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Should The Next Windows Be Built On Linux?
scrm writes "The next version of Windows should be built on top of Linux, according to this article by Robert Cringely of PBS." If Microsoft wanted to, they could be the world's largest vendor of Free software .. couldn't they?
I'm sure that a lot of Windows driver developers will enjoy porting their drivers over to the Linux architecture.
Since when was OS X built on Linux?
I know you Linux guys live in your own world, but come on...
Let's be realistic now, Windows and Linux do different things. If you want actual control over your computer and a nice development environment, use Linux. If you want to access any kind of file type or hardware simply and easily, you're gonna use Windows. Sure one could be brought to perform like the other, but that would take a damn long time.
>>Since when was OS X built on Linux?
Actually OS X is built on UNIX (BSD).
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
Well, IBM is larger, and they ship free software. So in order for Microsoft to be the largest company that sells free software, they would need to be larger then IBM.
Otoh, if you're mesuring units shipped, M$ could probably do it. I don't know why they would want to, though.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
"If Microsoft wanted to, they could be the world's largest vendor of Free software .. couldn't they? "
/.) get their panties in a bunch accusing MS of over-extending their monopoly into the Linux world?
They'd also be the largest vendor of Free Software filing for bankruptcy.
I don't intend that comment as a troll. I know some investors. (My uncle is one...) I've talked with them about MS etc and what they like/dislike about them. If they were invested in MS, they'd be upset about MS giving their moneymaker stuff away. They'd likely sell their stock in a heartbeat unless MS put one hell of a spin on it. There's the whole matter of how you make free software profitable. They want return on investment. They want what's tried and true.
Now, as for MS porting Windows to Linux: Wouldn't everybody (at least on
Since this article was already highlighted on OSnews and Newsforge, I am once again forced to repeat myself: :)
Cringely has no idea wtf he is talking about.
Windows XP is NOT a simple windows manager sitting atop MS-DOS.
But it has a DOS prompt!! Yeah, so does Linux if you install an emulator, does that mean Linux runs on MS-DOS?? The DOS prompt in XP is just another program that happens to look like what you used in the 80's before there was Linux
I could go on and on about how XP is based off the NT core which came from VMS and how different the X server is from how MS does its graphical shell, but I'm sure many other posters will put up the same info.
OK: Even ignoring why Cringely was completely wrong from a technical standpoint, here's why he's still wrong even if he were right (does that make sense?)
MS: Has spent a boatload of money copying and building there own versions of what everyone else already had. They are finally starting to get it right, and are making money hand over fist doing it (at least in the OS sphere which is what we are talking about). Moving to a Linux base would be a HUGE investment, and MS software would go back to the stability of Win98 for 3 generations as they worked out all the bugs. As much as the Linux gurus on Slashdot would love to see MS sabotage themselves like that, they aren't that stupid.
Linux: Linux would NOT be helped by having MS grab the Linux kernel and use it as a base for their OS. I also don't give a fsck what you'll say about "but the GPL!!" If MS were to do this they would withouth question weasal around the GPL or hire an army of lawyers to get it thrown out or watered down to the point it wouldn't matter. Meanwhile, they would either not give any code back to the kernel, or more likely would inject code specifically designed to slowly build up an IP claim over the entire kernel.
MS doesn't like Linux but believe me, they are doing it a major favor by not trying to subvert it, and despite how much everyone here loves to bash MS, a whole bunch of the software running on
Linux owes some credit to MS for providing a model to follow, like it or not.
Once again, Cringely is proved to be a whole bag of hot air.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
I can run cygwin bash, too.
sh
"[A] high IQ is like a Jeep; you will still get stuck, just farther from help!" --Just d' FAQs, c.g.a
If you read the article, Cringely seems to have a misconception about how Windows NT works.. he still thinks that Windows is just a binary layer running over a DOS shell, something that hasn't been true since Win9x. The command line in Windows 2K/XP is just an emulation of DOS. Anyway, let's be serious. We all know Microsoft isn't worried about the quality of their products, and certainly wouldn't backpedal the last few years of Unix/Linux bashing (no pun) and do something revolutionary like this.
It doesn't save much even when he concludes that it wouldn't likely happen. This is mainly because the idea of Microsoft moving their windowing system over to Linux has been thought of long ago. And If not also by other people, certainly by myself.
Frankly, I think it would sell all over the place though clearly people would insist on running X with "Microsoft Lindows" anyway... look at people running X with MacOSX.
It's clear that Linux users need a MUCH better windowing environment, but we've been geared to X for so long that another windowing environment is unimaginable... okay maybe not unimaginable, but so far, not projected to be in wide acceptance.
I also fear for what would happen if Microsoft got control of the Linux desktop. Instability is a "feature" I firmly believe is part of their marketting strategy. (Provide patches for a while and then stop offering them while pushing the 'next version.') We would always have problems and would never get fixed.
However, I also see people hackign Windows for Linux by writing compatible libraries and making it free. It is happening with a great deal of stuff in the WINE project... it would just be more complete and more compatible wouldn't it?
Anyway... it's not going to happen. MS would sooner take FreeBSD and put Windows atop of that.
GPL licensing is anathema to them, but they seem to enjoy using BSD licensing....
But only in the one direction, no? Do they ever license their own work as BSD?
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Even today, you can still get to a C: prompt under Windows XP, which means a disk operating system is hiding there no matter what Microsoft wants us to believe.
The command processor has nothing to do with the operating system. This statement displays Mr Cringely's deep ignorance of operating sytems.
Having worked on development of MSDOS,Window 95 and Windows NT, I can state authoratatively that DOS is not the foundation of windows XP (which is really NT with lipstick). Anybody who knows anything about OS's knows this anyway.
IMHO, considering what Microsoft has done in the past, the right word here is not "use", but "cannibalize".
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
Of course they don't. That's why they like the BSD licence (and hate GPL): With the BSD licence, they can take all they want, have some obscure reference to the original authors in the documentation, and re-sell the work as if it were their own. The BSD licence doesn't ask anything more than to give credit where credit is due-- it's worth noting, however, that Microsoft has even violated that licence in the past. (They ripped off some fairly large chunks of BSD code, and never gave credit to the original authors).
However, the GPL licence: It requires that Microsoft give back; the thing to remember is that Microsoft is like a roach motel for source code -- it checks in, but it doesn't check out. The GPL would require Microsoft to make available any code they change under the GPL; it takes away their absolute control over the code, and takes away their ability to (over)charge for said code. Plus, a good roach motel doesn't let anything escape.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Are we really supposed to take someone who says something like this seriously:
"Even today, you can still get to a C: prompt under Windows XP, which means a disk operating system is hiding there no matter what Microsoft wants us to believe."
Clearly the NT kernel is just a big lie, just like NASA never went to the moon. Thank you, Cringely, you have shown me the light!
And what the hell does he mean by "a disk operating system is hiding there"?? Please, someone, give him a non-disk operating system and see how far he gets after all his drives disappear.
Besides, it's not the NT kernel that's the problem, it's all the crap MS has put around it.
My Sig: SEGV
It's time we stopped trying to shoehorn seventies era multiuser designs (or eighties era single user designs) onto modern PCs. What we really need is an OS redesigned entirely from the ground up for the sort of tasks a modern home or business user needs on the desktop. Linux is no more that then Windows.
All of the complaints about Linux on the desktop boil down to the fact that it is a clone of an OS designed for minicomputers with multiple users. All of the complains about Windows boild down to the fact that it is an extension of a single-user, single tasking machine.
In both cases, the OSes have been stretched into something else. In both cases, the stretching has caused problems. Better to start from scratch.
The cake is a pie
The world == several billion people.
95% of the world would be several billion people.
There are not several billion people running Windows. There are not even a billion people running Windows.
There are not even a billion people with computers.
MORTAR COMBAT!
So is anything ANY company does; even your beloved RedHat, or SuSe. The goal of a company is to make a profit. Those cease and desist letters are to protect that; and they have every legal/moral right to protect their own property. What don't the majority of Linux users get about this?
*Sigh*. Once Linux users see that a business needs to make money, Linux will be viable on the desktop. Until then, none of them will buy Linux often enough to support the business until they gain the desktop. See the Mandrake story currently on the front page for more info on this topic.
Cringley isn't an idiot. You may not agree with what he's saying, you may think that he doesn't understand what an OS is, you may even think that Microsoft would never follow that course, but he isn't an idiot.
He is talking about Microsoft doing _exactly_ the same thing that Apple has done with OSX (use someone else's OS), except with Linux instead of BSD. Five years ago, would anyone have thought that Apple would use someone else's OS to run their UI? Heresy!
Is it going to be as easy as simply porting a windowing system? No Way! Does he understand that? Most certainly.
What he is saying is that Microsoft has demonstrated that it doesn't _need_ to control the underlying OS in order to get everyone to think that they're running the show on the desktop.
He points out the benefits of moving to Linux or even BSD. Would replacing XP/NT/9X as the OS remove MFC .NET, C#, DirectX or any other API? Nope, it would just use the underlying OS differently. In fact, Wine has done a lot of this already...
Would Microsoft ever do it? Doubtful, but then I would have sworn that Apple would never use BSD...
Jason Pollock
Did you ever consider that he was makeing an analogy... "MacOS is to Darwin (BSD) as Windows is to Linux" just in case you can't figure it out.
I am fortunate that my employers think Linux is worth using, and it's nice for Linux to have enough popularity that the software tools I need get developed, but they would be there even if the Linux usage had peaked in 1992. Maybe there will be a revolution. Perhaps it's even under way right now. Who knows? I'm not in it for your revolution. It isn't important to me.
This will NOT happen.
It's a shame to see MS take things it definately knows about and reinvent them poorly. They knew about UNIX crypt passwords, but went ahead and made the LM hash for passwords but neglected the salt value used in UNIX crypt to prevent parallel cracking of the entire password file. They later saw some of thier problems and came up with the NT hash based on UNIX md5 passwords (but using the md4 hash), again neglecting the UNIX salt. I'm a security systems guy, so maybe it just happens that MS only reinvented poorly the stuff I'm knowledgable about. Using off-the-shelf MIT-liscenced (similar to X11 liscence) Kerberos instead of making up their own networking authentication protocols and having to revise them when they realize they designed them poorly.
It was a good idea for them to try and make NT a microkernel OS, but it didn't end up working out. It's a shame they didn't reinvent the filesystem as a unified virtual filesystem with C:, D:, etc. being symbolic links for legacy purposes. Oh well.
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
And capatlistic tendencies are bad?
No, but then again, its not like we have (or want) pure capitalism. Pure capitalism would be NO government aid. No major tax cuts, no negative net taxes paid back to corporations. No corporations being handed publically funded projects (aka the phone lines, the railways etc).
Today's capitalist system thrives because of the socialist controls imposed on it...
Afterall, who needs the FDIC anyway?
Because Apple was willing to almost completely drop backwards compatibility. Microsoft's entire monopoly is based on backwards compatibility. If they were to say that the next version of Windows wouldn't be able to run most current programs, you would see their share of the desktop market instantly drop like a rock.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
No, I don't think he is smart enough to even know what it is exactly he was referring to... but my guess is more along the lines of the actual Win32 API as embodied in the Csrss.exe subsystem and the core Win32 DLL's (i.e., Kernel32.dll, User32.dll, GDI32.dll, ComDlg32.dll, AdvAPI32.dll, etc.)
Still, it's hardly even worth speculating since he is such an idiot. Listen, Linux has a lot of strong points and a good future ahead of it, but it is just lunacy to always assume that everything is better with Linux. Banana splits are great. Pepperoni pizza is great. But, that doesn't mean that I want to start putting pepperoni's, cheese, and tomato sauce on my banana splits! Both Windows and Linux will be far better off evolving on their own separate paths, and only a complete layperson would suggest otherwise.
You are so full of shit - you would have to be using a machine which takes less than 1 minute to boot.
What the hell are you doing to cause this?
I use my desktop/personal web/mail server for any number of things such as browsing the web with a number of different browsers, playing games both with wine and native linux ones (using supposedly "unstable" nvidia drivers - they have always worked great for me) and I havent had a crash for months. In fact the only time its been rebooted was when my fiancee's brother came to stay and couldnt sleep with the computer fan going.
I dont know why you people spout such crap.
when everything is working perfectly.. BREAK SOMETHING before something else FUCKS up!
"Even today, you can still get to a C: prompt under Windows XP, which means a disk operating system is hiding there no matter what Microsoft wants us to believe."
This is pretty much total crap. Yes, you can bring up a C prompt. Does that mean that XP sits on top of DOS? No. What you are doing is running a type of "DOS emulator." It's not really DOS at all.
"Windows XP is not an operating system. It is a windowing system that sits atop an operating system much as KDE or Gnome sit atop Linux."
Nope... Total crap here.
Windows, Windows 95, 98 and I believe ME are one branch. Windows NT is a completely different code base. NT, 2000 and I believe XP are all from the same code base.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
This article is by one guy, by that name. he used to write for a magazine (PC Week?) under that name and the magazine copyrited the name. That's the panel of writers you are thinking of.
IMHO, most of the critics here did not read the article, or read it too literally. His general point was that people buy Windows for the user interface, not for its VMS underpinnings or even for DOS.
PS: I noted the additional reasons they might want to do this in a later post. The suggestion that MS might benefit from a GUI on top of Unix approach is NOT a new prediction, and in fact there are rumors that they are already working on it.
The reasons they might want to do this go far beyond the technical difficulty issues. They have $40 Billion dollars for petes sake, they could write the whole dang thing from the ground up in Visual Basic if they felt like it!
(Now just watch someone comment on how ridiculous it would be to re-write Windows in Visual Basic)
Microsoft has $40 billion dollars in cash tucked away.
If they wanted to, the could be the world's biggest just-about-anything.
From the article:
I actually have a positive experience after having -finally- moved from 98SE and ME to XP, and despite my very low expectations about XP, I have to admit that it's not working too badly after all, to say the least.
Don't get me wrong, I'm also a happy Linux user since 1994. But with XP I can actually see Microsoft catching up with Linux regarding stability, performance and features....
How so "offtopic"?
This is exactly the point the article conveys.
I wanna lend my sympathy here to Cringely and, Robert, stupid people abound... Don't let your articles be limited in the future by jerks lacking imagination.
A further suggestion related to "shared source". Shared source is like the Hotel California, "You can check out any time you like but you can never leave." Great, now I've got the guitar solor running through my head all day. (But hey it's better than some ad jingle or the latest boy toy band ballad implanted in a mall or elevator. )
First, the idea of porting the Windows into Linux has been around for a long long long long time. It's always had it's supporters and dissenters, so far nothing in this string of posts have contributed anything new to the argument.
:) It should make at least some of giggle. :)
It comes down to getting decent apps on the Linux platform, and I know I'm probably gonna get flamed for this, but 95% of the software honestly sucks. At least Windows apps generally conform to a standard and typically very polished. Yes, I know that Linux apps are getting better, but they aren't there yet and why we all argue about every little thing, Microsoft moves on to the their next version, happy to throw something at the Linux community to get it all rialled up.
So far, the only version of Linux that I see as promising is Xandros and that's because they are in control rather than 5 million whiney geeks, hackers, cracker, dweebs, or whatever we call ourselves today.
Second, every OS out there sucks. They all do. Windows X.X, MacOS X.X, Linux and every other OS that is out there sucks.
I would love nothing better than to see a free, open source OS dominate the market because it is fast, stable, and actually easy to use. Linux is 2 out of 3. Windows XP is generally fast, stable, and a lot easier to use than Linux. MacOS X is fast, stable, and easy to use to a certain group of people while the rest think it is either moronic or insulting to use. In my book that puts Linux at 2 out of 3 while XP and MacOS are at 2.5. Perhaps Linux, in it current form, isn't the answer for the desktop. Maybe the GNU community needs to develope an OS from the ground up that is geared towards the Desktop, and let Linux handle the server and workstation market (where it is competeing extremely well). That way we aren't wasting are time trying to make the Swiss Army Knife of the OS world.
Oh, BTW, DOS under NT, 2000, and XP is an emulator, just like DOSEMU in Linux. It provides enough of DOS so that many, but not all, old DOS programs will run. The great part is that since those DOS apps run inside a Windows app, if the DOS program pukes, it doesn't take the OS with it like what used to happen under Win 3.x and Win 9.x.
Finally, here is a link to a funny song that helps make my point on OSes sucking.
Cya L8r
Lee
"Even today, you can still get to a C: prompt under Windows XP, which means a disk operating system is hiding there no matter what Microsoft wants us to believe."
WRONG. From NT onward, Windows has been an entirely new OS, not a windowing system "running on" DOS. Yes, NT/2000/XP etc have a command processor that LOOKS like DOS, and in fact they have DOS emulation SUPPORT (including the familiar "command.com" binary), but that does not mean they run on it, any more than it means Lindows runs on DOS because of Wine, or that any machine is running on Amiga just because it has an Amiga emulator.
_Showstopper_ is a good read.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Knowing Microsoft, they will probably settle for the Windows OS, and Linux GUI.
A better world already exists, called MAc OS-X. Got the best of all worlds with a great Unix OS, and a really cool GUI.
But that doesn't mean M$ would give up on basing their OS on other existing OSes. There's always BSD. If you had any memory at all, you'd remember the /. story Why Unix is better than Windows... By Microsoft. M$ goes on and on about all the things BSD does better than Windows. And who could forget that Hotmail used to be run on BSD.
Don't expect Windows 2004 to be based on Linux. It'd be BSD if anything (and if they give a rat's behind about security, they should go with OpenBSD ... but that's just me).
And you KNOW this.