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Petreley On Microsoft And Linux
Quite a number of people have woken up early in the morning to submit Nick Petreley's latest column in Linuxworld. It's kinda a grab bag column but he does reference a rumour that Microsoft has rewritten portions of Linux for use in Windows. I doubt anything like that has actually happened - but it's a strange world out there.
While I agree with the notion that this is hype and not to be believed, it does highlight something about the GPL that frightens me: It's impossible to enforce it. *IF* a closed source product were to illegally include GPL code in it, how would anyone ever find out about it? The only way to ever find out would be to look at the source, and it's closed.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I now now that linux zealouts are idiots.
Before you flame, read on, PLEASE.
First off, let me state that am a long time unix user and admin, and I consider FreeBSD and Solaris my favoritre OS'es. And i have dabbled with linux since early '95 ( i think feb or so )
But come on guys, the windows 9x series is NOT, i repeat is NOT, aimed at stability, it's aimed at the consumer. Where easiness of use, and support is what matters.
Are these guys too idiotic to realize this, or are they just flame throwers and FUD spreaders?
And NT, as much as i dislike it, has some features, that although not turned on by default, are of great use, and not available on most os'es? ACL's, file attributes, etc etc.... stuff that most unixes are still trying to implement or get right.
Goin back to win 9x? does XFree even come close, and don't even bring the "remote display capabilities argument" , because it DOES NOT MATTER on a consumer OS, in terms of speed and display quality.
Linxu for extreme stability? HAH, sure linux is stable, compared to win 9x, and ok, i might give you NT on SOME configs, but there are so many cluless linux "ADMINS", and that alone makes it less stable than any other os. now that's the truth, not pretty, but true.
Microsoft might no be the best company, but donot question what they have done, they have managed to support the greates array of hardware than any other os. prolly as much as all the other combined, and still managed a reasonably stable os with all the legacy.
as a fact, most of the instability is due to third party drivers.
COme on guys, linux is getting better, and i applaud that, but it is IN NO WAY, th ebest OS" out there, it has a LONG WAY to get there, and there are situations where it is well suited it, but come on, don't push it...
i'll stop this cause i don't have the time to go into more detail....
I personally know at least two people who work for Microsoft and I know that they were told by Microsoft Legal that they are not to look at any Open Source software code. This is to prevent even the accidental use of some ideas from Open Source Software in any of the Microsoft products. The last thing that MS needs right now is another legal battle saying that they stole some GPL'd code. This would be a very dumb move to make on the MS side of things if you think about it.
"The bad news is tied to the explanation for why Windows may be getting more stable."
What is wrong with this? Is this not what we want? Do we want windows to die a horrible death or do we rather see it get stable? If you don't want it stable, why? are you afraid of a little competition?
"According to a source who has access to internal Microsoft developers, Microsoft has dedicated resources specifically to the task of analyzing Linux source code and rewriting sections of it for use in Windows."
Note these two words "ANALYZING" and "REWRITING"
Anaylzing is nothing wrong we do it all the time.
Rewriting again is nothing wrong, I can take any GPL program analyze it and rewrite it, and still keep within the boundaries of GPL, It is even much safer when 2 developers are involved at least. The first set does the analysis and translates the code to english/pseudo-code/specs, the second group works from the specs and produces code.
"According to the source, it is the adoption and translation of Linux code that is helping Windows become more stable."
Imagine someone quoting that the unstability of Windows is making Linux more stable. Or perhaps a few peeps from the BSD camp quoting that BSD code is making Linux more stable. Contrarily to popular opinion porting of a stable code doesn't necessary result in a stable port. It largely depends on the program especially when working on a huge and complex code base.
All in all, this is a useless article to start the end of my thanksgiving break. It is not worthy of discussion, I hope you all had a wonderful thanksgiving, as I did. I watched Gladiator 3 times, I am on my 3rd day without sleep. *Yawn*
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
His reasoning about reuse of Linux source turning Windows into a catchup OS is flawed. Any large program is likely to contain a large number of "components". Many of these will be useful but mundane things such as link list classes, tree sorters, task schedulers, etc.
Innovation doesn't arise from the quality of the individual components, but from the way in which those components are assembled.
Therefore, it is quite possible for MS to steal Linux code and use it to produce products that are ahead of Linux. In fact, we should expect that the result of such theft would be a product better than Windows without the theft, otherwise why bother?
As for whether or not MS is doing this, I suspect they are not. It would be foolish to do it with Linux when high-quality, legal BSD code is available for the same purpose.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
According to the article " According to a source who has access to internal Microsoft developers, Microsoft has dedicated resources specifically to the task of analyzing Linux source code and rewriting sections of it for use in Windows.....I suspect that such a practice may constitute a violation of the GNU General Public License"
Clean room reverse engineering is perfectly legitimate. The GPL gives you the right to ignore the licence and not redistribute. This still allows you to receive the code and learn from it, and even extract a specification from it. This is called fair use. The fact that source is provided makes reverse engineering a lot easier.
It's impossible to enforce it. *IF* a closed source product were to illegally include GPL code in it, how would anyone ever find out about it? The only way to ever find out would be to look at the source, and it's closed.
...
Which was one of the funny things about MS-DOS when it first came out, it was obviously ripped off from CP/M, right down to the internal names and variables, when you examined the binary with a disassembler.
Don't think, just because MSFT legal tells programmers not to use Open Source, they won't use Open Source. It works, it's been hacked to high performance, and it's a lot better than the usual MSFT spaghetti code. When you need code that won't fail, are you really going to reinvent the wheel, when they already built the best wheel there is and you just have to "borrow" the code and pretend it's yours
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
It's good that MS adapt Linux code
... Because that is what the OSS spirit of sharing is all about.
If this were BSD code we were talking about, you'd be right, but since it's GPL'd Linux code we're (hypothetically) talking about, MS would be obliged to publish the entire source to whatever component of Windows this (hypothetically) is under the GPL too.
The Linux community copies MS ideas at every opportunity it gets - WINE, Samba, even the look & feel of the desktops.
That's a trifle unfair. SAMBA is merely a protocol implementation. The "idea" in SAMBA is filesharing: hadly a Microsoft innovation; and Jeremy Allison is on record as saying that SMB sucks as a protocol: nobody actually *wants* to use SAMBA: it's only there as a compromise. Windows won't do it our way (NFS), so we'll be nice about it and talk to Windows the way it wants. Mohammed going to the mountain.And, just so we can brag about it, we'll make SAMBA better than native Windows SMB....
WINE is similar: nobody *wants* to use WINE. Every WINE user would prefer Linux native versions of the applications they're running in WINE.
As for the desktops, I'll regretfully half-agree with you on that one. Whoever decided to make FVWM95 a default window manager wants shooting - it's terrible PR. Personally I use WindowMaker, which is sufficently dissimilar to any iteration of Windows as to totally confuse most people who try to use my desktop (and I get confused using Windows -- damn click-to-focus --shudder--).
Anyhoo: this is all moot. MS are not daft enough to be putting GPL code in Windows. I don't work for MS, but where I do work we have lawyers jumping through hoops to make sure freeware licenses are adhered to. If we do it, I'm certain MS will do it. If they're replicating Linux functionality, I'm sure they'll be doing it in a clean-room manner.
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to write anything. These salesmen posing as journalists are getting way out of hand. They pretend to be objective but they aren't. Clearly Petreley is owned by Sun and Oracle. He is so deep in their backpocket that he hasn't seen the light of day in years. But he wants YOU to know that HE knows everything and, if you disagree, you know nothing. He is a self-absorbed geek and his remarks do not bear examination.
Is this a joke? Seriously how did this piece of crap end up on Slashdot which recently has become almost respectable and unbiased? The overwhelming absurdity of this article is beyond the imagination and anyone who actually believes it must be smoking some mighty strong crack (and NO ONE in software development will believe this shit and will immediately discredit this fool as exactly what he is : A pandering rumor monger eaking up hits however he can with absolutely no integrity or ethics).
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Unbelievable. If any of you believe this, please become luddites and get out of the software and computer businesses, because you're very stupid.
..that indeed MS is examining certain parts of the source code to linux. From what I understand, they have exhausted their supply of Mac source code and are in need of YET ANOTHER OS to rip off!
Are YOU listed?
This claim is absurd. There is only one kind of hint you can take from the Linux code: Design decisions. If you think that any Windows instabilities are caused by flawed design decisions, then you have another thing coming.
Finding errors with design decisions could be done by purely looking at theory on paper. However, the problems are much more deeply routed. They are problems with the implementation. I don't see how spying at Linux code could improve this. Let's call this bullshit a product of hype and move on...
Michael Labbe
The claim that MS is stealing Linux code to make Windows more stable is absurd on the face of it.
Windows and Linux have almost nothing in common. You can't just stick the Linux kernel in Windows and expect it to fit. Nor any major portion of it.
Reliability has to be designed in from the ground up. Frankly, that's why I give more credence to the people claiming that W2K is unstable than to those who claim that it's stable. Stability wasn't an issue at MS until Linux started getting popular. By the time MS started talking up the stability line, W2K had already been in development for several years. I know they didn't go back and retrofit stability as an add-on, because it simply isn't possible.
Now if they were desinging a new OS from scratch they might be able to benefit from Linux. But there's not really even any need for that. Good OS design has been an open topic of discussion among researchers for decades. All you have to do is want it and then apply yourself.
The problem with MS and stability isn't a matter of know-how, it's a matter of care-how. They have always been more interested in bells and whistles than in substance. If they are suddenly interested in stability now, it's because Linux's stability has been killing them in markets that they wanted very badly to corner. Expect them to brag about new, improved stability for several years while they go back and design their third generation of Windows with stability actually built in. If they're still in business you'll be able to buy stable Windows systems in 4-5 years. Not sooner.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
My m$ sources tell me that the recent 'stability' in IIS is due to analysis of Apache and copying the strategy, namely forking the process and periodically killing the children and restarting new processes.
So ... whilst I would seriously doubt the existance of any GPL'd code in windows, there may be some analysis and subsequent adoption of sucessful stategies, but this should hardly come as a surprise to anyone.
I am an avid Slashdot fan for at least a year... and I am used to the Win/Linux "comparisons" popping up from time to time. Fair enough, it's a competitive world. But the fact that a newspaper publishes a whole column revolving around a *hypothesis* that there is code stolen, and bashing Microsoft over a whole A4 page for the supposition that this would happen - that's a bit too much for me. It's not logical, it's not funny and it's a shame for Linuxworld to publish something like that. Go on, flame me!