Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Warms Up to Linux
prostoalex writes "InfoWorld reports that despite warming to the OS, Microsoft won't be releasing its own distribution of Linux any time soon. From the article: "Hilf acknowledged that Microsoft's commitment to Windows does not preclude the company from continuing a strategy he has led in his 19 months at the software vendor: To see how Microsoft's proprietary technologies can better interoperate with Linux and a host of other open-source software. In fact, that is exactly what will be the focus of a discussion the long-time open-source proponent will lead at this year's upcoming Linuxworld Conference & Expo next month in San Francisco. In a session entitled, 'Managing Linux in a Mixed Environment ... at Microsoft?' Hilf, who polished his open-source evangelism skills working on Linux deployments at IBM Corp., will talk about how he and the team at the Linux/Open Source lab run open source technologies in "the most Microsoft-centric IT environment on the planet." "
They'll have to provide a version of Linux signed with the endorsement key for the Palladium/TCPA/NGCSB platform so they can pretend that it's not about DRM and vendor lock-in.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
"Microsoft won't be releasing its own distribution of Linux any time soon."
I've got to admit, if they were, Windows running on the Linux kernel with some gnu apps and a bash shell (without cygwin of course), would be pretty snazzy.
Why else do you think they've hired four Gentoo people over the past six months?
This is surprisingly soon after this article in which M$ repeatedly bashed Linux:s html?tid=109&tid=187&tid=106
http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/05/07/21/1218247.
Microsoft: "Oh shit, that last statement hurt our PR right before the Vista Beta release...guess we'd better warm up now!"
Only if they paid ATI and NVIDIA to improve their Linux drivers . ,this is perhaps what needs the most improvement in the proprietary drivers. That and getting the actual support for the newer models .
If MS does a Linux distro (shudder) then basically what you have is a linux distro , even if they port the entire API the drivers would still need rewritten for the kernel .
Anyway I have rarely had that much trouble with graphics cards over the last couple of years on linux , NVIDIA are certainly far ahead of ATI in this respect , but my laptop which has a radeon 9000 mobility in works fine including openGL hardware support.
Installing it is still a very daunting task for a novice user i would imagine
It would be nice to have them GPL their drivers , but i don't see that happening either
So all in all , if MS does release a linux distro it will still be the linux kernel with a windows GUI perhaps and perhaps a port of the API , of course this could raise a whole host of other issues . but that's another story
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Ok, the deal is that Microsoft has deicded that they can't beat Linux in the market place if they attack it head on, so instead they have decided to co-opt it. The problem is that sooner or later Linux and FOSS alternatives are going to be eating into every one of Microsotfs main revenue streams and the pressure for Microsoft to "do something" about it will be insane. I doubt they will sit there and happily get along as billions in revenue streams are slowly chocked off.
Hilf said that Microsoft now has a far better understanding of how technologically diverse customer environments are than it did several years ago, and is more open-minded than ever about making sure its products interoperate with competitive ones such as Linux
Yea because Microsoft has a great history of being open-minded about other products competing with it's own. From my understanding they have two tools they use with any competing product, they either buy it, or break it.
*DrugCheese rants*
Some settling may occur during posting.
I'm afraid there's something very wrong here. And I'm sure many of the /. crowd have this gut feeling too.
In one of the Halloween Documents http://www.opensource.org/halloween/ ESR talks about Microsoft being asleep at the switch. They are waking up it seems.
Just embrace and extend? That too.
They're cooking something alright. This time it won't be just FUD campaigns.
The shops with the technical expertise to do this have already done so. The target market for MS-Linux would be shops that aren't Linux saavy. They need a simple, drop in distro. And I know that ~you~ think these distros already exist, but the lack of Linux market penetration says otherwise. Technical issues that you and I would take for granted are large hurdles to someone whose never been off of a MS OS.
Don't get me wrong... I'll be using KUbuntu myself :) but there are lots of straight MS shops out there...
Agile Artisans