An open-source Linux distribution built and optimized for Azure, with sources derived from Fedora Linux. Azure Linux provides a secured, reliable operating system for virtual machines, containers, and bare-metal platforms.
Azure Linux is built on a robust open-source foundation and enhanced with Azure-specific innovations. This provides the familiarity of the RPM package ecosystem, while adding Azure-native security, compliance, and operational capabilities.
Key features of Azure Linux include: hardened security posture, an Azure-optimized kernel, supply chain security, native Azure integration, and a predictable lifecycle.
Prediction: Microsoft Is Going To Do The Funniest Thing Imaginable this guy called it loooong back
People will hate me for saying this, but if in fact Microsoft rolled their own distribution, it would mean a lot of Microsoft $$$ goes into developing, maintaining and hardening the kernel, with Linus Torvalds gatekeeping the changes.
It does make complete sense, doesn't it?...
Admittedly, Microsoft did not actually write Xenix. They bought a System3 source license from AT&T and used that as a base, Their main service model was to port it to various systems.
Fun Fact: Xenix was the main reason a partition table was included when the PC first got hard disk support.
Source: I lead the AKS and Azure Linux PM teams at Microsoft.
You can do one-off configuration by writing scripts to run when the machine first boots, but after that the whole system is immutable except for whatever containers you’ve configured
> I blinked. Backstage, Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation's CEO, blinked, and all the Linux-savvy people in the crowd went "Huh?"
Any money I could have paid to be there would not have been enough to enjoy that reaction. Also that man has quite a background and title. Microsoft is company I like as a .NET developer, but they do some things wrong (so you could say I have a love and hate with them), but a lot of people don't realize they employ a lot of open source maintainers, and they release most of their software under the MIT license. Even .NET itself, is all MIT licensed.
Hell, the github for their Linux distro is MIT Licensed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
No thanks.
https://web.archive.org/web/20251108032058/https://mslinux.o...
> MS Linux is released under the provisions of the Gates Private License, which means you can freely use this Software on a single machine without warranty after having paid the purchase price and annual renewal fees.
But it can get old and lose its teeth...
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20150621191048/http://segfault.o...
« M-DOS
During 1977 and 1978, Microsoft adapted both BASIC and Microsoft
FORTRAN for an increasingly popular 8-bit operating system called
CP/M. At the end of 1978, Gates and Allen moved Microsoft from
Albuquerque to Bellevue, Washington. The company continued to
concentrate on programming languages, producing versions of BASIC for
the 6502 and the TI9900.
During this same period, Marc McDonald also worked on developing an 8-
bit operating system called M-DOS (usually pronounced "Midas" or "My
DOS"). Although it never became a real part of the Microsoft product
line, M-DOS was a true multitasking operating system modeled after the
DEC TOPS-10 operating system. M-DOS provided good performance and,
with a more flexible FAT than that built into BASIC, had a better
file-handling structure than the up-and-coming CP/M operating system.
At about 30 KB, however, M-DOS was unfortunately too big for an 8-bit
environment and so ended up being relegated to the back room. As Allen
describes it, "Trying to do a large, full-blown operating system on
the 8080 was a lot of work, and it took a lot of memory. The 8080
addresses only 64 K, so with the success of CP/M, we finally concluded
that it was best not to press on with that."https://www.pcjs.org/documents/books/mspl13/msdos/encycloped...
My best guess, memory, on those early microcomputers that consideration trumped any user interface ergonomics and DOS(cough CP/M) used less memory than the BASIC interpreter.