Slashdot Mirror
On Microsoft Porting to Linux/Unix
skubalon writes "Mainsoft confirmed today that they are indeed porting Microsoft's apps to Linux. The story was first reported in Paul Thurrott's WinInfo yesterday. Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player will be among the first apps to be ported." On the other hand we have this submission:rendell writes "According to this story on Beta News, Microsoft is denying the rumors that they were in the process of porting some of their software to the Linux platform. Especially focusing on the rumor that the main project was Office." So - who knows? My analysis: Microsoft is correct - /they/ are not doing the porting. Mainsoft however, appears to have the powers to execute the porting.
I found this unfinished press release poking blindly around the Mainsoft press release directory. Enjoy!
/etc directory and spread around the file system.
Mainsoft announces major breakthrough in porting Windows functionality to Linux
San Jose, Calif - April 1, 2001 - Mainsoft, the leader in common code-base cross-platform solutions for the enterprise, today announced a major breakthrough in porting Microsoft Windows functionality to the Linux Operating System.
The first breakthrough is a patch to the linux kernel, kernmem.sys, allowing any linux machine to display important debugging information any time an application needs to. This is an important first step to porting other Windows applications, as it allows any user to immediately see when an application has requested the system to be rebooted.
"Windows has had this functionality for a long time." said Yaacov Cohen, president of Mainsoft. "In the Windows world, this feature is known as the Blue Screen of Debugging". He continued, "We feel this has been a missing feature of Linux since its beginning, and will allow normal users of Windows to feel comfortable that Linux now behaves like a real Operating System."
The second breakthrough is the porting of the registry to Linux. The registry will obviate the need for hundreds of configuration files in the
"With a working registry in Linux, we can replace all those antiquated file and user permissions and SUID bits that clutter up the Linux system." said Miguel De Icaza, Linux pundit "Now every Linux system will be as secure as a Windows machine, allowing consumers to feel safer about automatic registration and other new Microsoft technologies."
The largest breakthrough is the porting of the Microsoft Entertainment Pack to Linux. Containing the most widely used applications on computers today, the Entertainment Pack will bring Solitaire, Minesweeper, and Yambo to Linux.
"These productivity applications account for more than 50% of all CPU time used on Windows machines" said Rob Malda, Chief Productivity Application Tester at slashdot.com. "With these applications now available on all Microsoft Linux compatible distributions, productivity will soar".
Future enhancements to Linux will include the return to the Single User - Single Machine philosophy which fueled the explosive growth of the PC market in the 1980's. Removing the ability to have more than one user logged into a machine at any single time makes more efficient use of the resources of that machine, and simplifies licensing of future applications under the M$GPL.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Having used MainWin to port an relatively large (300,000 lines) Windows application to UNIX, MainWin's Win32 API implementation at the time was pretty damn lacking. Actually, I found it to be a bit of a pain in the ass.
... else ... endif preprocessor mess throughout "lower-level" parts of the code. Yeah, MainWin made the task a lot easier, but then again, our code was really pretty high level. We didn't really use anything that I would consider low-level, but we still had to kludge things up. Microsoft's code is pretty much known to use undocumented APIs and other such mess---that's why MainWin needs the Windows source code to even do the port. If we had a bit of difficulty porting our Windows program, I can't even imagine the nightmare of porting a Microsoft application.
It's been two years since I've used it (I left that company) but some things that stick out in my mind were that the resource files were somewhat different under MainWin. (We wrote a pretty crazy Perl script that modified the Windows resource file and covered up those differences.
I also remember lots of ifdef UNIX
But in the end, you really should have separated your user interface from the rest of your code. Then, doing a port is just a matter of hiring some people to make a new GUI for each platform. That's (usually) not so difficult. Motif (Gtk+, Qt, whatever) code for UNIX, Win32 for Windows, MacOS for Mac. Of course, Microsoft certainly didn't consider cross-platform code when they wrote (or bought) the Office products.
Microsoft is in business to make money.
Why is this such a foreign concept? Why are so many /.-ers looking for an ulterior motive? It's right there, in front of your faces.
Office is one of Microsoft's BIGGEST money-makers. And it's not available in any way on a platform that many industry surveys show is gaining acceptance in the business world.
Do you think they're going to sit idly by while their cashcow runs out of pasture?
--
New Amiga-based PDA announced.
Microsoft Funds "KDE Foundation".
Linus Torvalds admits: "I run Win2K".
Pat Buchanan to nix Copyright Law: Geeks vote for Pat!
UI Expert proves: Vi is better than Emacs.
Finally free: the Linux Kernel is BSD'ed
etc, etc, et-freaking-cetera...
engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
Look at Office 2001 for the mac, you can see what I mean. Mircosoft knows Mac users dont' like Microsoft. So they are downplaying everything that says Mircosoft. It's totally carbonized, etc.
I'd expect the same with a linux port. I'd assume the first version would be just a MainWin "port". But then a linux ap division. Which I hope is as talented as their MacOS divsion. Thier 2nd offering of Microsoft products would use all gnome services, bonobo, corba, gtk. etc.
And for all you doubting thomas's. Interenet Exploer 5 for MacOS is the most standards compiant browser on the market. I'd execpt no less form Microsoft on a linux port.