Certainly it's the right direction, but, you have to wonder about a company that took until 2016 to realize that Linux was an important platform to support for an enterprise RDBMS.
Keep in mind that Microsoft sells tech support to companies with a special hotline they can call and get answers and support for enterprise level software. Porting SQL Server to Linux means more copies of SQL Server being used out there and more tech support phone calls that companies pay for.
With Office 2000 there was the MSDE on the CD-ROM that had a developer version of SQL Server that could run on Windows 2000 Pro to test out databases without using Windows Server. It was limited in number of connections and other things.
That said, SQL is rarely the first tool I look for regarding my DB needs.
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3041378/microsoft-windo...