Microsoft's Linux and Open Source Moves: A Look Back
![Microsoft's Linux and Open Source Moves: A Look Back Microsoft's Linux and Open Source Moves: A Look Back](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/bltfe0fe6c69443a356/6538ebbab493171b913b081a/ms_loves_linux_0.png?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
In February 2016, Microsoft announced that it was bringing Red Hat Enterprise Linux — the flagship product of Microsoft's biggest open source competitor — to its Azure cloud as a new OS option. It had good reason to think the move would please customers, since Microsoft also reported at the time that 60 percent of the Azure images were Linux-based even before RHEL became an option.
March 2016 saw Microsoft announce that SQL Server, its enterprise database product, would become available for Linux — although the actual release won't appear for many more months.
The latest big Linux-friendly move by Microsoft was the introduction of Windows Subsystem on Linux. The product provides binary compatibility for Linux-based apps running on Windows — which means Linux apps can run directly on a Windows system, without special emulation. The drawback is that only certain apps are supported, and when Microsoft says "Linux apps," it really means "command-line Ubuntu apps" — at least for now.
Microsoft added Debian GNU/Linux as an OS option on the Azure public cloud in December 2015. As probably the most popular community-developed Linux-based operating system, Debian opened new avenues for people who wanted to be Azure customers but use an open source OS.
Visual Studio, Microsoft's app for editing source code, went open source in November 2015. The app ran on Linux before that change, but the open-sourcing of the code was a major step forward for Microsoft in allowing anyone to collaborate on developing its products.
In September 2015 Microsoft announced that it was building its own Linux-based operating system. In light of more recent engagements by Microsoft in the open source space, that news may no longer seem so shocking. But at the time it made huge headlines, even though the OS was for internal use only on Azure's network switches.
In September 2015 Microsoft announced that it was building its own Linux-based operating system. In light of more recent engagements by Microsoft in the open source space, that news may no longer seem so shocking. But at the time it made huge headlines, even though the OS was for internal use only on Azure's network switches.
It's now been well more than a year since Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, declared that the company "loves Linux." A string of major open source moves have emanated from Redmond since then. Here are the highlights.
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