Microsoft Trying To Appeal to the Unix Crowd?

DigDuality writes "With the news that Windows 2008 (recently discussed on Slashdot) will have GUI-less installs and be fully scriptable, that they've opened up their communication protocols for non-commercial usage and are providing a patent covenant (Redhat Responds), and now finally an interesting rumor floating around that Microsoft will be taking on GNU directly. Has Microsoft totally switched gears in how it is approaching the Unix and FOSS sector for direct competition? According to an anonymous email leaked from a Microsoft employee, it seems Microsoft will be developing a framework that will be completely GNU compatible. Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, said on Friday (23 February) that they are aiming to restore a Unix-like environment to its former proprietary glory, at the same time proving that Microsoft is committed to interoperability. Ballmer emphasized that Microsoft's new strategy is to provide users with a complete package, and this includes users who like Unix environments. According to the supposedly leaked email, UNG, which stands for UNG's not GNU, is set to be released late 2009."

Comments

Wow

[Renegade Lisp]

A rumour that sounds about as trustworthy as an e-mail from Nigeria.

Re:Wow

[ZeroFactorial]

Does Balmer actually understand the holy war he's getting the company into?

This is like Satan trying to appeal to Christians.

*nix users have already eaten the apple and realized they were duped.
If the Nigerian princes are right, I'd say it's time to sell your Microsoft stock.

Re:Wow

[diegocgteleline.es]

I don't agree. Microsoft IS trying to make Windows the best FOSS platform. The goal is not to be nice to FOSS, but to try to damage Linux. It's not me who says it, but Mary Jo Foley (who got it from a Microsoft), one of the most journalists experts in microsoft, if not the best. Quote:

"Microsoft is looking at open-source software (OSS) as just another flavor of independent software vendors (ISV) software. Microsoft's goal is to convince OSS vendors to port their software to Windows. But Microsoft doesn't want OSS software to just sit on top of Windows; the company wants this software to be tied into the Windows ecosystem by integrating with Active Directory, Microsoft Office, Expression designer tools, System Center systems-management wares and SQL Server database.

In cases where customers and software vendors want/need Linux to still be part of the picture for some reason, Microsoft will suggest they use Hyper-V, its forthcoming virtualization hypervisor, to run Linux and Linux-dependent applications.

Microsoft's OSS strategy makes a lot of sense for Microsoft. It's another way for Microsoft to try to make Linux obsolete, and not look as obviously ruthless doing so. And for OSS vendors who are selling a lot of their software on Windows -- Ramji repeated a couple of times that more than 50 percent of JBoss' business these days is from software running on Windows -- Microsoft's OSS push isn't a bad deal, either.

Re:Wow

[AKAImBatman]

This is like Satan trying to appeal to Christians.

Is that really that great of a description? I mean, Satan is depicted as putting money, power, wealth, women, and other temptations in front of Christians to tempt them from their path. He's also depicted as regularly succeeding.

I think the analogy you're looking for is something more along the lines of selling sno-cones to Eskimos.

Re:Wow

[AKAImBatman]

Long story short: "Embrace, extend, extinguish"

Re:Wow

[Andrzej Sawicki]

If anything it's a step on the way from Embrace to Extend. Later to be followed by Extingiush. I wonder, though, if the target isn't a tad too big this time. We'll see, I guess.

Re:Wow

[Bill_the_Engineer]

More like Yellow sno cones, being sold as lemon-aide.

Eskimo: Hey! This doesn't smell right!

Microsoft: Trust us, it's an improved lemon flavor.

Re:Wow

[The One and Only]

The way I see it, Microsoft is fighting. Which is step 3 of 4 in Ghandi's formula for success: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

What Gandhi left out is that, nine times out of ten, the fourth step is "then you're never heard from again".

Re:Wow

[incripshin]

I think Cygwin's full of too many hacks to be a good starting point. For instance, Windows programs have no ability to fork, and yet cygwin has a fork() implementation. Personally, I don't want GNU compatibility but POSIX compatibility. There are POSIX makefiles and there are GNU makefiles. The difference is that POSIX makefiles run everywhere, while GNU makefiles don't. Just the same, I try never use GNU-specific language features in gcc (I use -std=c89 or -std=c99 with -pedantic). GNU hinders interoperability, themselves. It would be good if a Microsoft-developed make (there is nmake, but I don't know how it works at all) had a POSIX mode and a GNU+POSIX mode, in the same way that GCC allows by use of -std=XXX -pedantic flags to disable GNU extensions.

Also, Microsoft's library model is positively nutty. Static libraries are stored as a big .lib file, while shared libraries are stored as a small .lib file together with a .dll file. Unix has .a and .so files, respectively. Inter-operable makefiles need simpler compilation systems than having three kinds of library files.

Re:Wow

[mikael]

Microsoft did try this before when they first brought out Windows NT. They provided a very minimal shell environment along with some unix emulation commands (make, ls, df, du, vi) as well as being able to get OpenGL drivers ported over. The idea was to provide these commands to get the applications ported over, and then to silently withdraw the suppport once the applications were ported.

There are still emulation libraries by Cygwin and MKS

Shell scripts are Microsofts weakness. Microsoft held off from including Monad into Vista for security fears. This was in a previous Slashdot discussion

Re:Wow

[evil_neanderthal]

[0] Unix
[1] GNU: Gnu's Not Unix
[2] UNG: Ung's Not Gnu
[3] UNU: Unu's Not Ung
[4] UNU: Unu's Not Unu
[...]
[n+0] UNU: Ununix's Not Unu
[n+1] UNU: Ugnu's gnot Ununix
[n+2] UNU: Unugnu's tong Ugnu
[n+3] UNU: Gnugnuung's gnongt Unugnu
[n+4] UNU: Ungnungnungnu[...]

Re:Wow

[EvanED]

[Whew, long post. If your reaction is 'TL;DR' I don't feel bad.]

The NT kernel... is an interesting beast. There are a lot of things I really like about the architecture it presents. In many ways it has a lot of things that are more modern and better-designed than Unix-descendents (including Linux). At the same time MS seems to have made it more complicated than it "needs" to be, in part to satisfy backwards compatibility and in part because they just seemed to make some decisions I don't agree with.

Some of the good points:

1. Security. Yes, security. This is often brought up as a Windows problem, but that is largely because of policy decisions such as running as admin. (There are also a number of bugs caused by just plain bad coding that lead to buffer overflows. The biggest problem here in some sense is some of the abilities such as sending messages to other processes, which are probably too ingrained to pull out without some very clever modifications.) The security manager in NT provides a lot of very fine-grained control. Related, you don't need explicit file system support and a separate mechanism to do more than RWX on files. (ACLs are absolutely vital in some environments, and things like an "append only" or "create files but no delete" are useful for some applications.) In Unix, sometimes you use chmod, sometimes you use fsacl or whatever it is; the framework isn't unified.

2. Flexibility, in some sense. MS (in theory) can change the system calls that the NT kernel accepts on a whim. This is because all programs are dynamically linked to the Windows subsystem DLLs. These DLLs translate Windows API calls into whatever actual system calls they need. (One API call may generate zero, one, or more syscalls.) It's only the rare, "misbehaving" program that uses the syscall interface directly, and MS doesn't mind breaking them too much. (There are some mostly-legitimate reasons why you need to do this.) By contrast, statically linking code is a bigger tradition in Unix. (Then again, so is having source, so you can recompile if you change your syscall interface.) The idea of having various subsystems that provide different API views is pretty neat, though it's not a fundamental idea. (It's hard to say how it differs from just dynamically linking against just some shared lib.)

3. Not really a good advantage, but interesting and one of the rare examples of where Windows is actually simpler is in the read/write interface. In Unix, my impression is that if you are writing a driver, you "have" to implement to entry points for each: synchronous and asynchronous read, and synchronous and asynchronous write. In Windows, you only implement the asynchronous interface. If a synchronous request is issued, it is handled at a higher level and translated to an async call. (Upside: simpler driver code. Downside: inability to implement just the synchronous version.)

4. It's actually possible to use extended attributes on Windows, though admittedly only because of a huge hack introduced for a related but not-quite-the-same reason. (In Unix, opening a file with an extended attribute in Vi or Emacs, modifying it, and saving it is enough to kill the extended attributes. This makes them next to useless, when I at least can imagine a TON of very useful and neat things you could do with them if you could use them reliably.)

5. The registry gets a lot of hate, but I think a modified version could be better. There are a lot of very nice things it provides over config files. (Transactional access, fine-grained access controls (often nice for a corporate environment, at least in some sense),

6. Diversity. Yes, diversity. People often talk about the "Windows monoculture" on /. and other places. And yes, this is a big problem. But there is another kind of diversity, which is that Windows is the only major OS that isn't Unixy. Solaris is Unix. BSD is Unix. Linux is Unixy. It's only when you start talking about either research OSes (Mach, L4, Singularity) and old Oses (OS/2, BeOS

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

[n+5] Ubuntu: ???

Microsoft: UNG's not GNU

[FlameWise]

> UNG, which stands for UNG's not GNU

Wait is it april's fool's already?

Re:Microsoft: UNG's not GNU

[morgan_greywolf]

In related news, Microsoft announced today that it has hired Richard M. Stallman and Linus Torvalds, who will be working together as partners on their new UNG project. Torvalds and Stallman hugged following a speech given by Steve Ballmer, and promised to put their differences in the past.

book about UNG

[stoolpigeon]

There is already a book out on UNG. How do publishers knock this stuff out so quickly?

Re:Makes some sense

[genik76]

>Something like "Those who forget Unix are doomed to recode it".

And those who forget important quotes are condemned to reinvent them, poorly.

Re:MSFT used to be a UNIX vendor

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, you're a little confused on the facts there.

Around the mid eighties, Xenix was the most widely installed unix, due primarily to the cheapness of the hardware on which it ran. To say it wasn't popular just isn't true.

Also, MS never sold Xenix directly to customers, quoth Wikipedia:

"Microsoft did not sell Xenix directly to end users; instead, they licensed it to software OEMs such as Intel, Tandy, Altos and SCO, who then ported it to their own proprietary computer architectures. Microsoft Xenix originally ran on the PDP-11; the first port was for the Zilog Z8001 16-bit processor. Altos shipped a version for their Intel 8086 based computers early in 1982, Tandy Corporation shipped TRS-XENIX for their 68000-based systems in January 1983, and SCO released their port to the IBM PC in September 1983."

Re:MS is a business

[jc42]

That POSIX layer isn't. It's POSIX only in name, ...

Actually, the proper term is WEIRDNIX.

For those not familiar with the term, WEIRDNIX was the POSIX crew's term for a hypothetical implementation that was technically compliant with all the POSIX standard, but implemented everything in the worst possible way. The idea was to find bugs in the POSIX standard that would allow implementers to claim compliance while violating the intent of the standard.

Mostly, people just sent in specs for a component that followed the standard but would in some way sabotage software that expected the obvious behavior. When NT came out, there were a number of discussions of its POSIX implementation, and a lot of people explained it by saying that Microsoft had done a full implementation of WEIRDNIX. Hardly anyone's POSIX software would run sanely on NT, and that was a simple, elegant explanation of why.

Is there any reason to expect things to be different this time around?

Re:I think its great news!

[MindKata]

"able to count on some excellent tools" and from one of the parent posts "Microsoft would never have been happy about it because it would further erode their lock-in."

also from the article link http://www.royalidea.com/site/?q=node/12 we get this section...
"The aim of UNG is to write complete GNU-like tools and frameworks that will be completely compatible with existing GNU software and standards. These tools will run natively on Vista. This means that software written for the GNU environment will be able to compile and run on Vista with little or no modifications. Major software currently running on GNU/Linux will be able to run natively on Vista."

Microsoft's strategy revolves around the idea of lock in. Looking at this from the point of view of lock in, it then sounds like Microsoft is trying to find a way to get GNU code over onto Vista. If you can't beat them, then assimilate anything useful they have ... like some excellent tools. That way, you get some good and free applications, sitting on top of your proprietary OS. Plus maybe even help remove, some of the reasons some corporate (non-technical) bosses of companies would think their staff would want Linux. "Why both, its got the same apps on Vista?".

While Microsoft controls the OS, they hold the foundations upon which all their competitors try to build a living. They are not going to give that up, but any company switching to Linux is a problem for them. So this is another chess move to try to reduce corporate customers moving towards Linux. Loosing corporate customers is what Microsoft really fears. Big customers moving away from Windows sends out a message to other big customers to act in a similar way. Microsoft wants to prevent this slide, especially as more cheaper embedded systems are very likely in the near future and a lot of them are likely to be using Linux.
e.g. News such as 10 billion ARM CPU sales isn't going to help Microsoft as much as its going to help grow Linux support, as a lot of ARM CPUs are using embedded Linux. Add to this the number of other CPUs using embedded forms of Linux, then industry support for Linux is growing faster than just on desktop machines. Microsoft needs to move to either block or reduce this, to help maintain their OS lock-in.
e.g. http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2207797/arm-hits-billion-processor

NT and forking

[Myria]

Win32 does not have a way to fork a process, but NT does. Passing a NULL image handle to NtCreateProcess() is similar to calling fork(), cloning the memory space as a new process. The NT kernel supports a lot of system calls that are not exposed through Win32, and it's a shame. The NT API is much more elegant and self-consistent than the Win32 wrapper, yet it's the officially undocumented one.

NT is almost a superset of the features of Linux. There are only a few concepts that don't exist in NT, like signals.