Microsoft, Satya Nadella, Sing The Praises Of Open Source And Linux

Sam Dean | OSTATIC | October 21, 2014

Has Microsoft finally, truly warmed up to Linux and open source? New CEO Satya Nadella is definitely pushing that notion. Several media outlets this week are reporting on his comments on how he "loves Linux" and he reportedly claims that 20 percent of Microsoft's Azure cloud is already Linux-based. Furthermore, the software titan seems remains committed to providing top-notch support for Linux distributions in its public cloud offerings.

This, of course, is the smart way for Microsoft to play things now that data centers are running multiple operating systems and heterogenous environments. At Microsoft, apparently, open source is no longer "a cancer."  Steve Ballmer, former CEO at Microsoft famously called open source a cancer.  

...Satya Nadella, though, seems to genuinely sing a different tune. This week, he announced support for the container-friendly CoreOS Linux distribution, and Microsoft's Azure cloud also supports CentOS, Oracle Linux, Suse, and Ubuntu. Clearly, Nadella wants IT administrators to feel like they can run Azure, Windows and Linux in parallel without compatibility problems...