Microsoft Links Open-Source Arms with Linux Frenemy Red Hat

Microsoft has just signed a new deal with longtime rival of Red Hat to support the company's version of Linux service in Microsoft Azure cloud.

Customers can run Linux on Azure, but the new partnership to support the implementation of the "hybrid cloud" where applications can exist in both private data centers and public cloud services will expand. More significantly, Microsoft and computer support Red Hat will work together for the same services to support Red Hat customers using Azure. Vice president of cloud and enterprise Microsoft Scott Guthrie said in a webcast today that this is the first time he knows that the Microsoft support team "co-located" with another company.

The agreement is the latest example of Microsoft playing nice with an old rival. "When we started [Red Hat Enterprise Linux] I never would have thought we would do this," Red Hat's president of products and technologies Paul Cormier said during transmission.

Recently, in 2007, Microsoft was threatening to sue Linux users for patent violation, but then reverse. But the world of computing has changed since then, and Microsoft had to change with it. Linux and open source software has grown from a fringe movement in the 1980s and '90s to be merely controversial in the 2000s to be so common today.

The business reasons for the association are very simple, Cormier said. Red Hat customers, particularly large companies, tend to be a combination of different technologies, including Linux and Microsoft, and they want these technologies to communicate with each other seamlessly. Red Hat and Microsoft first linked arms in 2009 to ensure compatibility between their technologies of virtual machines, an agreement that followed a controversial collaboration between Microsoft and Novell in 2006 that SUSE Linux users protected from lawsuits by Microsoft.

Microsoft reports with the open source community have gradually thawed since. The company began supporting Linux on Azure in 2012, and now 25 percent of all cases Azure runs Linux. Last September, the company said it has also been using a customized version of Linux among racks to help manage Azure. But the biggest breakthrough Microsoft was probably launch its .NET programming framework for the community, the world closed the opening of open source Microsoft.