Microsoft opens SQL server to Linux

For years, Microsoft built walls between its products and the rest of the industry. Now it is tearing them down.

Microsoft, the world's biggest software company, is known for creating business software that runs only on the Windows operating system. That has made it hard - or impossible - to buy something like a database from Microsoft without first buying Windows to run on a server.

But on Monday Microsoft announced that SQL Server, its software for managing corporate data, would also run on Linux, a competing operating system. Other Microsoft products could follow suit, analysts said.