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drnick1 | on: Azure Linux 4.0 is Microsoft's first general-purpose Linux
This is a nonevent, unless perhaps some genuine "general purpose" tools come out of this. MS will never contribute to things such as Wine and Proton and kill its golden goose.
Krutonium | parent | next
You say that, but Microsoft has contributed to Wine!

Both in terms of code and help, on occasion. Microsoft gave Mono to Wine, and while Wine has a ban on accepting code from people who have seen the source of Microsoft Windows, they have, if I recall correctly, accepted documentation on Windows Internals from Microsoft themselves.

999900000999 | root | parent
Which is rather kind.

They could of also pulled an Oracle , claimed the APIs are copyrighted and sued.

WINE, even if right couldn't afford to fight.

I can even imagine official Linux support for the Surface tablets.

Infact, Microsoft makes very little off its consumer OS. They could even give up the market entirely and bless a distro with solid WINE support for legacy applications.

overfeed | root | parent
> They could of also pulled an Oracle , claimed the APIs are copyrighted and sued.

They did, well - not the suing part, but everything else in your sentence; including helping Oracle "pull an Oracle". In 2013, Microsoft filed an Amicus brief in support of Oracle's[1] position, appealing against a judges ruling that APIs cannot be copyrighted. At the time, Microsoft were also trying to get an Android-compatible runtime on Windows off the ground, which was incredibly awkward. They came to their right mind by the time 2019 rolled by and the case had been appealed to the Supreme Court. At this occasion, Microsoft switched teams and filed an amicus in support of Google. I don't know if Microsoft's 2016 release of WSL had anything to do with it.

1. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/02/microsoft-forese...

Topgamer7 | parent | next
Technically they gave mono to the wine project
DeathArrow | parent | next
>MS will never contribute to things such as Wine and Proton and kill its golden goose.

I think Microsoft is contributing to Linux kernel. Their golden gooses are Azure and Office which have nothing to do with Wine and Proton.

It wouldn't be too weird if they will release a win32 compatibility layer for Linux in the future as they might not want to maintain a full operating system.

pjmlp | root | parent
Nope, they just doubled down on Linux containers integration on Windows, with CLI and OS APIs to drive them from C, WinRT and .NET, that is the main way they see Linux going forward.

Azure Linux 4.0 will be the new WSL default distro, after going into stable.

Source, Linux sessions at BUILD 2026.

makeitdouble | parent | next
DeathArrow also touches on this, but to complete:

Windows stopped being the Golden Goose a long time ago, probably from the point Satya Nadella became CEO.

A visual aid from a quick search: https://visuwire.com/microsoft/

For instance Bing and LinkedIn combined bring in more than Windows at this point. And XBox is basically on par.

Their money makers don't rely on Windows either, so the OS isn't even a useable moat, which is why they can afford to enshittify the consumer version to death.

[Edit: fixed the CEO name]

murkt | root | parent
Sundar Pichai does not work in Microsoft, though. A bit weird to anchor the MS timeline on his position. When he became the CEO, actually? I don’t remember the year even approximately
madspindel | root | parent | next
Pretty sure he meant Satya Nadella but picked the wrong name...
makeitdouble | root | parent
Sorry it was a brain fart. I meant Satya Nadella.
murkt | root | parent
Ah, okay, my bad. Got too focused on the name. Googled the dates, Satya became CEO in 2014 and Sundar became CEO in 2015, so it’s actually not that different, especially when we look at the events more than a decade later.
santoshalper | parent
I don't think Microsoft would intentionally compete with Windows, but it does seem as though they are preparing for a world where Windows is no longer their golden goose, or at least hedging their bets. Given that Windows has already decisively lost the battle for servers, this seems prudent.
kenjackson | root | parent
It’s already no longer their golden goose. It’s about 6% of total revenue (see http://bullfincher.io/companies/microsoft-corporation/revenu...).

Microsoft could give Windows away for free and be fine. Of course it’s still a lot of money, so they’re not going to leave a multibillion dollar business on the table. But strategically, preserving its revenue is not their priority.

warumdarum | root | parent
How many percent of their revenue funel are dependent directly or indirectly on windows beeing the peoples workstation funneling them towards their subpar products?
philistine | root | parent | next
In the Enterprise, they'll fight tooth and nail to maintain that synergy. In the small business and consumer markets, people are having a very slow divorce from Windows, and Microsoft is well aware. MS365 is an ok product and can absolutely thrive on its own without Windows.
kenjackson | root | parent
Probably some amount. I agree Windows is strategic, but do definitely could see them giving it away and/or fully open sourcing it.
pjmlp | root | parent
It is most likely impossible, given the amount of code that is probably still under contractors copyright, or other kinds of licenses.
rswail | root | parent
They don't have to provide the source to give the OS away for free.

The difference between BSD and GPL in one sentence.