Plenty of Linux love at Microsoft Build 2018
Microsoft’s passion for Linux is real, judging by its recent developer conference.
Microsoft also revealed that its most popular SQL Server product runs on Linux…
Microsoft has softened its stance on Linux in recent years, and has even been going so far as to announce that it ‘loves’ the open source operating system. While some people have been cynical about the Redmond company’s affection for the FOSS alternative to its Windows, the company appears keen for its services to work with Linux.
This was particularly evident at Microsoft’s Build 2018 developer conference. The company announced it had overhauled its simple Windows
Notepad text editor so that it would now cope with the line endings used in Unix, Linux and macOS, correctly displaying text files created on those platforms. Traditionally, Notepad has only supported text files that use Windows End of Line characters, and if these are missing – Unix, Linux and macOS text files don’t use them – then everything comes out in a completely unmanageable lump of text. Microsoft goes into more detail about the change in a blog post that can be read at http://bit.ly/notepad-line-end.
Microsoft also revealed that its most popular SQL Server product runs on Linux. This news comes in an interview that TheRegister held with JG “John” Chirapurath, general manager of Azure Data, at the Build conference. You can read the full interview at https://bit.ly/2wtWxmW. According to JG, the SQL Server that runs Linux, along with embedded R and Python, is “the most successful server product we’ve ever released, in terms of downloads…Our typical download volumes are in the hundreds of thousands. We’re looking at seven million downloads.” With this insight, Microsoft’s love of Linux starts to make more sense…
All of this follows the announcement of Azure Sphere, a new platform that runs on a custom version of Linux developed by Microsoft, and which is designed to interact with a huge range of smart and internetconnected devices. The impact of this reveal was underscored by Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, who said that, “After 43 years, this is the first day that we are announcing — and will be distributing — a custom Linux kernel.”
Microsoft has designed Azure Sphere as a platform that uses hardware, software and the cloud to bring better security to smart devices. As BusinessInsider reports ( http://bit.ly/
ms-azure-sphere), Microsoft has designed a new, more powerful, CPU that the company will make available to chip manufacturers (initially) for free. Alongside this, there will the Linux-based Azure Sphere operating system, which will be smaller and lighter than Windows, and able to be run on these devices, and this hardware and software combination will be integrated with an Azure Sphere cloud security service, which will provide security patches for at least 10 years.