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Microsoft to Stop Releasing Services for Unix
lilrowdy18 writes "According to a recent article, Microsoft will stop releasing any new versions of Services for Unix. SFU 3.5 will continue to be supported until 2011 and will have extended support until 2014. From what the article hints at, Microsoft wants Unix interoperability integrated into the OS. Microsoft says that this integration couldn't be done with past architectures."
Embrace and extend! UNIX is doomed! Mwahahahahaha!
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Microsoft are moving to it as well as Apple!
Imagine...what a novel concept...the ability to interact with a Unix system...they should patent that!
Dave
And if you really need a real Unix / Linux on XP then colinux can provide it running at near-native performance.
The eWeek article is just a summary. The full story is here.
I support a Solaris based printer, and with SFU 3.5 I can make the customer's Windows server host the jobs, and make them responsible for the NFS server, while all I have to do is add one line to vfstab. This is one good thing Microsoft has done (and Slashdot, I first read of them freeing it here).
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
Hmmm, when Windows NT was still new, there were great plans to implement not only the win32 API, but also the DOS and win16 APIs, and even POSIX! All of these were implemented to some extent, but the POSIX personality never reached a state where it was really usable.
Knowing that, and knowing all the announcements that Microsoft has been making about great new features that were going to be in Longhorn, and the subsequent withdrawal of nearly all of those features, I find it hard to believe that Microsoft will be providing POSIX compliance in Windows.
Of course, there's always Cygwin. And BTW, what came of CoLinux?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The negative spin is right there in the headline - makes it sound like MS is dropping Unix interop support, when in fact they're integrating it more tightly into the Windows core to improve it.
Will this mean poorer unix services? In the pre-OS X days, Apple File Services (AFS) for Windows was always years out-of-date, making Windows clients perform better than Apple clients on networks with Windows servers. The result was that poor-performing Mac clients soon disappeared. The truly paranoid might think MS did this on purpose or that MS had something to gain by keeping AFS out-of-date. ...but it was just business and allocation of resources, Right? Just happened to work out that way.
Instead of Microsoft SFU, perhaps it would be better known as Microsoft STFU?
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Everytime I read "SFU", my brain tried to parse it as "STFU"...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
but reinventing it. By moving this capability into the OS instead of hosting it as a parallel OS on the same kernel, they will gain performance and increase integration.
This is actually just one more example of an acceleration of rumors of Longhorn features. The rumors were that Longhorn would be able to run Unix applications and, specifically, x86 Linux binaries without recompilation. It looks now like at least a portion of that capability will appear in SP2 for Win 2003 Server a full year before Vista release.
Why pity them? They will still be supported for another 6 years (9 if they want extended support). They just aren't releasing any new versions of it.
Even still, some of the next-gen SFU functionality is being integrated into Windows Server 2003 R2. It's not the end of unix interoperability from Microsoft, just this derivation of it.
It was released in January of 2004, so mainstream support should end 2009, extended support ends 2014. Sounds like they decided to extend mainstream support 2 years to 2011 and still end extended support in 2014. No conspiracy to see here.
Microsoft says that this integration couldn't be done with past architectures.
Because, unbeknownced to the world, Microsoft is using a BSD kernel in Vista.
Use Cygwin.
"the POSIX personality never reached a state where it was really usable"
;)
Wasn't this needed in order for Windows to be used by certain US governmental agencies that stipulated that all OSs they used must have POSIX compliance. If I'm right in thinking that they must have been accredited with being POSIX compliant from someone so it can't have been all that bad...
You're right that Cygwin's the way to go though. I'm hoping that one day Microsoft will resurrect Xenix and port the Win32 API to it
I think that Microsft has looked at how well Apple has used BSD in their OS offering, and the wheel began turning.
They have been targetting Unix for a while, and this is aimed squarely at killing off Unix as a viable alternative inside of 5 years, as Win for Workgroups was aimed at Novell. Their other target are the switchers from Unix who tend to gravitate towards BSD or Linux. Doing this will give an option that will be quite tempting, given their installed base.
Off course, could be a bit more smoke and mirrors designed to bait switchers....
Just my two cents.
For every present, there is a past
``I don't know about now, but at the time Microsofot did the POSIX implementation it wasn't so much that MS version of it was useless, it was more that the spec itself was useless. It did not have things like printing and network access, so in all reality not one single useful application in the world could say it was POSIX compliant.''
Wow, slow down for a bit. You're saying three different things here and presenting them as a single argument.
First, your argument that POSIX is useless. Certainly, POSIX does not standardize everything under the sun. That wouldn't be possible, and it wouldn't be a good idea either. That doesn't make it "useless". It standardizes the interface to a lot of system functionality, from basic file I/O to sockets, threads and shared memory. This facilitates porting of applications between conformant systems - for many applications, the core functionality would not need to be rewritten for a new system. POSIX-compliance is what causes most open-source software to quickly spread to all alternative operating systems, whereas it takes a long time to get ported to Windows.
Then, the point about the Microsoft POSIX implementation being useless. Last I read about it, it said that the POSIX personality and the win32 personality were basically completely isolated from one another. POSIX process ids are separate from win32 process ids, POSIX processes cannot start win32 processes, and communication between the two types of processes is difficult. In addition, large parts of POSIX were unimplemented, which means that many POSIX apps simply wouldn't work on NT.
And then the claim that no single application in the world can claim to be POSIX-compliant. Well, just because not everything in an application is also specified in POSIX doesn't make it not POSIX compliant. As long as everything that is in POSIX is also done the POSIX way in the application, it can be called POSIX-compliant. And for the record, there are hordes of applications that are purely POSIX; basically any Unix command-line program or daemon is a good candidate.
Finally, an interesting bit of knowledge: although POSIX is typically associated with Unix-like systems, there are other systems that are POSIX-compliant, too. IBM's MVS and VMS are two examples.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
As a mostly-Linux developer who has done his share of Linux->Windows porting, the lack of fork() and pipe() are easily the most irritating aspects of programming for Windows.
Oftentimes in security code, you want to know which process is speaking to you on the other end of a pipe. Under Linux, this is very easy. Under Windows, it is a huge bear, not the least reason for which is that Windows lacks the concept of a named pipe, so you have to make something up based on shared memory or some other such garbage.
And fork()... well, as anyone who has written a fork()-based program (i.e., one that doesn't just exec() right after forking) knows, this entirely changes the structure of the application. Yukk.
Last I head, pipe() and fork() are both POSIX, so I hope these system calls appear when Microsoft takes the plunge and replaces their crappy kernel and API with something closer to UNIX. Given how long UNIX has been around and how much important software exists for it and is being developed daily (mostly on Linux and MacOS these days), I can't wait until we can finally declare system API "victory" and move the fight to something that causes much less irritation for developers.
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Bill Gates' SWOT ANALYSIS:
Strengths:
1. Marketing == Massive propaganda machine.
2. Proprietary == Huge market penetration.
3. Rich applications == User lock-in.
Weaknesses:
1. Bloated and frankly god-awful code-base
2. Expensive to maintain, insecure etc
3. Cant really afford to start from scratch
4. Cant steal Linux due to GPL
Opportunities:
1. Use BSD
2. Convert some UNIX/Linux/BSD sites
3. Remove some barriers to entry at UNIX shops
Threats:
1. Linux
2. IBM
3. Open Sourcerors
The logical BUSINESS APPROACH is this:
1. Grab BSD.
2. Break the interfaces.
3. Call it "WinBSD".
4. Creat compatibility layer: "WinBSD-API"
5. Patent "WinBSD-API" so you now own WinBSD
6. Trivial porting exercise
7. Brand it like youve never branded before
What does this give you?
-It gives you something that looks like Windows and works like Windows, but is better than it.
-It leaves you with all your existing apps and protocols still working at minimal update cost.
-It means your customers expensively bought/developed apps will still work.
-It give UNIX shops one less reason to reject windows as a solution.
-It locks out OS/3rd party developers due to the broken (and patented) WinBSD interface.
-It offloads a large amount of knackered code.
Now add all this up and it gives MS EXACTLY what they have always strived for: Continuing user lock-in to the Windows monopoly while maintaining a very painful barrier to anyone else who wants to write for the platform.
Disclaimer: I am not an OS guru so there will be some technical issues with my analysis. Im just looking at it from a business point of view.
I wish at was Friday, but I dont want to wish my life away. So I wish it was last Friday.
Shouldn't it have been called Unix Services for Windows? In another example of MS marketing spin, they act as if SFU somehow does something for Unix, when it instead adds basic functionality to Windows. I used SFU for about 1 month. I still was so frustrated doing Fortran development under Windows that I wiped the drive and installed Linux.