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Microsoft and Red Hat Team Up On Virtualization
mjasay writes "For years Microsoft has insisted that open-source vendors acknowledge its patent portfolio as a precursor to interoperability discussions. Today, Microsoft shed that charade and announced an interoperability alliance with Red Hat for virtualization. The nuts-and-bolts of the agreement are somewhat pedantic, providing for Red Hat to validate Windows Server guests to be supported on Red Hat Enterprise virtualization technologies, and other technical support details. But the real crux of the agreement is what isn't there: patents. Red Hat has long held that open standards and open APIs are the key to interoperability, even as Microsoft insisted patents play a critical role in working together, and got Novell to buy in. Today, Red Hat's vision seems to have won out with an interoperability deal heavy on technical integration and light on lawyers."
No moon? Then where does Moonlight come from?
Face your daemons!
Virtualisation has been a bit of a curveball that Microsoft hasn't liked for some time. It gets people off the hardware and upgrade churn, whilst sill upgrading their real hardware, and allows people to run previous versions of Windows and applications pretty much indefinitely. It also gives the potential to outflank Windows technology by bypassing it in the virtual machine itself and surrounding Windows with non-Windows systems. Additionally, ubiquitous, freely available virtualisation is going to end up ruling, and ultimately that means an open source host running something like KVM. I suppose Microsoft had to try and do something. They want to try and get into all of this somehow, and I suppose it does mean they sell more Windows licenses and Red Hat gets to run Windows certified on their platforms which should please some people.
It's a real kick in the teeth for Novell. This is a perfectly straightforward deal of certifying each other's systems on their virtual platforms that Novell couldn't get right. In practice, Microsoft is providing no help whatsoever to Novell in running Windows on their virtual platform (which I don't think Red Hat is expecting itself really) and they sold themselves down the river by agreeing to some elaborate coupon scheme that saw SLES servers totally surrounded by installations of Windows Server and AD domains. I don't think they even realised what they'd signed up to. At least Red Hat gets some marketable press out of this without conceding anything.
Theres an interesting read over at the 360 blog here., which covers the debate/fight between these 3 giants quite nicely.
AG
...Why you would run Windows on top of Linux, given not only the stability history but also since now there are now FOSS alternatives for almost anything Windows can provide, without taking a huge hit to the "total cost of ownership".
No. There aren't. Period. There is no FOSS alterantive for LOTs of things, and even when there is switching is cost prohibitive and pointless.
accounting: nope. And migrating to a linux alternative even if one existed would be monstrously expensive for any business of size.
photoshop/illustrator: nope. sure there is the gimp etc, which is all fine and good. But you need to integrate with a workflow where you are exchanging files with other businesses etc you have to use the tools they are using.
microsoft access, filemaker pro, 4D... millions of highly custom applications exist for these to fit business needs. Even if an alternative "application building framework" exists on Linux, the cost of migrating and reimplementing these applications is prohibative. Companies that rely on these won't even consider switching until FM, 4D, etc run on linux natively.
sql server - lots of businesses rely heavily on this. And even if postgresql or mysql, etc could do the job, again, its a massive amount of work to migrate from one to the other.
exchange - nothing needs to be said.
visual studio - sure linux alternatives exist, and you can even just use vi or notepad, but VS2008 is REALLY good.
The above isn't a small list of niche products or categories that only affect a handful of businesses. Millions of businesses rely on multiple of them.
Oh, and at home, there are games blocking a lot of people from leaving windows.
Accounting: I'm surprised that there are no real FOSS contenders in this space; at least on the low end, such packages are perfectly suited to a subscription model (hey, those tax tables don't update themselves.) This is a niche, however, where people probably feel better paying for a bit of piece of mind (nobody ever expects an audit...)
Photoshop/Illustrator: GIMP is 90% there for 90% of people. Opens PSD files, so it would seem to fit into most folks' workflow. I'm honestly not sure where Inkscape is at, but it's only going to get better.
Access/etc: If your business depends on Access or something similar, you're almost better off running it on Windows. When you scale it, you can scale it onto a better platform.
SQL Server: I think you'll find that Postgres can 'do the job' significantly better than SQL server under almost all workloads. Mysql is, of course, a running joke amongst anyone who knows what they're talking about. Obviously, if you're going to migrate to a new DBMS, there's going to be pain. SQL 2005 to Postgres is no more or less painful than Oracle 9i to SQL 2005.
Exchange: There are umpteen trillion unix-based (OSS, free beer, AND payware) 'groupware' suites. Most of the better ones have an Outlook plugin if you're still using Office.
Visual Studio: The choice of an IDE is INCREDIBLY subjective. I have /never/ liked Visual Studio, although that's not to say that others aren't more productive using it than using any other IDE. Developers, ultimately, need to be able to choose their own IDE; as long as it integrates with the higher level workflow and speaks the same language dialect as the rest of the team, who really cares? I know some people who swear by Eclipse (which I tried at the start of last year and didn't like much,) and some people who won't code using anything except nvi. For what it's worth, I find that Code::Blocks has a great feature:heft ratio.
You're right about one thing, though: games. At home, the ONLY use I have for windows of any stripe is the (sadly, more than) occasional reboot into XP64 to play Farcry 2 or Fallout 3 or the depressingly bad port of Saints Row 2. This will change, however, and not in the direction that most people are hoping. Consoles are already in the process of murdering PC gaming to the point where all we'll get given to us are bad console ports (Saints Row 2 was the most egregious example, on a 4-way 3.2GHz machine with a GTX260 the framerate fluctuates between 3 and 85fps) loaded up with DRM and other nonsense. Of the three games I mentioned, only Fallout 3 considered the PC to be a first-tier platform, and that's most likely because of Bethesda's history as a PC development shop and the fact that the Fallout 3 engine is a direct descendant of the Morrowind engine.
After the next generation of consoles, I'd expect gaming on Windows and Linux to be roughly at parity, and I'm not expecting anyone to port too many more games to Linux. Wine will run the bad ports well enough, and there will be a thriving third party aftermarket for keyboard/mouse connectivity kits for consoles.
You're doing it wrong.