To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. Microsoft has admitted it was wrong about open source, after the company battled it and Linux for years at the height of its desktop domination. Microsoft president Brad Smith now believes the company was wrong about open source. Microsoft has certainly changed since the days of branding Linux a cancer. The software giant is now the single largest contributor to open-source projects in the world, beating Facebook, Docker, Google, Apache, and many others.
Microsoft has also partnered with Canonical to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10 , and it acquired Xamarin to aid mobile app development and GitHub to maintain the popular code repository for developers. Microsoft is even shipping a full Linux kernel in a Windows 10 update that will release later this month, and it moved to the Chromium browser engine for Edge last year. Subscribe to get the best Verge-approved tech deals of the week. Instead, Microsoft adopts or supports Linux when the customers are there, or when it wants to take advantage of the ecosystem with open-source projects.
Back in , when Hyper-V was released, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server became the first non-Windows operating system officially supported and 'enlightened' to improve performance on Hyper-V -- two years after Microsoft and Novell signed an agreement to work on interoperability and seven years after then-CEO Steve Ballmer infamously compared Linux licensing to "a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches".
Microsoft was no doubt hoping to win over Linux users to the enterprise features in Windows Server, but customer support mattered too. In , Microsoft and Red Hat announced that Microsoft would validate Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Windows Server and Hyper-V, Red Hat would validate Windows Server guests virtualised on Linux, and the companies would offer joint technical support to enterprise customers using the two operating systems together.
Over time, Linux support at Microsoft became rather more enthusiastic, if no less pragmatic:. NET had to go open source and cross-platform or it was going to lose its customer base; that also meant becoming a modular, agile project built on GitHub with the community, rather than a framework that shipped once every three to five years with a new version of Windows.
As a result, Microsoft began working with distros like Red Hat and Ubuntu to tune the Linux kernel for Azure ; and if customers run into bugs in Linux when it's running on Azure, Microsoft will work on the bug and contribute code to fix problems or just to make workloads like SAP run better.
SEE: 60 Excel tips every user should master. Similarly, bringing SQL Server to Linux in meant that Microsoft could carry on competing with Oracle for database customers who didn't want to move to Windows Server because they'd invested in containerisation and DevOps. In , Tony Petrossian, then in the Microsoft database systems group, told us: "Apart from all the obvious reasons -- that people are using Linux -- one of the big motivators for us was that a lot of the container and private cloud technologies are built on Linux infrastructure and we wanted SQL Server to be part of that ecosystem.
By the time PowerShell became a cross-platform, open-source project in , Jeffrey Snover creator of PowerShell and then the chief architect for Azure infrastructure could say quite sincerely: "The company is becoming a cross-OS company; I like to say 'the sea refuses no river' and we want to be the company for everybody, no matter what platform you're using.
Linux support is important for hybrid cloud with Kubernetes, for edge computing with containers, and for IoT devices that often don't have the resources to run Windows. Although Windows has become modular over the years, and stripping the GUI out of Nano Server makes it a much smaller image than full Windows Server, a custom Linux build can be smaller still.
Microsoft's buying power meant it could ask network hardware suppliers to support SONiC so that all the network hardware it bought for Azure would run the NOS which makes SONiC support widespread enough that advanced enterprises can start adopting it themselves.
And making it open source and submitting it to the Open Compute Project meant that hardware vendors and other cloud providers like Alibaba and even before the acquisition LinkedIn could contribute improvements.
Microsoft also used a custom Linux kernel for the Azure Open Network Emulator originally called CrystalNet , a system that runs both containers and VMs to emulate the entire Azure network for testing network changes before they're made. Now it is 7, lines, and supports more devices, [including] mice and newer releases of the Hyper-V system," he says.
Cade Metz is a former WIRED senior staff writer covering Google, Facebook, artificial intelligence, bitcoin, data centers, computer chips, programming languages, and other ways the world is changing. Senior Writer Twitter. Topics announcements Enterprise operating systems software. Of course, as you might guess, neither Srinivasan nor Microsoft are doing this due to any particular love tor Linux per se. The vast bulk of Microsoft's contributions has been to its own Hyper-V virtualization hypervisor drivers.
Hyper-V is Microsoft's bit hypervisor-based virtualization system. Microsoft you see wants it to be possible for both Linux to run Server R2 instances and for Windows R2 to run Linux instances using its own virtualizaton tools. At first, this code wasn't open-sourced at all, but in , it was discovered that some GPL code was already in Hyper-V's Linux drivers. The code, which includes three Linux device drivers, has been submitted to the Linux kernel community for inclusion in the Linux tree.
The drivers will be available to the Linux community and customers alike, and will enhance the performance of the Linux operating system when virtualized on Windows Server Hyper-V or Windows Server R2 Hyper-V.
It also helped, of course, that Microsoft, ever so reluctantly, has been forced to work with Linux to try to keep their market share.
In the months after that though Microsoft did little to improve its code. Microsoft seems to have finally gotten the message. In the last few months they've worked hard to improve Hyper-V and Linux interoperability.
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