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.
Is a Microsoft flavor of Linux coming? It could be this week's sign of the Apocalypse.
www.freshlymixed.com
...that this will be a venue to generate more FUD as well as an attempt to get a competitive edge? Am I just paranoid or what?
Keep your enemy close to you so you can keep your eye(s) on it. A wise move by Microsoft.
that they did not bother to look at it so far?
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
...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
from the article: 'In an effort to better understand its main source of competition'
IMO The problem with MS is they no longer understand the customer
------
beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master
It's actually being emulated within Windows XP... that way engineers are exposed to a "regular" rate of crashing and don't get too suspicious.
The last thing Microsoft wants is for its engineers to switch over themselves.
The suggestions that this is an attempt to create FUD seem a bit off the mark to me. I'm sure MS aren't going to be touting the benefits of Linux, but in a closed environment they have far more to gain from honest testing and competition than they do from convincing a very small number of customers, presumably devoted ones, that Linux sucks.
Were they do do that, they'd just end up looking like fools. And while marketing may help in the desktop market, those who spend large amounts of corporate money on enterprise software research it thoroughly. MS won't beat Linux in the server market just by marketing, no matter how much they spend. They know that, and have clearly decided to take Linux seriously as a competitor.
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;
diff -urN ms-linux/CREDITS linux/CREDITS
/*
--- ms-linux/CREDITS Wed Jul 31 17:39:29 2001
+++ linux/CREDITS Wed Jul 31 17:41:45 2001
@@ -973,8 +973,8 @@
-ALL YOUR BASE
+BELONGS TO US
*/
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
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
Maybe they could put in a patch that would make Linux display a friendly blue screen when it crashes instead of a kernel panic message. Embrace and extend!
Wow, somebody actually did pay SCO to license and use Linux!
--That's the point of being root, you can do anything you want, even if it's stupid.
First Linux gets deployed for testing in a test lab at Microsoft.
In order to get it's performance down to a level that they can compare Microsoft software to it they start storing internal documents on it and tell internal users to use that store to stay current.
Since the internal servers are now getting fewer hits, they start consolidating some of the services they had spread across several servers onto fewer servers, freeing up those servers.
A few of the free servers get rouge installs of Linux with Samba, and people discover that they can actually store files on these servers with some reliable expectation of seeing the files again a couple of minutes down the line.
The Micorsoft Win2k+3 servers start to respond even faster to the test systems and more consolidation goes on.
Someone in the test lab isn't happy that the Linux boxes are still outperforming the Win2k+3 boxen, so he convinces management to use them as DHCP servers for the campus.
This frees up even more of the internal Win2k+3 servers from consolidation, and someone says, let's show that SQL Server is better than (insert favorite Open Sourc or proprietary RDB engine that runs on Linux here) and people in the company realize they are actually getting close to real time results off of these servers, and start migrating applications over to them.
Since Microsoft is trying to move to a dbfs anyway, even more of the internal infrastructure starts getting moved over to Linux as the original Microsoft OS servers are relieved of the duties that they were originally tasked with.
Marketing comes along and asks how the new Windows 2K+3 is going, and IT is able to say with a straight face:
"We were able to consolidate the entire campus server farm down to a single system runing Win2k+3. And since no-one in house is actually using it, response time and recovery from failures has become a non-issue. We are saving millions of dollars every year because the quiet migration to an all Linux infrastructure has reduced the actual demand for systems to the point that we have been able to reduce our electrical usage by shutting down systems and reducing the demands on the cooling systems significantly. Our phone support teams are somewhat confused as they are getting calls about server issues that they have never experienced, however our developers have been able to get Win2k+3 running on a VMWare image under Linux and we have been able to simulate the issues that customers have been experiencing, without actually loosing any data or having any significant down time."
Marketing, "Huh?".
Ok, it's not likely to happen, but we can fantasize.
-Rusty
You never know...