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Gone are the days when Linux was considered just “a cancer” by Microsoft’s big honchos, as the new CEO of the Redmond-based company says the open-source platform is quickly gaining ground on its Azure platform.

Speaking at a cloud event in San Francisco, Nadella has suggested that “Microsoft loves Linux,” pointing out that the company is working to offer support for more Linux distributions through its Azure cloud service. Nearly 20 percent of Azure is Linux-friendly, he revealed, adding that starting this week, CoreOS is also supported. CentOS, Oracle Linux, Suse, and Ubuntu were already working on Azure.

What’s more, Nadella has revealed that Microsoft is working with Red Hat to make Enterprise Linux run on Azure as well, but more information on this will only be provided at a later time.

During his keynote, Nadella was standing in front of a banner with a text reading “Microsoft heart Linux,” trying to suggest that Redmond no longer sees the open-source world as one of its fiercest rivals.

Ballmer: “Linux is a cancer”

Nadella’s way of doing business seems to be entirely different from that of his predecessor Steve Ballmer, who called Linux in a 2001 interview “a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.”

There’s no doubt that Linux wasn’t quite the best partner for Windows a few years ago, but Ballmer shocked pretty much everyone when he compared the open-source platform with a terrible disease. And what’s worse, he never apologized for it, but instead added the following:

“The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source.”

Not just a Windows vs. Ubuntu battle

The rivalry between Microsoft and open-source software comes down for most users to the competition between Windows and Ubuntu, which at this point is the number one Linux distribution out there.

There’s no doubt that, at least on the desktop, Windows still has no rival, holding a market share that’s bigger than 90% worldwide. On the mobile market, on the other hand, Windows is doing poorly, so the desktop continues to be its key focus despite all Microsoft’s efforts to push it into the world of tablets and smartphones.

But Windows and open source are not only about the desktop, and Microsoft’s commitment to make more Linux distributions work on Azure is living proof. The company has finally understood the potential of Linux in its cloud environment, so making more distros available for customers is clearly a priority.

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