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."
I guess Slashdot's picture of Gates as a Borg is applicable more now than ever
My work here is dung.
If you can't beat them, join them!
-- Cheers!
i mean posix has been long available under NT, nothing new under the sun. Microsoft allready had als a fileserver update to have size limits on folders. In the end this is not unix specific it was user environments require.
There are a lot of similarities ofcourse however often they are result of standardisation, or the result of new technoligies, if you think about a SAN environments then folder based limits makes sence. I see more and more SAN's connected to MS networks.
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
If it were anyone other than Microsoft I'd be happy about POSIX support, but you just know they're going to make it "MS-POSIX" or "POSIX++" or something stupid instead, and cause more incompatibility than they fix.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
Why do article submitters assume us UNIX guys know all the latest buzzwords and upstart companies in computing? For the uninitiated, Microsoft are a software publisher who sell a toy operating system called Windows.
How many programs were developed for UNIX (or Linux, or ...)? For example, Apache? Now runs on Windows. Postgresql? Now runs on Windows. There is a LARGE amount of formerly UNIX-only software, much of which is open source, that can now run on Windows. Microsoft is no dummy. They too, just like SCO, can leverage this software.
Open Source is a double edged sword -- it gives you a fantastic advantage, but at the same time, your competitors are free to use your software, your IP, your efforts. One hopes that the benefits outweigh the advantages to your competition.
The real strengths of Open Source are leveraging development and testing all over the world (lower product costs, time to market, code reuse, etc.), much lower marketing and sales costs (Internet distribution), and better quality (many eyes make all bugs shallow).
> A tu vieja le cabe, lo sabemos todos.
Something about CAB files and dying on Saturday, I think.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Microsoft's been doing Unix since Linus an elementary school kid playing with his Vic-20. It was the first Unix I used, running on Tandy hardware.
and it has always sUxx0rd. incomplete, poorly implemented, not really POSIX.
are they saying that they are doing it right now, or just pretending what is old is new?
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
For a full history of NT, Interix and SFU, see Should that not be GNU/Microsoft SFU?
It's not the dollar value itself that is the problem. It's getting approval. Somebody has to sign off on the purchase and make it happen.
Then there is the matter of storing and keeping track of those silly hologram cards that supposedly prove that you have valid licenses. It costs staff time to deal with that. If you screw up, and maybe even if you don't, the BSA shows up with a bunch of US Marshals (or non-US equivalent).
...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...