Windows Services For Unix Now Free Of Charge

pole writes "Version 3.5 of Services for Unix will be free. Previously, it was $99. This article at Information Week has the details. It contains an NFS client and server in addition to POSIX libraries and utilities including pthreads. Aside from the NFS utilities, how does the environment compare to Cygwin?" An anonymous reader adds links to coverage at News.com and at geek.com, writing "The reviews for these tools have been highly favorable. It looks like the next volley has been fired in the struggle between Windows and Linux."

Comments

bass ackwards

[Doc Ruby]

It's really "unix services" for "Windows". They can't even get the name right - what else did they screw up at the forge of Mordor?

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[account_deleted]

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Good business decision

[Dark Paladin]

This is probably a good thing for Microsoft: make it easier to run Unix (aka Posix) apps on their systems. Odds are, they walked into too many meetings like this:

Salesman: So, that's how much switching to Microsoft Server will cost.

IT Guy: Yeah, but then there's the development costs of porting over our Unix and Linux stuff over.

Salesman: Who needs it! We've got IIS!

IT Guy: Yeah, but we developed our own apps or used some open source stuff -

Salesman: Agggghhh! We speak not its name!

IT Guy: Um, right. Anyway, now we'd have to redevelop those for Windows. How much does that Unix thing cost on Microsoft?

So now the answer is "free". I'm not saying I like Windows servers over Unix-style boxen - but this was a good business choice for MS.

Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.

Great Acronym! SFU!

[slacy]

Wow, what a great acronym, and I'm quite surprised that they seem to be actually using it externall!

Anyone who disagrees with microsoft can just SFU! I mean, install SFU from microsoft.com.

(Just in case somebody missed it, SFU = Shut the F**k Up.)

Windows needs more apps

[mattkime]

This great news for those windows users out there. It will be surely provide much needed apps for this upstart operating system. Now, whenever someone says, "Windows? But what can I do with it?" you can point out that they can run their favorite unix apps.

Yeah, MS marketing director is clever indeed...

[plj]

..as he mentions that "very few of our customers are going to have a pure Unix or pure Windows environment".

Previously, I used to think that at least half of the MS customers or so would have a pure Unix environment. Thanks for enlightening me, Dennis!

Hmm...

[cperciva]

POSIX environment... C compiler... you know, it should be possible to get my depenguinator to work here.

I'm not sure about being able to write the filesystem image to disk, Windows might not allow that.

Re:I have had unix tools for windows for a long ti

[Bingo Foo]

one word, cwywin

Ah, yes. The Welsh-centric fork of Cygwin.

Samba won't be popular until...

[Jahat]

it is ported to Windows. (BTW... Got this from some other post on Slashdot a long time ago)

Re:Great Acronym! SFU!

[Dave2 Wickham]

I've already heard it as STFU...

Anyway, it's still better than the Critical Update Notification Tool.

Re:Microsoft motives?

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

What do you want them to do?

Die, dissipate, dissolve, terminate, and ceace function.

Re:Microsoft motives?

[Chris Mattern]

What do you want them to do?

I've got a suggestion, but this is a family forum.

Chris Mattern

MS Conversation

[glenstar]

SFU PM: Wow! We had 50,000 downloads of SFU the first day.

BillG: Great! It looks like we have another winner on our hands. People sure do want that Unix stuff. Oh, wait...

SFU PM: erm...

BillG: You're fired.

Re:so lets make this simple

[Syberghost]

My experience of SFU was that it was much more reliable than Hummingbird's implementation of NFS client.

Almost anything is more reliable than Hummingbird's NFS.

Viewing the file in hex and yelling it out across the room to somebody else who types it back in is more reliable than Hummingbird's NFS.