Microsoft softens its journey to cancerous CentOS Linux

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Back in the bygone era of 2001, the CEO Steve Ballmer had claimed that Microsoft was being threatened by a cancer called Linux. Fast track to their interoperability strategy team’s general Manager Paoli (who co-wrote XML) to August 2010 as Microsoft now soft pedals to offer interoperability features for key components of cloud networks. The focus of this operability is data movement, improving migration and deployment.

Microsoft’s new love child for cloud networking today is the Hyper-V for virtualizing platforms on the Windows Server. To help it grow and expand it has just last night announced interoperability support for the CentOS Linux.

Now, this is seen as a great softening as this follows very closely behind the first jolt that opens source has had from Microsoft in the recent past. The unexpected had happened when suddenly Microsoft source code was submitted to Linux Kernel.

The cynics believe this is an all out war cry against VMware to ensure Hyper-V becomes the crown prince of open source. In the process smaller minnows like Xen and KVM too are expected to be gobbled, leaving the field plain and clear for Hyper-V to wax forth.

According to Microsoft’s Marketing GM, Sandy Gupta, CentOS was their first choice as it is a very popular Linux distribution for hosting service providers. By opting for CentOS it gives Microsoft’s Hosting partners the opportunity for consolidating mixed offerings on Windows as well as Linux on the Windows Server Hyper-V.

Hosting partners would thereby find it cost-effective as well as technically easier. The virtualization platform would no doubt have greater capacity and be ideal for enterprise level virtualization.

Further support news from Hyper-V for CentOS are to be expected at the Open source Business Conference

To long timers, this is final vindication for Red Hat as CentOS is after all a Linux grandchild from Red Hat OS. However, as Microsoft continues to tread toes by accusing Android- on- Linux, it will truly be difficult to relate to Microsoft in the context of open source.

Progress of Microsoft Linux Kernel

Over the past eighteen months now, since the source code submission for review, the maintainer of the staging tree claims patches have been issued by Microsoft while there has been contribution by a few developers too.

The intrepid patches are indications that Microsoft on Linux-base has a future, which may portent good news to the computing world at large.

However, with Microsoft’s expansionist mode into open source territory most suggest greater caution and diligence towards it as ultimately open source will allow code to remain where it belongs- to the community that developed it. This is a principle that will never be acceptable to proprietary software giants such as Microsoft.

However, it is true that Microsoft’s journey to the cancerous frontiers of Linux, has begun as the future has no room for expensive paid software!

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