Microsoft Now Has a Fedora-based Linux Distro. Azure Linux 4.0 is on the way, and its GitHub repo quietly confirms it’s built on Fedora.
At the Open Source Summit this week, Microsoft announced a range of open source-focused updates, ranging from new Linux distro releases to agentic AI tooling.
Brendan Burns, co-founder of Kubernetes and Corporate VP for Azure OSS and Cloud Native at Microsoft, delivered a keynote on their technological shift from cloud native to what the company is calling the “AI native era.”
The announcement covered quite a bit of ground, so here’s a breakdown.
Microsoft’s strategy has shifted a lot in recent years, and while their emphasis on Windows OS remains strong, their model is really moving towards subscriptions all around.
Pick any OS, but then subscribe to our cloud services, making it easier to capture a broader market of users to still pick Microsoft directly or indirectly, in both the consumer and the enterprise markets. You can see this with their approach to supporting Linux and MacOS in more scenarios but then incorporating the rest of the Microsoft-owned services for revenue generation models. For example, pick any OS but use M365 Apps, pick any OS but then use GitHub, pick any OS, but host in Azure.
Most of Azure already runs on Linux in the backend. And from the shareholders’ point of view, I’m not sure they care so much which technology is used in the background, as long as you pay your subscription.
My concern is that they are using this as a long-term market penetration, with the goal to please the crowed with open standards and look like the good guys to get mass adoption on a Microsoft-managed ecosystem, then turn the nobs to lock consumers in. Will you start seeing Copilot for Azure Linux eventually (i.e.: Fedora)? I can’t predict the future, but my guess is Microsoft’s primary objective is to maintain their dominant position, alongside AWS and Google.
Choose Linux, but on Microsoft. This is what they want. I understand the business logic, and for many organizations, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. But I just hope they don’t mess up or confuse the space or gain too much influence over time on organizations like the Fedora Community or Canonical.
I think it is good news when Microsoft voluntarily chooses to maintain at least one open-source operating system, even if it is mostly based on Fedora, on top of their existing portfolio. It certainly changes my perspective of them as a whole. I have no doubt they will use SaaS to attempt to penetrate the market, but the market itself is pretty mature at this point, so their reputation will have to do most of the heavy-lifting.
I agree, the more engineers, developers, UX designers, and folks from Microsoft that gets into Linux, the better it is. It also raises the global pool of talent that knows both, and likely to get more people advocating for Linux principles, despite any direction Microsoft may take in the future. I don’t think it’s necessary to think in terms of one or the other, but rather one and the other. Options and freedom of choices are good for the industry and for communities.
