Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft to 'Support and Usurp' Unix
qedramania writes "Computerworld has a report on the latest Windows server release and their Unix strategy." From the article: "R2 is built on the Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 and is geared towards specific workloads such as storage management, branch office server management, as well as identity and access management. It also provides a subsystem which supports Posix applications."
Will they get more than an '80% POSIX complaint' OS out of this effort?
And does anyone who uses a real UNIX actually care?
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
So how come Jeremy Allinson and the other SAMBA guys have such a problem getting technical details out of Microsoft about the inner workings of SMB for their product that allows "Windows interoperability with Unix"???
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I think Microsoft is *very* interested in being compatible with Linux. If Windows can become the very best choice for heterogenous networks, then it becomes an easy decision for *any* users and *any* network. The default question when making a buying decision will be "What compatibility bug prevents us using Windows here?". If there isn't one, they'll buy Windows.
Part of the reason for enterprises to choose Linux so far has been "It works in nearly any point in our network, so we can always just install Linux servers". Since purchase price is not a big issue for business users, the only downside to Windows would be client access licenses. If they got rid of those and bumped up the initial purchase price of Windows server systems, Linux would be hurt very, very badly.
So typical of Microsoft - it's 2006, and to compete with Linux they start offering Telnet clients rather than something actually useful and secure like ssh. I can picture the sales calls and interviews right now, "well, they insisted they wanted Linux compatibility, it's not our fault that Linux telnet is so insecure, if only you had done your implementations the Windows way."
I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress -J Adams
>> Microsoft has had a POSIX subsystem for ages. It's called Windows Services for UNIX, and it works quite nicely. It's not a new thing.
Just to drive the point home;
Where is fork() ?
Oh, and is fork() POSIX ? Yes, it is. CreateProcess doesn't really change that.
This is an excellent point. I manage a few dozen mixed servers (Windows, Linux, Solaris) that fall into one of three categories: Production applications (web, database, email, etc); Testing for the production applications; and various utility services (internal ftp, service monitoring, backup etc).
The utility servers are without exception Linux because they can be made compatible with any or all of my other systems with very little work and with no capital cost. Currently, Windows isn't even on the radar when it comes to setting a machine like this up because I know that it won't play nice with my Sun boxes and if I want it to talk to a production Linux server, I have to make changes to the production server, not the utility server. If MS made some strides toward making Windows work well with other systems, the Linux option would no longer be a slam dunk and we could better assess the Right Tool for the Job.
No, no no! They're going to *innovate* Unix. Get it right!!!!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
...but I still don't see the big differentiator here that'll convince a UNIX shop to adopt Windows over the latest iteration of their existing platform.
.NET experts recommend using XML-based, application-specific .config files over the monolithic registry). The Monad shell promises to be quite powerful and could address the severe shortcomings of the existing command shell and allow the OS to run usefully without a GUI. POSIX/UNIX compatibility will be further developed...and so on.
This isn't a really huge move actually--it is just more of the same "bundling" stuff that Microsoft has done with its OSes forever (applets in Win 3.0 is where it started and now we have Media Player, IE, firewall, etc). Microsoft has finally seen how successful projects like Cygwin have eaten into its SFU market space, and relatively speaking SFU has been a mild failure for Microsoft. W2K3 R2 now simply bundles an improved SFU right into its OS distribution and is betting that customers will be "lazy" enough to use their solution rather than adopt 3rd party solutions like Cygwin.
I do not think this will accelerate the demise of UNIX all that much though...I think that this will simply be more appealing to customers who are already migrating towards a Microsoft solution from legacy UNIX systems. Using Win2k3 as a drop-in replacement for a UNIX box simply because you can doesn't seem justified here, even if licensing and hardware costs are lower than for, say, SUN/Solaris. THe description just sounds like a model of inefficiency to me: All the UNIX stuff runs outside the kernel and still seems "bolted on". You have all this powerful hardware and all the work is being done by these bolt-ons and you still have the Windows kernel, fancy GUI and a load of services and drivers to support what you might not tough more than 5% of the time when in production. The only way that sounds appealing to me is if you are migrating to Windows and have new critical enterprise applications that run in the Windows environment alongside UNIX legacy apps.
Windows will only TRULY "ursurp UNIX" when it TRULY adopts a UNIX-like architecture: It has to un-couple all the client-ish stuff (well all of its components really) and offer tools to support this more modular architecture. W2K3 R2 is not nearly there yet. However, MS is definitely heading closer in that direction: The windows registry is essentially deprecated as of the release of Vista (it is supported but is considered "legacy support"...a lot of
"Vista Server" (or whatever they call it) won't be totally there but the one after that will be close enough...Windows server will NEVER become just another UNIX clone, but out of necessity it'll probably evolve into a very UNIX-like architecture that uses proprietary/"extended" protocols, languages, libraries, interfaces...