.

Users of the hosted version are receiving new functionality, too, in the form of two additional services for streamlining the deployment and maintenance of applications, one of which is specifically designed for making it easier to launch projects in the cloud.

As a result of the move, millions of .NET developers around the world will now be able to transfer their hard-earned skills beyond Windows with having to so much as switch to a different development environment. The sheer number of professionals using the framework guarantees Microsoft a piece of the Linux application pie while also putting the company in a better position to address the increasingly heterogeneous nature of enterprise infrastructure.

But that is not to say Microsoft has shifted its attention away from Windows. Quite the opposite, in fact. The company is actively working to level the playing field against Linux, recently entering a partnership with Docker Inc. to bring the latter’s open-source container engine to the next release of its server platform.

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