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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.
...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.
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.
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!
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?