The cynic in me says this is part of embrace, extend, and extinguish, but it’s certainly a surprise:
“Under the hood, Azure Linux 4.0 is based on Fedora Linux and is delivered as an open distribution on GitHub. This code is available now. Yes, Red Hat knows that Microsoft has done this. Evenson continued, “So, we made a decision to use Fedora as an upstream, so it’s using RPMs in the Fedora ecosystem. Microsoft curates the packages and the supply chain to fit Azure’s cloud platform.” Microsoft also created “it to be purpose-built for Azure, which integrates vertically into all of our infrastructure to give you the best Azure Linux experience on Azure.””
open source and closed source at the same time. Shrodinger’s Distro!
I’m sure there’s no telemetry at all 
the shoe fits
Only the distro becoming open source is new - Azure is and always has been Linux. Nothing else scales good enough to be used as a hyperscaler.
I stand corrected on that point, thank you.
Still can’t wrap head around entirely open source though. Look forward to reading more.
EDIT: it appears its flatcar-server type mostly(?) headless type distro. Further down in the text:
"However, when pressed about a desktop experience, Evenson was clear that there are “no plans” for a graphical environment.
“It’s optimized for server-side in the cloud,” he said, adding that even on a developer machine, users should expect a lean environment."
I think Microsoft realized that Office and windows are no longer the money making fountain that they used to be. Azure, Office-365 and few other streams have overtaken them long ago.
Further over the years Windozs has become a mess. 45 mins to apply a path. 3 reboots required to apply a patch. A OS that is measured in tens of gigabytes. Questionable choices, lock the start menu, do away with start menu, put ads in Start menu, etc. 136 Vulnerabilities fixed in a single May-2026 patch because LLM found them in a month.
Makes sense for them to ditch the bloat that is windows and go with Linux.
Now what will it take for them to buid a real BSD based OS? Huh?
I’m actually surprised they hadn’t already taken this approach.
Bill Gates likens the GPL to Pac-man (and not the Arch kind ), and Steve Ballmer said “Linux is a cancer”, and yet for some reason years later, they adopted Linux instead of BSD, when BSD has a lot going for it in the server space and doesn’t carry the GPL they were previously so loath of.
Apple, Sony and Netflix all took the BSD approach.
Looks like they are consuming and ingesting the cancer. Steve Ballmer where are you thou? Happy making Google dance? Is google doing the samba or ballet?
About the Pac-man idiocy, Pac-man defecates Windows updates pants down 7 days a week and twice on a weekend.
Motor mouths imbeciles.
They went Linux and not BSD because they needed multiple thousands of engineers to tackle their cloud when the hypetrain went choochoo.
Their desktop issues have nothing todo with this.
Sigh…
Like someone is dumb enough to use their crap. 
Spyware on a server…
Microsoft Linux?
I just plagiarized that for the Manjaro Forum. Got a laugh within seconds. 
Cheers! 
Once upon a time–before Linux–Microsoft’s UNIX version was called Xenix.
Don’t forget M$ also owns the trademark on Lindows, which they strong armed away from a Linux distro with their high priced lawyers in court many years ago. You never know, they could take Lindows out of mothballs and resurrect that product.
You know, I kind of wonder if Microsoft at some point will just go “you know what? This is too expensive. Let’s go to Linux” and just decide to make Windows a Linux distribution with their proprietary blessings. They are certainly adding more and more features from the Unix-y world in Windows 11, poorly, but you know…
This is exactly what Windows needs. it needs to be totally re-written.
Be careful what you wish for.
Microsoft’s stratagy on these things is “Embrace, extend, extinguish”.
At least publicly, they’re currently at the “embrace” stage. Begin to really worry when they want a seat at the Linux Foundation table. The long game says Linus will die someday. Microsoft will still be around and will see a seat at the Foundation as the opening they need to “extinguish”. Between now and then, is the “add Unix-y” things stage of “extend”.
Anyone standing in-line for this ‘release’. . . ?
Rich 