Microsoft reached out to us back in early 2018 in order to use our data in Bing — we followed the normal sort of on-boarding procedure that we use for our supporters. During one of these on-boarding calls we were asked if there was more that Microsoft could do to help us and support our mission. Soon thereafter I provided them with a list of things that would be useful to us. Sadly, the request to buy a major record label and then to give it to us to manage was turned down for being too expensive. 
However, Microsoft did like two items on our list and agreed to support us — they were:
1) Azure hosting credits — we’re always looking for more hosting capacity and these credits will allows us to provide virtual machines to our team and to close collaborators who are doing good work, but might be lacking the computing power to push their projects forward. This contribution is of direct benefit to our community — often times our projects contain quite a lot of data and thus have some heavy processing requirements. We’re currently using our hosting credits to do some large data set crunching and some testing for the Virtual Machine that we provide to users who wish to get up and running with MusicBrainz data quickly.
2) Sponsoring our summit — our annual team meeting and foundation summit happens at the end of each September, normally in Barcelona where we have our main office. Microsoft’s sponsorship allows us to invite more people to the event, since we have the means to cover their expenses. Our summits have traditionally been our annual forum for meeting the other team members and volunteers and to take a breather from the normal course of business. At the event we see a more human side of each other and we’re more easily able to discuss our challenges and the vision for the future.
We really appreciate our supporters who go above and beyond the normal levels of support for us — these contributions really sweeten the deal of hacking on open source software!
Thank you so much to Microsoft and everyone at Microsoft who helped move this contribution forward!
[from https://ift.tt/2lc8A0P]
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