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."
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.