Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Deploys Linux, Open Software in Test Lab
securitas writes "Microsoft has deployed Linux and other open-source software in test labs used by business customers to experiment with Microsoft's products. The products include Linux, Apache, MySQL and Open LDAP directory-access software on Intel-based computers, according to Martin Taylor, who is in charge of Microsoft's Linux competitive strategy. He said the goal was to learn 'what can you do and how can you do it' using open-source software in a competitive analysis. This step comes after Microsoft's recent admission that Linux is Microsoft's biggest threat after economic conditions. Mirrors at CMPnetAsia and InternetWeek." It'd be cool to see some patches come from Redmond, but that's probably wishful thinking.
Unless I'm /that/ tired, it looks like the post is talking about MS deploying Linux patches.
If that happened and (as one would assume) the source were available, would anyone still trust it?
I'm not sure if I'd want to run MS code on my Linux box.
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
You'd think, with SFU, NFS, etc, that it wouldn't be big news when you hear that Microsoft has Linux installed on campus, especially when doing Inter-Operability testing.
A Nony Mouse
Dollars to donuts the primary purpose is nit pick every problem that occurs in a mixed OSS / microsoft environment and then turn them into talking points for sales people.
...is the bit in the referenced article where Steve "Monkey Boy" Ballmer is claiming that not only does Windows have a lower TCO than Linux, but MS is faster at patching bugs than the OSS/FS community...
If it weren't such a sobering reality that many businesspeople actually believe such BS, it would be funny...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Sorry for any MS bashing later in this post, but thier marketing department is asking for it.
First off, lets talk hardware. I'm assuming here that both sets of hardware are going to be identical and normalized. By that I mean no paladium test beds, or winmodems, or other odd hw pieces that would skew things in one direction or another. Just some off the shelf dell's would be good. This is the easy part.
Next, on to the software. We have a company that doesn't know much about linux (I do mean as a company. I'm sure there are some very smart folks up there that know what they are doing. Its just in MS's best interests not to have them around the linux machines.) setting up a linux system. Heck, this sounds like it is just slightly more shady than an "independant testing" lab doing the comparision.
Now, software tuning. Somehow I doubt that the win2k installs are going to be stock. They will tune everything to get every last cycle they can out of it. Now, I wonder if they will do the same in the linux boxen? Heck, I'd put money on them actually slowing down thier benchmarks for thier tuning efforts.
The only set of benchmarks/comparisons I'd respect is a side by side setup. One side has MS's lackies fiddiling with thier server to tune the heck out of it. The other side would have the folks from MySQL*, Apache, RedHat*, and probably ESR for good luck. Then some independant testing machine connected to both doing the same task. (i.e. an actual demo transaction). Why hasn't anyone done something like that?
And tell ESR that hacking the Windows machine before they had a chance to patch it is no fair.
[*] Please substitute your favorite software package if you feel the need to do so.
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
Or figuring out a strategy to get the GPL tossed out so they could use other strategies to be able to use the code.
hmmm, I wonder what this whole SCO ordeal is?
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
With M$ realizing that they have competition, they will strive to improve their products (with how much success?). If they actually do improve their wares, the Linux community will ralley to improve the software in Linux.
Everybody wins.
BTW, my work was investigating Linux desktop environments to see what the state of the art was. Lots of the devs monkeyed around with Linux, but everyone was very hardcore about not touching the sources.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
And I'd be happy to get patches from them, especially since they'd be open-source, and reviewable. If they were helpful, of course they would be accepted under the GPL.
If you look at early white papers from Microsoft, it becomes obvious that some very intelligent people worked there at one time. Surely some of them are still there, as well as fresh talent. Many people I know "sold out" to Microsoft in college, but were actually experienced Linux hackers.
Software bloat (happens to everyone), company overhead (impossible to avoid in a company the size of MS), and economical agendas driving poor design decisions have all made MS' codebase an unsightly beast, I'm sure. But to think they are incapable of creating working, useable, and even secure code is preposterous. Some of the most talented programmers in the world work for MS.
However, I'm fairly sure that very little help will be given to GNU/Linux from MS, whether by the company as a whole, or specific employees. MS would consider it a waste of time, and dangerously helpful to a competitor. The only reason I could see them doing this is to convince a court they weren't "anti-competetive." Judging by the overly-lenient rulings as of late, however, I doubt they need to do so.
-Dan
Get 2 Pentium III 450MHz with 768MB of RAM .Net Framework - JSP in Tomcat
.Net developer tools (you need to be able to program that server) are around 1200 + 800 + 1200 + 900 for a total of $4100 (approx). Not too expensive but not free either.
Install like software:
Windows 2000 Server - RedHat Linux 7.3
IIS 5.0 - Apache/Tomcat 4.1
Sql Server 2000 - MySQL Or Postgres Or oracle 8i
Exchange Server 2000 - QMail
Which perform better under a low, medium and heavy load? That is an excellent test because it takes the hardware out of the equation and does a real stress test on the OS & applications.
I did this and believe me it is like night and day. The linux server ran without a hitch. The windows server was painfully slow. I guess being able to run all your apps without a gui is an advantage. Hell ssh versus terminal services is no contest. If you need a gui just tunnel vnc through ssh.
Oh did I mention the cost for the software?
Windows 2003 Server, Exchange 2000, SQL 2000,
Plus the added bonus of checking technet for patches twice daily.
Not at all. As long as you get work done, hit your milestones, etc, people dont really care if you run linux, or netware, or OS/2, or a mac, or whatever else floats your boat.
Linux is the current favorite, mostly because there are lots of people with a unix background running around, and its hard to get management to spring for macs or other unix hardware; everyone has 3 or 4 pcs around though, and throwing linux on one of them is not at all uncommon.
So, I'm not looking for a finished product, but something that I can call my own. For me, that's Debian 2.2, fvwm2 (on that now, with Opera 6.03) I think it's great, and to me it's the journey rather than the destination.
Cheaper, too.
Isn't anybody else concerned that MS might have its technicians trying to find exploits in Linux round the clock, and whenever there's one to be found, they code a workable exploit script/program and release it for the kiddies?
That way, they could make a nifty point at how Linux is less secure. Over time, this could become really annoying.
Of course, I'm assuming that they have the competence to find exploits in other people's software and not in their own. But this is MS, so it wouldn't be surprising to have more R&D money flowing to "Linux Exploit Dept" than to "Windows Security Dept".
Oh well. Tinfoil hat is getting hot now. Must be them again!
I'm an employee. There's no reason for me to respond anonymously: the corporate policy is well publicized.
.el files to keep things clean. His attitude is that it's easier for him to keep using a tool which he recommends other developers avoid than it is to learn a newer and more efficient tool. I've asked him if he ever received any pressure to change. His answer was, "Never. [Our boss] doesn't care what we use to write code; he cares that we write code."
Internally, corporate policy has always been that we can use whatever tools we want, provided that they serve the purposes of our jobs best. The only restriction under which we work is that developers or other people who have direct check-in rights to any of our trees (think "committer privileges"; it's the closest thing in the FOSS world) are not permitted to examine code released under GPL or any other viral license.
So, yes, for testing interop, we have a lot of Linux/Apache boxes around. We have a lot of Perl. (We've been supporting ActiveState for years, after all.) If there were a competitive FOSS compiler available, I'm sure that some groups would use it. There isn't. We've certainly had teams do comparitive analyses.
One of the developers in my group is a forty-something year old guru who run XEmacs on his main dev machine. Whenever he reformats his machine, he does a pure binary install and deletes the
Maybe he's drunk too much of the KoolAid -- but my experience tracks his. Think about it. Why would we care? If one of our gurus is more productive using XEmacs, that is at worst a data point for the Visual Studio folks.
Seriously, though, if M$ thought they could profit from Linux they'd be using it in their products already and biting the GPL bullet. Or figuring out a strategy to get the GPL tossed out so they could use other strategies to be able to use the code.
They really wouldn't need to do that. If they were seriously interested in competing in the open source realm, they could go the BSD route, like Apple did.
Wouldn't it be fun to see a Microsoft OS based on Darwin?
Hey, it was just a thought. Nevermind.
You are as whacked as these guys (read more at http://evidence-eliminator-sucks.com)
Since atleast October 6, 2002.
another example (a linux router for a day??)
a little freebsd in the mix
Gee... Could this be Microsofts attempt to find every little bug they can so that they can start an FUD campaign about how buggy opensource software is?
Knowing Microsoft and their best interests, this is merely an exercise to find any possible weaknesses of Linux and open software they could then authoritatively use on paper. Microsoft probably has another lab where they really compare Linux with Windows, and paste good code over.
But look at the situation in a positive light. Who better to criticize the weaker points of Linux than Microsoft?
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Tell that to my Pentium 4 system that ran Windows 2000 Pro from the day it was released until the day I got Windows XP. Rarely crashed. And I even play games on 2000. No probs.
So, what happened when I installed Windows XP (clean install! not upgrade!!). The filesystem mysteriously self destructed about 2 weeks later. The system wouldn't boot. Couldn't repair it in the recovery console. FSCK! Went back to Windows 2000 Pro... the system has been happy ever since.
They're not afraid they'll lose their source for their entire product line. They ARE however afraid that they will lose the source for a single product.
Your interpretation of the GPL also differs quite a bit from the way most people here interpret it. The typical interpretation I read is "if you put GPL code in your software that you release as a binary, you have to release the source, no exceptions." Since nobody has taken it to court yet, nobody knows if it can be enforced that strictly -- and likely, as you suggest, nobody would force MS to release the source code for, say, Office.
However the risk IS there, and they'd be incredibly stupid if they did have a policy that allowed a single employee to open MS up to that kind of damage.
Something I always wondered is...
Since Microsoft products are all closed source, who the hell would ever find out if Microsoft was using GPLed code in any of their products?
AFAIK, there's really no way to tell... for all I know, they could have been using GPL code for quite a while and no one would ever notice.
Also, I don't know what CowboyNeal is thinking but if Microsoft deploys linux in a lab, it's most likely to demonstrate that they can break it or that their products are superior or simply to find more information about what they're up against... I seriously doubt the entire management team at Microsoft got hammered one night and decided to help out the linux community by submitting patches to their only real competitor...
I mean come on... it's like BMW helping out GMC and teaching them how to build cars... not really a business model.
So anyway, let's be realistic instead of hoping Microsoft will port all their products to Open Source, submit patches to help out linux, and offer free training to all customers wanting to "upgrade" to MS-Linux...
If the GPL gets "tossed out", then no-one can use the code - that's how it works. The only rights granted to third parties are those given under the GPL; thus, if the GPL is found to be legally unenforceable, nobody other than the original author has any rights to that code.
They will probably put Red Hat 6.0 with "everything" installed. Hey, even an M$ tech can figure that one out, right?
All kidding asside, this lab is getting set up because they were tired of how lame their lies were. It was so obvious their FUDsters have no clue. They can't even hire a PR firm to lie for them as is.
Check out the quality of the FUD from just a few articles back in Computerworld The poor meat head tell about chasing down M$ worms and finding "rogue" computers running Linux. Though he's forced to run all over the place by Windoze poor remote administration tools, he worries about the security of boxes he did not know about because they never had a problem. He worries about the security of "third-party" applications like " file transfer protocol, sendmail and Apache. And other open-source software ..." Total cluelessness. They don't know what they are talking about, so they can't lie about it. It's as simple as that.
Their biggest problem is going to be finding people with both the comptence to run their lab and the the ability to lie enough to please meat heads like Steve Balmer. The truth, "dude, this is kicking our ass." is something they already know and don't want to hear. I can just hear Mr. Baller, "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard, tell me something bad about it, bitch or you are out of here!" Yeah, everything I read about life at M$ is like that, they call such abuse "elite". It must take a really wierd combination of high intelegence, low self esteem, big ego, bad morals, and greed to put up with that.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
My guess is they will create another fud attack by studying its weaknesses and then pay someone like the Gartner group to set for the same results under a limited condition and boom. Instand fud, WIndows2k3 can do this but Linux can't.
WindowsNT4 could handle the i/o of 4 ethernet cards by bounding the i/o commands to each cpu. Linux could not so under this ms sponsored Mindcraft fud the Linux box performed poorly while NT was 300% faster.
http://saveie6.com/
What crap. You are talking about a company that got it's start from dumpster diving someone else's BASIC. Their whole business model is raping what they call "loss leaders" and publically state they will never enter a "market" untill it's "mature", in other words, they stay out of a technology until someone else has done all the work. Then they come in with the famous $500,000 check to aquire, shutdown or destroy ala Netscape, DRDOS and others. They also advocate "Extreem Programming" in which source code is not touched for the most part, only modified slightly. I imagine that most M$ developer time is put in trying to "integrate" the vast Byzantine raft of other people's code that they have aquired, one way or another. Yeah, and they steal code too, that's why they keep losing lawsuits.
Either you are deluded enough to think M$ cares about anyone or you are an Astroturfer. What version is the Steve Barkto program up to?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Since Microsoft products are all closed source, who the hell would ever find out if Microsoft was using GPLed code in any of their products?
AFAIK, there's really no way to tell... for all I know, they could have been using GPL code for quite a while and no one would ever notice.
Well, to help answer your question:
1) Microsoft has over 54000 employees. Around 10% of which are temporary contractors whose contracts can't go over a year. That's quite a few people who could snitch.
2) As long as you sign a NDA, you too can see the source code for Windows NT for academic purposes.
3) Source code is regularly licensed to other companies and governments.
4) The embedded products are compiled by the customer!
5) Microsoft is very visible, people reverse engineer parts of Microsoft software all the time.
6) The legal liability scares Microsoft to death! A couple years ago they went so far as to decree that no Microsoft programmer is allowed to even look at GPL code, let alone contribute to a GPL project on personal time. One programmer I know had to have his manager hire a contractor to reverse engineer sample code for a netscape plug-in because the sample code was GPLed and he wasn't allowed to look at it!
It'd be cool to see some patches come from Redmond, but that's probably wishful thinking.
Yes. Yes that really is just wishful thinking. That's not the way Microsoft does business. Instead, they'll:
- research the Linux apps thoroughy,
- determine if the Linux apps really are better in any obvious ways (read: the marketing dept. can't pull the wool over potential customers' eyes with fake numbers in these areas)
- Now, with this info, they'll make their code just barely good enough to show that it's better than the equilvelent Linux version.
They can do it. They'll look at Linux source and modify it if necessary. And, if they do that, no they won't give it back to the community and yes they will get away with a GPL violation.If you think Microsoft isn't willing to do this sort of thing, you're living in a dream world with "lots of fru-fru, happy bunnies."
DISCLAIMER: I AM WEARING ASBESTOS THOUGH I DO NOT HOLD A MATCH:
This post is not intended as troll or a flame. It is not a statement of fact. It is, of course, only my (strongly worded) opinion.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
"fighting" Linux? Do you mean competing in the marketplace? ;-)
:)
.NET CLR for Windows, MacOSX and FreeBSD). With DRM supported in hardware (read Palladium), in a few years, it might be possible for an individual to obtain (possibly for just CD shipping costs) the Windows source code on CD (requiring DRM to provide a "secure" viewing environment). Yeah, not open source, but giving the individual developer insight into the internals of the OS.
Windows is currently a 10+ billion dollar a year business for Microsoft. They would be crazy to not milk that business for all it is worth. Why do anything to damage that business? And how do you make money selling Linux? (Microsoft most likely makes more money selling games than Red Hat's current annual revenue. No joke--Flight Simulator alone is a big money maker.
But Microsoft can read the writing on the wall: the future of PC operating systems is a two horse race between Windows and Linux. By the end of the decade, Windows and Linux will split the market probably 50/50 (at least in the server OS space).
Microsoft would do well to learn what attributes of Linux make it successful and apply similar ideas to Windows. For example:
1) better (and more personal) community support--this is already happening with MS engineer's blogs (blogs.gotdotnet.com) and participation in newsgroups.
2) Better turnaround with patches--we're seeing this with important security fixes, but not with general bug fixes. (Frankly, it's currently very expensive to provide fixes for issues that are requested by only one or a few individuals. Microsoft will likely move that kind of support off-shore in the coming years to make it financially feasible.)
3) Opening up source code--they've taken some baby steps in this regard with the Windows CE codebase and the Rotor project (implementation of
4) Enabling customers to create customized builds of Windows with only components needed. Microsoft will likely support this eventually--they've already taken the first steps with Windows XP Embedded, where the OS is componentized enabling vendors to assemble only the components needed (although MS still has a lot of work to make the components and dependencies smaller, more granular).
The point is, it's healthy for Windows and Linux to compete against each other in the marketplace and to absorb and build on the other's best ideas.
Peace.
It is a free world. Nobody is holding a gun to your head and telling you to run Windows.
I'm sorry that you are so pissed off at Microsoft. In some situations (not all) they have better solutions. I would prefer a friendlier EULA too, but other companies are much worse.
Microsoft doesn't insist on Winmodems - the cheap modem manufacturers do.
Don't believe everything you read in The Register (and yes, I had previously read that Hotmail case, attended a couple talks on it, read a few internal reports, and watched the team I work in make improvements based on suggestions provided by the Hotmail team.
There are thousands of people at Microsoft who are passionate and personally dedicated to improving their software.
If you want to talk about quality problems, subscribe to bugtraq and watch the linux security problem annoucements come in, usually 10+ per day!
If you want Microsoft to leave you alone, that's fine too. I used to be rabidly anti-microsoft like you are, but then I actually talked to a few people that worked there and found out that it is a really nice place to work where almost everyone is very interested in producing a quality product.
And for the record, I still use linux every day and have a variety of unix boxen on my home network.
AOL and Compuserv also started as competitors to the Internet.
I don't know about AOL, but Compuserve was there way before the web (read: way before the average user could get a hold of the WWW.). In many mind it is a precursor (read: did address the masses before the internet)
AOL is far more successful than the other two at winning at that contest.
Well, AOL embraced the internet, it is no longer a competitor.
I would rate MSN a distant third to the two above at 'embrace and extend' as far as the Internet is concerned.
Does someone atually use it?
Seriously, MSN was very late in the game. They just pay the price today of their strategic error (not believing in the networks and the internet)
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Lets forget about the jokes. And instead lets try to imagine, what Microsoft Linux would really be like, if it was ever released.
I'm pretty sure it would include patches to the kernel, and they might even play by the rules and release the source for those. But there might very well be some closed source kernel modules as well. In addition you will not be allowed to copy those kernel modules. We can start guessing about what modules there will be. But I'm pretty sure one of them would be an ntfs driver.
Microsoft could get their usual GUI to run on top of Linux. Since others have done most of it, Microsoft could do it as well. The exact details about how Microsoft would do it are not easy to guess. They could use parts of Wine, but maybe, Microsoft want to do it another way. If they are going to use Wine, they could either use the latest version, or the last non GPL version.
But Microsoft could take a completely different route and not use any Wine code at all, instead they could use as much of the existing Windows code as possible. I wonder if this would be best done in a library or a kernel module. Probably they would like a real binfmt_exe.o kernel module with its own personality. It is probably going to map some large DLLs into the process address space, and maybe even some shared memory.
I believe programs written for Windows when running on this Microsoft Linux will have access to some NTFS features, that are not easilly accesible by normal Linux programs. It could be done either by the closed source library knowing about some secret ioctl implemented by msntfs.o, or by cooperation between msntfs.o and binfmt_exe.o. Possibly a combination; an ioctl, which is not only secret, but also only allowed to programs running with the exe personality.
I wonder what graphics drivers are going to look like. I guess they will probably ship with closed source kernel modules implementing drivers for various graphics chips. But of course they are probably going to be incompatible with XFree86. And might even prevent the ones needed for XFree86 from being loaded at the same time.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Microsoft has managed to corner the desktop market, and that is there main reason of their success. It is not the Windows produc, but rather the fact that the customer has no other viable choices but to buy Microsoft. If Microsft switches to Linux or bsd, consumers would still buy from them and for the same reasons! When he PC comes preintalled, and all your friends use this thing, and you have no (easy) alternatives, it makes not difference if the product is Windows, OSX, or Linux. Whatever the the name of the product, Microsoft's success is the same (at verious levels of degree, but that is mostly a secondary detail.)
What Microsoft should be doing is porting the Windows API to the Linux kernel - a sort of official MS version of Wine. They won't have to GPL this as you're explicitly allowed to run proprietary apps on top of the Linux kernel. They'd keep control over the lucrative win32 API, while farming off the production of the underlying OS to a raft of unpaid hackers.