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."

Comments

Yawn.

[Vengeance]

Will they get more than an '80% POSIX complaint' OS out of this effort?

And does anyone who uses a real UNIX actually care?

Anyone else see the contradiction?

[pandrijeczko]

At a recent media briefing in Singapore, David Lowe, senior product manager, Windows Server, Microsoft, cited interoperability with Unix as one of the key features of Windows Server 2003 R2.

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"???

Re:Anyone else see the contradiction?

[Azarael]

By interoperable they mean that Windows software will be able to make use of Unix software without having to give anything back in return. Otherwise known as a 'One way street'.

Re:The Borg Queen ... er ... King?

[Bloater]

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.

Re:The Borg Queen ... er ... King?

[ILikeRed]

To manage the applications, R2 will provide shells - a command language interpreter - to run Unix scripts and Telnet clients.

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."