Wwriting the latest chapter of its love affair with open source, Microsoft has offered its own FreeBSD distribution.

For those who are new to the world of open source, FreeBSD is an open source Unix-like operating system that’s a direct descendant of BSD, a version of Unix developed at the University of California.

Coming back to the latest development, Microsoft has published a distribution of FreeBSD 10.3 and made this operating system supported and available in Azure. Before this step, if one was willing to run FreeBSD image in Azure, he/she had to bring a custom image from outside.

Along with this availability, Microsoft has brought technical support for the same via the Azure portal.

Setting up FreeBSD in Azure is a hassle-free process. All you need to do is go through the Azure Portal, click on the +New button in left pane and type FreeBSD 10.3 to get started.

Microsoft has called this step a way to remove a burden from the FreeBSD Foundation. It should be noted that the FreeBSD community supports the Foundation via donations.

This step was also welcomed by the FreeBSD Foundation. Justin T. Gibbs, the Foundation’s President, called its an important milestone for the community.

Here’s one important aspect of this release that I want to point out – Microsoft isn’t simply making a fork and keeping it to itself. Instead, Redmond is making its efforts at the kernel level up-streamed into the official FreeBSD 10.3 release.

Apart from the usual features of FreeBSD 10.3, Microsoft has added the Azure VM Guest Agent to communicate with the Azure Fabric.

About the future releases, Microsoft says that the company intends to stay up-to-date and release its FreeBSD distribution just after the FreeBSD team releases their version.

Notably, Microsoft’s interest in FreeBSD isn’t new. The company already explains its use in many software applications and provides support for FreeBSD to Hyper-V.

For more information, visit Microsoft’s blog.

Read our whole coverage about Microsoft’s love affair with Open Source Here.

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