In a blog post, Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise Group, announced that its flagship database product, SQL Server, will soon run on Linux. That’s a big change for the company, which until now has required that most Microsoft software run on Windows.
However, in recent years, Microsoft has been embracing open source software. Nearly a quarter of the servers running on its Azure cloud computing service run Linux. And while it isn’t open sourcing SQL server, it has released many of its other products under open source licenses.
It remains to be seen whether any customers will actually want to run SQL Server on Linux as there are already very popular open source database options like MySQL and PostgreSQL.
