Microsoft has released an open source product based on GNU / Linux

Microsoft really did. Yesterday, at the Open Compute Project (OCP) conference in San Jose, a completely open product was introduced, called SONiC or Software for Open Networking in the Cloud . The product was created with the participation of manufacturers such as Arista, Broadcom, Dell and Mellanox. SONiC is a set of software and utilities and designed to control network devices of L2 / L3 levels from different manufacturers. At the moment, the basis is the Debian distribution with the Linux 3.16 kernel, but as Microsoft claims, any other distribution with a kernel version starting from 3.16 can be used.

SONiC can work on various devices due to the SAI (Switch Abstraction Interface) specification adopted in the summer of 2015. OCP project. The initiator of the SAI project was also made by Microsoft itself. SAI is a standardized C API for programming network equipment ASICs. The SAI project is also open and available on Github .

SONiC is the foundation of another GNU / Linux-based Microsoft product, the Azure Cloud Switch (ACS) OS. ACS was developed by the company for internal use and contains an additional set of software for managing Azure clouds.

Microsoft states that SONiC v1 is used in production and is already present in existing switches of Microsoft data centers. Also promise in the coming weeks to put on Github Sonic v2 , which will contain many improvements.
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SONiC project page on Github: http://azure.imtqy.com/SONiC/
SONiC project sources on Github: https://github.com/Azure/SONiC
SONiC project FAQ: https://github.com/Azure/SONiC/blob/gh-pages/FAQ.md

UPD: Project released under Apache 2.0 license

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Sources:

1. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/ocp-2016-building-on-community-driven-innovation/
2. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-showcases-%E2%80%9Csoftware-for-open-networking-in-the-cloud-sonic-%E2%80%9D/