In a significant departure from tradition, Microsoft today announced they were releasing 20,000 lines of device driver source code under GPLv2 licensing to the Linux community. These device drivers are expected to significantly enhance the performance of the Linux operating system when virtualized on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. The previous release was supported only under SLES and as closed source, leading users to ponder why these drivers weren't made available on other Linux distributions and open sourced.
Kudos to Microsoft for listening to users and allowing the rest of the Linux distros to run optimized on Hyper-V. Note however that although Microsoft has open sourced and submitted the driver code to the Linux Driver Project, it is not yet part of the main Linux kernel. The code still needs to be reviewed and tested and submitted for official inclusion into the Linux kernel tree. Once through this process, these integration components should eventually gain acceptance and make their way into most Linux distributions.