14 DAY TRIAL // Those days when Microsoft considered Linux “a cancer” are long gone, and the company is now looking into ways to get closer to the open-source community in a wide variety of ways.
The Redmond-based software firm has announced today the availability of FreeBSD as a VM image for Azure, as it has discovered that there are many customers whose solutions were designed to launch on this operating system.
As a result, Microsoft has joined forces with a number of companies, including Citrix Systems, Array Networks, Stormshield, Gemalto and Netgate to bring their virtual appliances to the Azure Marketplace, and today it’s also releasing a ready-made VM image of FreeBSD 10.3 for interested customers.
Microsoft claims that it is listed as the publisher of the FreeBSD image in the marketplace, and not the FreeBSD Foundation, which is supported with donations from the community. The whole building and testing stuff was performed by the company, so “we removed the burden from the Foundation,” as Microsoft itself explained.
FreeBSD applauds Microsoft’s work
As a result, Justin T. Gibbs, President of FreeBSD Foundation, has applauded Microsoft’s efforts in this regard and welcomed the company to the community, a thing that a few years ago was impossible to hear from someone deeply involved in the Linux world. And yet, it seems like Microsoft and Linux can now live together in the tech world, and what’s more, they can collaborate on a number of projects.
“The majority of the investments we make at the kernel level to enable network and storage performance were up-streamed into the FreeBSD 10.3 release, so anyone who downloads a FreeBSD 10.3 image from the FreeBSD Foundation will get those investments from Microsoft built in to the OS. There are some exceptions where we included some important fixes that weren’t complete in time to make the FreeBSD 10.3 release,” Microsoft explains.
Customers who want to get the new VM in the Azure portal only have to click the +New button in the marketplace and type FreeBSD 10.3 to get it. Microsoft promises to update the VM image with new improvements shortly after they are released by FreeBSD.
Steve Ballmer: Now I love Linux too
Seeing Microsoft looking beyond Windows isn't surprising. For those who forgot about the early relationship between Microsoft and Linux, it's worth remembering that former CEO Steve Ballmer himself trashed the open-source world, comparing it to "a cancer."
"Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source," he said in 2001.
And yet, seeing Microsoft investing so much in the Linux world made Ballmer change his mind, and in more recent statements he said that he actually loves the open-source world, especially because it's actually one of the businesses that Microsoft is investing in.
Article was updated to change the better reflect that FreeBSD is not Linux. Thanks everyone for sending this in.