Microsoft Releases Linux Device Drivers As GPL

mjasay writes "Microsoft used to call the GPL 'anti-American.' Now, as Microsoft releases Hyper-V Linux Integration Components (LinuxIC) under the GPL (version 2), apparently Microsoft calls the GPL 'ally.' Of course, there was little chance the device drivers would be accepted into the Linux kernel base unless open source, but the news suggests a shift for Microsoft. It also reflects Microsoft's continued interest in undermining its virtualization competition through low prices, and may suggests concern that it must open up if it wants to fend off insurgent virtualization strategies from Red Hat (KVM), Novell (XEN), and others in the open-source camp. Microsoft said the move demonstrates its interest in using open source in three key areas: 1) Make its software development processes more efficient, 2) product evangelism, and 3) using open source to reduce marketing and sales costs or to try out new features that highlight parts of the platform customers haven't seen before."

Comments

Hell called

[Anarke_Incarnate]

Send sweaters

Re:Hell called

[Ardaen]

Don't forget Microsoft's strategy: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

Re:Hell called

[eldavojohn]

Don't forget Microsoft's strategy: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

I heard reasonable arguments about that being true for the Ms-PL but I thought the GPL (v2 and v3) were supposed to be embraceable and extensible but nearly non-extinguishable ... once the code is out there, just fork it. Care to explain to me how this plan can follow after releasing something under the GPL? I'd be shocked that no one's tried it yet if it's possible.

Re:Hell called

[McDutchie]

Care to explain to me how this plan can follow after releasing something under the GPL?

They can sue for infringement of software patents.

Re:Hell called

[bb5ch39t]

Not under GPL v3. But is Hyper-V in any way better than XEN or KVM?

Re:Hell called

[perlchild]

Given Microsoft's attacks on GPL as a license, I just do not understand why they licensed it GPL instead of LGPL or BSD

Re:Hell called

[Darkness404]

...Too bad the software in question is released under the GPL V2 which doesn't have patent clauses in them.

Re:Hell called

[poetmatt]

GPL3 is different than GPL 2. This was GPL2, meaning it's only covered by Microsoft's "covenant".

Re:Hell called

[EvanED]

Even the GPL v.2 has this to say about patents:

For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.

So basically, if MS holds patents on the code they are contributing, my reading of the GPL says they can't contribute it (or can't enforce said patents).

Re:Hell called

[eldavojohn]

Care to explain to me how this plan can follow after releasing something under the GPL?

They can sue for infringement of software patents.

Um. Okay, let's dissect this. Microsoft has released device drivers under the GPLv2 which states:

7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.

Emphasis mine. I would find it more than hilarious to see the reaction on the faces at the EFF if Microsoft tried to sue someone who modifies/redistributes/forks this GPLv2 licensed code. By Microsoft releasing this under the GPL, Microsoft has basically announced there are no patents or copyrights on this code--otherwise they would not have been able to license it under the GPL. If so, Microsoft would have no one to sue but themselves before they demand people stop using the code.

I'm still not convinced on your argument. Don't get me wrong, I'm as cautious as the next guy. But isn't the GPL pretty rigorous (even v2) at protecting us from our fears?

Re:Hell called

[Anonymous Coward]

The Extinguish usually comes after people become hooked on MS software, to the point where even if its free, MS can dump it and it becomes irrelevent. In this case, the Extinguish could happen after people become dependent upon Hyper-V, and MS could then improve its Windows version, while letting the Linux drivers lag behind, then it continues to lag behind until it becomes pointless on Linux.

But, thats far into the future, right now MS is probably just concerned with undercutting the competition without regards to the future. After all, once they get a monopoly, it wouldent be that much work to drop the Linux support, they could even switch to a new virtualization platform, one that Linux wont support if they wanted to.

This makes the GPL irrelevent, at least in this case of device drivers.

Re:Hell called

[EvanED]

They could have.

No, they couldn't have, at least not if they wanted it to be distributable with Linux (which was kinda the point). The Linux kernel is GPL v.2 only, which is incompatible with the GPL v.3.

Furthermore, even the GPL 2 provides some protection against patents, as a couple people have pointed out.

In short, FUD.

Re:Hell called

[gnick]

If so, Microsoft would have no one to sue but themselves before they demand people stop using the code.

I'm going to take this move at face value and assume that Microsoft is just doing something non-evil. But the notion still amuses me that they could be so fractured that one department may make a move like this only to be sued by another.

Re:Hell called

[maxume]

I wouldn't be surprised if it was just tone deafness at whatever level the commitment was initiated at (I would speculate that the people actually working on the product and wanting to release the code had to take that request to somebody who could actually commit to the release; the yes probably left his desk with a certain license named, and the legal approval process didn't address/bother changing it).

Re:Hell called

[Austerity Empowers]

The usual way is to make their tools and solutions cheap/free, and get people to build their entire operation (code, infrastructure,etc.) around it. Require enough infrastructure that rebuilding is very expensive. Then, once the industry has managed to use your software as the center of their infrastructure, hammer them.

All they seemed to do was ensure linux will run on HyperV, something it has not previously done well, and which puts MS at a disadvantage. Thus customers have not been adopting that platform in droves. Now they'll have fewer excuses not to. Nothing prevents MS from later making the LinuxIC tools incompatible at a later date (or just letting them atrophy, as the technology develops).

Just don't use Microsoft products ever again...if you want to run a business you really shouldn't put all your eggs in their basket anyway.

Re:Hell called

[MaskedSlacker]

Ah, so their motive here is try this in court and invalidate the entire GPL!

See, I knew we couldn't trust them.

Re:Hell called

[Sam Ramji]

Our use of the GPLv2 license, as requested by the Linux community, means we will not charge a royalty or assert any patents covering the driver code we are contributing.

Sam
sramji@microsoft.com

Re:Hell called

[McDutchie]

So basically, if MS holds patents on the code they are contributing, my reading of the GPL says they can't contribute it (or can't enforce said patents).

Who says it has to be about the code they are contributing? There is plenty of other code in the Linux kernel that they could base a strategic lawsuit on. It's not like they haven't done that before.

Re:Hell called

[Ardaen]

They are releasing the drivers as open source, not the underlying product. I've not looked at the Hyper-V product very closely, but it seems to me that once they control the market, they only need to change the Hyper-V product to be incompatible with the GPL drivers. In that case, what good would a fork do?

Re:Hell called

[Freetardo Jones]

Releasing something as gpl doesnt mean the come isnt copyrighted

Re:Hell called

[EvanED]

There is plenty of other code in the Linux kernel that they could base a strategic lawsuit on.

Sure, but it's not like there's a rule that says "you can only file a patent lawsuit against Linux if you first submit a new feature" or something.

The Hyper-V patch doesn't affect that; if they could claim patent infringements in other parts of the kernel now, they could do it before too.

Re:Hell called

[EvanED]

Too bad the software in question is released under the GPL V2 which doesn't have patent clauses in them.

You know, except for the part that says "if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program."

Re:Hell called

[AndrewNeo]

Because kernel patches have to be GPLv2?

Re:Hell called

[blueg3]

I don't think LGPL buys them anything. If they're going to release it as open-source (which they have to if they want it incorporated in the Linux kernel), then they'd presumably want to be as little use to their competition as possible. Not competition as in Linux or Xen, but as in VMWare, etc. -- closed-source, commercial virtualization vendors. BSD-licensed code could be very reasonably put to use by their competitors.

Re:Hell called

[McDutchie]

The Hyper-V patch doesn't affect that; if they could claim patent infringements in other parts of the kernel now, they could do it before too.

Exactly. So there is nothing at all about their contribution that would prevent an embrace-extend-extinguish strategy.

Contributing is the embrace step. More people will use Linux when it's progressively made compatible with Microsoft technologies: extend. Then they can go all SCO and sue the pants off of some strategically selected parties that use it: extinguish. End result: Microsoft owns Linux.

The original question was: how could Microsoft still employ its usual embrace-extend-extinguish strategy while contributing to the Linux kernel? The answer is that it's very simple because there is nothing stopping them. They could do it if they wanted to. And given their track record, it would be silly to trust them not to.

Funny how my first post in this thread is now at -1, Flamebait for accurately answering a question.

Re:Hell called

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't confuse MS with the bank which was on slashdot sueing itself a couple days ago.

They may be evil, but they are not stupid.

Re:Hell called

[Ardaen]

Again I ask:
How does this protect against the Hyper-V product being changed to be incompatible with the GPL drivers in the future. What guarentee do we have that compatibility will be maintained or the drivers updated?

GPL drivers don't do much good if they aren't compatible with the hypervisor. Otherwise we'd be using Xen drivers on Hyper-V wouldn't we?

I know I'm jumping to conclusions a bit, but this is a company with a very long history of this kind of behavior. Even after several court cases and many promises.

(Hope I get answers, instead of just getting modded up, then suddenly down into oblivion again)

Re:Hell called

[Chyeld]

Or simply pull a SCO and remind everyone they have patents on Hyper-V and thus anyone implementing it, even via GPL, needs to stary paying up.

Re:Hell called

[Daniel_Staal]

...While you are distributing the code.

(Trust can be lost in a day, but takes a lifetime to earn. MS has spent a lifetime abusing trust. If they want it back, they will have to prove they deserve it.)

Re:Hell called

[Cley Faye]

Extinguish hell ? If that's so, they're doing a good job by releasing something under the GPL :)

Re:Hell called

[Alphager]

Too bad the software in question is released under the GPL V2 which doesn't have patent clauses in them.

You know, except for the part that says "if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program."

Which only applies to you when you try to distribute it; this does not cover the initial distribution by Microsoft (one of the flaws which were corrected in GPLv3).

Re:Hell called

[Xtifr]

Microsoft has released device drivers under the GPLv2

Yes, but Microsoft is the licenser, not the licensee, and as such they are not bound by the license terms! It's their "property"; they own the copyright, so they don't need a license to use or distribute it. So your argument kind of falls on its face. Clause 7 does not apply to them (unless they try to distribute the whole kernel, not just one driver), but it applies to us, so if MS asserts a patent claim, it's everyone who is/was distributing the kernel with the contaminated code who needs to stop distributing until the code can be cleaned up.

Remember, the GPL exists to provide a defense against charges of copyright infringement. You can't, generally, be sued for violating the GPL, but if you fail to comply with its terms then "nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works", which opens you up for that copyright infringement suit. But if you own the copyright, you don't need permission!

Re:Hell called

[shutdown -p now]

Sam, does this mean that this GPLv2 release was actually negotiated and coordinated with Linux kernel developers? If so, it would be interesting to hear more about that side of it. So far I have found this:

Q: Why release the code?

A: Because we have utilized Linux code, Microsoft has an obligation to open source the device drivers. This is the process outlined by the Linux community.

Q: Why open source the code?

A: Because this is a requirement of the community, and critical in ensuring that as the Linux Kernel evolves, and as Hyper-V evolves, that the Hyper-V Linux Device Drivers evolve as well.

But this is rather vague - it's not clear where the "requirement of the community" comes from; is it implied, or was it specifically talked about?

Re:Hell called

[jonbryce]

I see it as an amoral (ie neither moral or immoral) part of their marketing strategy.

They are doing this for the simple reason that they want to sell more copies of Windows Hyper-V server. People buy hypervisors because they want to run different operating systems on the one computer. One of the operating systems they will want to run is Linux, and if Hyper-V server doesn't run Linux guests well, they are more likely to chose another hypervisor than chose a different operating system for their guest machine.

Re:Hell called

[Ardaen]

A lot of people have been burned repeatedly by Microsoft's empty promises. Most have also had to deal with a lot of astroturfing.

Believe it or not the fanboys who wont change their minds are not a majority. Many are just cautious and have many doubts due to past experience. Such doubts don't vanish overnight, and aren't helped by dismissive comments like the parent here.

Re:Hell called

[EvanED]

Yes, but Microsoft is the licenser, not the licensee, and as such they are not bound by the license terms!

MS is bound if the driver can be considered derivative work of other bits of the kernel. I suspect, though don't know, that this is the case.

Re:Hell called

[Chyeld]

Unless Microsoft is redistributing someone's modified code, as opposed to actually creating it, then that clause is moot. Microsoft can not do anything that would prevent their ability to license and distribute code they've written themselves under the GPL.

The license (or rather than portion) applies to the downstream redistributor.

Re:Hell called

[Hurricane78]

A) Ok. I believe that. Because Microsoft is such a trustworthy and all around nice company.

B) "Whenever a controversial law is proposed, and its supporters, when confronted with an egregious abuse it would permit, use a phrase along the lines of 'Perhaps in theory, but the law would never be applied in that way' - they're lying. They intend to use the law that way as early and as often as possible."
-- meringuoid (568297) @ 2005-11-24 16:40 (#14107454)

C) Microsoft employees? On my Slashdot?? ;)

Re:Hell called

[Chyeld]

I knew a man named Bob once, Microsoft Bob.

Just that knowledge would convince me that it would be worthwhile to challenge your statement.

Re:Hell called

[Ardaen]

Someone is going overboard with the mods on this thread. How does the parent deserve to be modded Troll?

Re:Hell called

[maxume]

The parent post is only a troll if you are illiterate or are moderating an agenda.

All it says is that a part of Microsoft could easily end up ignoring corporate strategy if someone who wasn't paying a great deal of attention to that strategy was making a decision about whether releasing code for a project was healthy for that project.

Sure, it accepts the presumption of such a corporate strategy from the grandparent post, but still not a troll.

Re:Hell called

[Just Some Guy]

Sam, forget the naysayers. Seriously, welcome to the party!

Re:Hell called

[digitrev]

C) Microsoft employees? On my Slashdot?? ;)

It's more likely than you think.

Re:Hell called

[nschubach]

As with all social experiments, the majority is usually the first to dominate a story. Slowly, the majority (even here) is being replaced by Microsoft fans.

I wish meta moderating was allowed inline so whoever modded it troll could be properly penalized by other mods for abuse.

Re:Hell called

[The Moof]

But the notion still amuses me that they could be so fractured that one department may make a move like this only to be sued by another

As absurd as that sounds, it has happened in recently.

Re:Hell called

[Korin43]

From what I can tell, all this patch does is make Linux run better in Microsoft's emulator (Hyper-V). If Microsoft decided to stop supporting this patch, it would just hurt their customers. My guess is that the only people who care how well Linux runs in Hyper-V are the people already drinking Microsoft's kool-aid.

Re:Hell called

[diegocgteleline.es]

Microsoft just wants that people can use virtualized Linux while paying at the same time their windows server licenses. I doubt they will break compatibility...

Re:Hell called

[TheRaven64]

No, kernel patches have to be compatible with the GPLv2. There is a large chunk of BSD / MIT-licensed code in the kernel.

Re:Hell called

[cstdenis]

A good step. But how about some BSD licensed drivers so the BSD family of operating systems can take advantage of these performance improvements too?

Re:Hell called

[shentino]

Whoever modded parent as flamebait has forgotten about Tom Tom

Re:Hell called

[poetmatt]

Maybe you want to look into the old "microsoft patent covenant doesn't cover GPLv2 but could be forced under GPLv3" thing.

Re:Hell called

[poetmatt]

Bingo. As much as I hate MS, I would absolutely make an about face on my opinions if they started joining in on putting things in under GPLv3 (without skirting it's intent). That's all I ask. I don't get why they don't, the whole marketplace would support them if they did so. I guess they don't like expanding marketshare in ways that benefits everyone as opposed to themselves (PS microsoft: this is how you make friends instead of enemies).

Re:Hell called

[shentino]

By contributing code, it might be an implicit patent license, especially if they don't demand anything in return. Promissory estoppel and all that.

Re:Hell called

[hairyfeet]

I know this will probably sound snarky but I don't honestly get it. Why exactly would you want to run Linux server as a guest and have Windows server as the host? That just doesn't make any sense to me at all, and I'm a Windows guy.

Now I can see running Linux server as the host and Windows server as the guest, because Linux server uses less RAM, is got less attacks aimed at it, easy to strip down for extra security, etc. So running Windows in a sandbox on Linux? yeah i get that. But what is the advantage of running Linux as the guest on a Windows server host? Wouldn't that mean you were sandboxing the one that had less of a chance at being boned, while running the more dangerous OS in the more vulnerable position?

Not trying to blast Windows here, but they are the OS that all the malware writers and script kiddies have a giant bullseye painted on. So is there an advantage I'm not seeing here? Some angle I haven't thought of? Because while I believe Linux desktops still got a ways to go, Linux servers are usually rock solid and secure. That is why so much of the web runs on LAMP. So is it a licensing issue? Something else? Because running Windows as the host for servers just doesn't make much sense to this old country boy unless I'm missing a piece of the puzzle.

Re:Hell called

[KibibyteBrain]

I think that is Microsoft's lawyers finding language to say that because they used GPL code in those drivers, they had to release them under the GPL as per the GPL. By instead using the mantra of "community standards" they refrain from any legal interpretation of the GPL or its validity.

Re:Hell called

[hairyfeet]

And considering the fact that MSFT just signed another patent protection deal with another Linux company, and recently sued TomTom over the dubious FAT patents, I think Linux guys have a right to be cautious.

After those of us survived the horror of WinME (you STILL owe me an apology Bill Gates!) we Windows guys know MSFT will screw us over in a heartbeat, you Linux guys just haven't had MSFT bring on the pain yet. But we Windows users are addicted to our games and apps, and therefor doomed. Save yourselves!

Re:Hell called

[harlows_monkeys]

They can sue for infringement of software patents.

Laches, estoppel, inequitable conduct. Take your pick. A defendant in such a suit would have numerous avenues to crush any such attempt, and probably even get rule 11b sanctions against Microsoft for filing the suit in the first place.

Re:Hell called

[Kickasso]

Care to explain why it doesn't apply to the initial distribution?

Re:Hell called

[Lt_Kernal]

He's not the only one. I've been here for a long, long while.

Re:Hell called

[Morty]

It's likely more subtle. Remember IE for Unix? Microsoft has a lot of business departments. Microsoft's desktop OS and office suites are dominant, but perhaps their browser or VM is not. If one department is not dominant in part because of multiplatform concerns, it makes sense for Microsoft to release a product that is multiplatform. Once the product obliterates the competition, Microsoft can then drop multiplatform support, reinforcing their underlying platform monopoly.

It's a delicate balancing act. But Microsoft has pulled it off before.

Re:Hell called

[Andy Dodd]

That's my primary observation here...

At least in the current state of things, running Linux as a guest with Windows as the host is just... Nuts.

That's what this release supports. As far as I can tell, it does NOTHING for a Windows guest with a Linux host OS, which is going to be the preferred solution for most people (including myself - I have never virtualized Linux within Windows and never intend to, but I routinely virtualize WinXP on my Gentoo laptop.)

Re:Hell called

[jipn4]

A lot of people have been burned repeatedly by Microsoft's empty promises. Most have also had to deal with a lot of astroturfing.

And that's different from a lot of other tech companies... how?

Microsoft's grave offenses are monopolistic practices, bundling, and tying. In terms of patents and copyrights vis-a-vis Linux, they have not been worse than other companies.

Re:Hell called

[Vancorps]

Sounds to me like you're quite behind the times given that Hyper-V only runs on server 2008 with a core installation you get a stripped down version of Windows that is every bit as annoying as Ubuntu server to get running something useful.

Server 2008 in head-less mode is quite easy to manage as long as you have a Vista workstation or a full server 2008 install somewhere on the network. For me, I was testing Hyper-V, VMWare, and XenServer on my HP blade chassis to see which would work best for my environment which includes SAN support which is much easier to manage on a Windows box than it is on a Linux box.

I ultimately went with XenServer because I need Linux guests as well as Windows guests and at the time Hyper-V didn't support Linux so that pretty much ended that discussion.

I don't think it's crazy to use a Server core installation as a host for VMs, especially if you already have management infrastructure like SCCM or Operations Manager which a lot of larger shops have.

Re:Hell called

[Sam Ramji]

First, the Hyper-V high-level specification is available under the Open Specification Promise; this can be used by 3rd parties to implement Hyper-V compatibility.

Second, we have a roadmap for the drivers that includes improvements to performance and manageability, including features like SMP support. These have been requested by our customers and are part of the engineering plan for these drivers.

Third, our maintenance plan for the drivers includes submitting patches to the kernel maintainers; and the process that Greg K-H and the team follow is designed to ensure that drivers can continue to be compatible with the kernel even if the kernel's model for device drivers changes.

Ultimately it will be the market success of this technology that will ensure its ongoing development by Microsoft - as we do with any product. So far the signs are good.

Sam
sramji@microsoft.com

Re:Hell called

[Sam Ramji]

It was specifically talked about. We considered other licenses (like the Clear BSD) which is considered "GPL-compatible" but the best choice was clearly the GPLv2.

This was the gentle advice we got from Greg K-H and we took it seriously. The more we thought about it, the more it made sense to follow Rosen's first law of open source licenses - "use the license of the community that you want to contribute to."

Sam
sramji@microsoft.com

Re:Hell called

[fireman sam]

Here is a thought...

"For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program."

Nowhere does this state that it is only the owner of the patent is unable to distribute the program (in this case, the kernel). That to me says the following *could* happen:

1. Microsoft releases drives under GPLv2
2. Microsoft code enters mainstream kernel
3. Microsoft starts enforcing patents covering released drivers
4. As the patent license does not permit royalty-free distribution of the program (as Microsoft would license the use of patented drivers) no body is allowed to distribute the program.

Whoever has the job of saying yes or no to the inclusion of this code should really say "NO".

Re:Hell called

[Runaway1956]

In a nutshell, the problem with GPL is that it hasn't been tested in court enough. MS knows that as well as, or perhaps better, than anyone. The GPL is just a legal tool, it isn't an authority, in and of itself. The judicial authority will ultimately test the GPL and it's derivatives in courtrooms.

The three E's? This could be the first of the E's. And, MS legal department may be gloating, because they have judges bought and paid for, just waiting for the day they walk into court for a GPL suit.

Be suspicious. I am.

Re:Hell called

[Q-Hack!]

Many of the old timers here remember when IBM was the monopolistic enemy. Once they started working with the open source community, they turned there image around. Microsoft could do the same... However, I am not holding my breath.

Re:Hell called

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

I think op meant not so much as the original distribution but rather the code drop. i.e. microsoft "committed" code into the kernel but aren't actually distributing the program themselves. Thus, microsoft could have inserted some chunk of code they have a patent claim on in order to look like the good guys (releasing stuff under the gpl) but make it so that no one can actually distribute the drivers in question without actually running afoul of the gpl

Re:Hell called

[sirsnork]

Well the immediate instances I've seen is that you already have a Hyper-V infrastructure and need a Linux platoform for something (development, firewall etc etc). it's much easier to do this in a VM than needing to find additional hardware. Espcially if there is going to be heavy network traffic as without the IC's your running emulated NIC's that won't have nearly the same performance.

Re:Hell called

[Curtman]

I have never virtualized Linux within Windows and never intend to, but I routinely virtualize WinXP on my Gentoo laptop

coLinux seems to work well for when I do. My wife insists on booting her PC into Windows due to some stupid bug with Flash not showing some stupid menu in some stupid Facebook game. I've used coLinux on there so that computer isn't a completely useless box while being a Facebook terminal.

Not that I'm bitter or anything. (I'm looking at you Adobe)

Re:Hell called

[EvanED]

I think that your series of events can only happen if MS is contributing anew. But, I would guess the driver itself is derivative work of other parts of the kernel -- a believable proposition on the face of it, especially as MS has said that they used software in Linux for it (in a FAQ they released that is linked to somewhere in this area of the thread; I can find it if you really want).

If that guess is true, then my reading is that your step 2 ("Microsoft releases drives under GPLv2") can't occur if MS wants to hold onto the option to sue over patent use.

Re:Hell called

[drsmithy]

As much as I hate MS, I would absolutely make an about face on my opinions if they started joining in on putting things in under GPLv3 (without skirting it's intent). That's all I ask. I don't get why they don't, the whole marketplace would support them if they did so.

Because the intent of the GPL (and v3 even more so) is to essentially make the primary business model (selling software) of companies like Microsoft unsustainable.

So long as Microsoft's primary business is selling their software and not selling services for software someone else has written, they're not going to be GPLing any code. It would be business suicide.

Re:Hell called

[BikeHelmet]

I think you're correct. This is a jab at all those other companies with virtualization products - VMware, RedHat, Novell, Oracle(Sun), etc.

Re:Hell called

[drsmithy]

I know this will probably sound snarky but I don't honestly get it. Why exactly would you want to run Linux server as a guest and have Windows server as the host? That just doesn't make any sense to me at all, and I'm a Windows guy.

I think you're confused. Hyper-V is a hypervisor, not host-based virtualisation. It runs on the bare metal, with a privileged Windows VM for management tasks (equivalent to dom0 on Xen, or the Service console on ESX).

You might want to use Hyper-V to run Linux because you have already committed to Hyper-V for your virtualisation infrastructure. This may be as simple as just having a single Hyper-V server running only one or two VMs, or as complete as multiple hosts with a substantial amount of established processes and procedures for managing that virtualisation infrastructure.

Re:Hell called

[drsmithy]

At least in the current state of things, running Linux as a guest with Windows as the host is just... Nuts.

I think you (and lots of other people) need to go and research the difference between a hypervisor and host-based virtualisation. Hyper-V is the former, not the latter.

Re:Hell called

[peektwice]

Am I to believe that the Cubs are going to win the World Series too?

Re:Hell called

[RiotingPacifist]

not in Europe :P

Re:Hell called

[level_headed_midwest]

Lots of those exploits are for older versions of programs. The Debian ssh snafu was one of the newer exploits on that site, and that was fixed quite some time ago. That's not surprising as patches for security issues in *nix programs come pretty quickly and it is widely known that it is a Really Bad Idea (tm) to use out-of-date versions of programs.

Re:Hell called

[selven]

So who's going to be the new enemy? Google?

Re:Hell called

[haruchai]

Releasing under the GPL v3 would satisfy most of the "fanboys", which would be a hell of a lot
less effort than the ridiculous extremes you've stated

Re:Hell called

[shentino]

Tom tom would say different.

Re:Hell called

[drsmithy]

The GPL doesn't tell that you can't sell software.

Nor did I suggest that it did.

Re:Hell called

[kdart]

However, there is growing concern in the industry about security related to hypervisors, and how that can undermine the security (file access permissions,etc.) of the guest OS. Therefore there is a trend to use "bare metal" hypervisors to better secure the whole system. Now, running Windows is the opposite of that. Indeed, it doesn't make any sense, especially considering MSs security track record.

In addition, their driver is about 22,000 lines of code! The existing paravirtualization code (that works with VMware also) is only about 6000 lines as far as I can tell. What exactly is IN that MS driver?

Re:Hell called

[janwedekind]

The Linux community also requests that you don't charge a royalty or assert any patents covering driver code you are *not* contributing (such as "vfat.ko").

Re:Hell called

[dontclapthrowmoney]

HyperV can be installed on non-Core installs of Server 2008 also - core isn't required, you can add the HyperV role to a full install of the OS also.

I kinda like HyperV myself in certain scenarios - for example I can give a VM host to my SharePoint development team (who seriously don't seem to have much of a clue about system admin tasks, and I want to keep them well clear of my VMware ESX environment).

HyperV is good because the more clueless can right-click their way out of trouble.

It is also a Microsoft product so is easy to "sell" internally to the people who sign the cheques, although from my personal experience, getting people to feel comfortable stepping away from Microsoft in certain areas is getting a little easier these days, thanks mostly to Vista - but also thanks to VMware, Citrix XenServer to a lesser extent, and some totally awesome and free to use apps like Nagios - $0 is pretty compelling. YMMV of course.

HyperV has its place, it is just going to take MS a while to catch up with certain features that other products offer, which they absolutely will, they have the cash to throw at this problem. They don't have any choice but to join in, this market segment is too large.

Linux support is something they needed to add, for example customers that host many windows OSes on HyperV might decide one day to run up a Ubuntu box to host Nagios - if HyperV doesn't support Linux guests they might decide to explore non-MS virtualisation platforms instead.

Re:Hell called

[geminidomino]

They can sue for infringement of software patents.

Laches, estoppel, inequitable conduct. Take your pick. A defendant in such a suit would have numerous avenues to crush any such attempt, and probably even get rule 11b sanctions against Microsoft for filing the suit in the first place.

Provided they have the pockets to front the lawyers' fees to do so.

Re:Hell called

[FrozenFOXX]

Thank you for answering some questions regarding this new development. We, as a community, may be skeptical but we always appreciate hearing from you and your colleagues on these matters.

Personally I hope to hear more of these sorts of developments.

Re:Hell called

[Vancorps]

I didn't mean to imply that HyperV only could be installed on core, I simply meant that a core installation of Windows isn't all that different from XenServer. I use yum to install software on Xenserver for managing SAN connectivity. They aren't all that different. The core installation is very much stripped down although I will grant not quite to the same level and so you do indeed have a point.

I was merely replying to the post stating that it is crazy to run Linux guests on a Windows host and I don't see that as the case.

As for HyperV linux support, that is indeed why I went with XenServer. I have a small VMWare setup but they screwed up my licensing when I asked for a quote and wanted me to go back to the owner and ask for an additional 30k after I had started the installation. Needless to say I didn't even try.

Licensing I think is the biggest push in the direction of Linux and open-source based solutions. Microsoft and VMWare have made their licensing schemes too complicated. They are far from alone, Adobe even does it too.

Re:Hell called

[harlows_monkeys]

Provided they have the pockets to front the lawyers' fees to do so

You don't think the FSF, the EFF, Redhat, IBM, and numerous others, not to mention thousands of individuals, wouldn't rush in to cover defense costs?

Re:Hell called

[WarlockD]

Thank you for answering some questions regarding this new development. We, as a community, may be skeptical but we always appreciate hearing from you and your colleagues on these matters. Personally I hope to hear more of these sorts of developments.

What wrong with me. I can't tell if this was a well meaning response or really good sarcasm.

What bothers me more about this is just the amounts of comments berating Microsoft gets here. We even get a head of the open source department to give use well reasoned responses and he is shot by all sides for stuff he probity has no control over. Sure some of the anti Microsoft stuff is warranted, but its getting to the point that the second Microsoft even acknowledges linux, people scream of the Satan devil:P

Re:Hell called

[geminidomino]

You don't think the FSF, the EFF, Redhat, IBM, and numerous others, not to mention thousands of individuals, wouldn't rush in to cover defense costs?

I think it's a bit too risky to take it for granted that they would. The FSF and EFF seem to have a rather spotty win-loss record, and RH and IBM could afford a patent license for less than contributing to the defense, if they felt it served them better.

Re:Hell called

[FrozenFOXX]

What wrong with me. I can't tell if this was a well meaning response or really good sarcasm.

Probably the fact that it's text on the Internet completely devoid of body language including tone. It tends to make discerning tone difficult and conveying tone in a small paragraph difficult to boot.

But no, not being sarcastic. I personally like hearing from people like Sam. It's hard to have a discussion if one side isn't talking, after all.

Re:Hell called

[gnud]

There is really nothing to gain from invalidating the GPL - if that happened, noone but the authors would have rights to the code, it wouldn't magically become public domain.
And then the authors could just find some other license.

Oh, and in case you tend to trust legal advice on Slashdot, IANAL.

Re:Hell called

[ShieldW0lf]

They could have. No, they couldn't have, at least not if they wanted it to be distributable with Linux (which was kinda the point). The Linux kernel is GPL v.2 only, which is incompatible with the GPL v.3. Furthermore, even the GPL 2 provides some protection against patents, as a couple people have pointed out. In short, FUD.

What a load of horseshit. You can distribute binary device drivers alongside the Linux kernel if you wish, as long as you have the permissions of the rights holders. Nvidia drivers anyone? There is absolutely zero preventing distributing GPLv3 device drivers. Everything you said was false.

Re:Hell called

[cowbutt]

You're welcome to study the GPLed drivers and write your own independent BSD-licensed implementation.

Re:Hell called

[FishWithAHammer]

Except that the GPLv3 doesn't benefit them at all. It doesn't even benefit "everyone." It benefits you, not them. Why should they do something that is harmful to themselves just because you want it?

Re:Hell called

[FishWithAHammer]

Server Core 2008 is where HyperV is run, not a standard Server 2008 box.

And many organizations already use Operations Manager or whatever for their Windows servers, and HyperV interfaces with that nicely.

You pay more, but you get integration, which is valuable.

(Oh, and "rock solid" stopped mattering around Server 2003. I've never seen a Server 2008 machine crash at all.)

Re:Hell called

[ShieldW0lf]

Except that the GPLv3 doesn't benefit them at all. It doesn't even benefit "everyone." It benefits you, not them. Why should they do something that is harmful to themselves just because you want it?

Charitable != Harmful.

One motive might be a desire to remain relevant rather than irrelevant. Personally, that's always been a major motive behind my charitable deeds...

Re:Hell called

[EvanED]

You can distribute binary device drivers alongside the Linux kernel if you wish, as long as you have the permissions of the rights holders.

Sure. You think you're gonna get said permission? Not in a million years.

Nvidia drivers anyone?

You want to know how Nvidia gets away with distributing a binary blob driver? Not quite all of it is a binary. The (relatively small) part of it that could be considered a derivative work of the kernel is available as source under the GPL v.2 since that's what the license requires.

All or almost all of what remains closed actually lives in user space.

There is absolutely zero preventing distributing GPLv3 device drivers.

You could do the same thing as Nvidia, and release a part of the driver as GPL v.3 and an interface layer as GPL v.2 if your driver is amenable to that, but otherwise yes, there are very much restrictions on distributing GPL v.3 drivers.

Do you know anything about the GPL?

Re:Hell called

[FishWithAHammer]

If you actually think that Microsoft is going to be anything but "relevant" for, oh, the next ten or twenty years or so, you're out of your fucking mind.

Then again, you're a freetard, so I shouldn't be surprised.

Microsoft does what benefits them. Doing things that does not benefit them is not their job and is outside their purview, as it should be.

Re:Hell called

[Adm.Wiggin]

doesnt mean the come isnt copyrighted

I'd hate to see the child that develops from that one...

Re:Hell called

[rakslice]

Basically if you are the owner of the copyright to the code, you can copy/distribute it however you like. By default, everyone else has no permission to copy/distribute it. If you release it under the GPL, what you're doing is giving other people permission to copy/distribute the code only if they follow the terms of that license. That doesn't in any way affect your original rights to copy/distribute the code however you like.

Re:Hell called

[generalcody]

As long as the code is totally free from copyrights, this is great! It goes through the same quality testing before it eventually gets included in the Linux kernel, as any other piece of code, so I think it will take some time, as MS coders are known to produce some really illiterate code...

Re:Hell called

[Kickasso]

I see what you mean. Now consider this.

Suppose Microsoft distributed the software under some kind of closed-source, commercial license. Suppose further the software contained something patented by Microsoft. (This happens a zillion times per year, think programs like Windows and Office). You wouldn't worry about obtaining separate patent licenses for the patented stuff, would you? The software license you've got IS the permission to use it, together with whatever patented stuff may be contained within. Furthermore, if the software contained stuff patented by third parties, you wouldn't worry too much about obtaining separate licenses from these third parties either. We rely on Microsoft's legal team which would supposedly care to obtain sublicensing rights in relevant patents first.

Now it all suddenly changes when Microsoft distribute software under GPL, and I don't understand why. Microsoft have granted you a permission to do a very specific list of things with the software, under a very specific list of conditions. Why do you think you need some kind of additional permission (connected to patents or other IP) to do these things? GPL IS THE permission. Why do Microsoft suddenly have a right to impose additional conditions on you, conditions like obtaining a patent license? They supposedly don't have such a right when they give you (for a fee or without one) Windows or Office or dotNet or whatever, including stuff you can redistribute.

What hidden dangers?

[Techmeology]

Microsoft has never been interested in anything other than its self. One must question its motives, and be acutely aware of the potential for unknown dangers waiting to surprise all of us.

Re:What hidden dangers?

[mrvan]

Ahhh right. And IBM c.s. is run by a bunch of code-hugging hippies and they function as a charity to release code for the improvement of the world.

How *could* I have missed that?

Re:What hidden dangers?

[Omnifarious]

With IBM, their value proposition was quite clear and we could get along happily. Microsoft is a much trickier case. They frequently do things that are not necessarily in their best interest in the short term in order to destroy their competition and achieve long-term control.

And this results in things like IE languishing for years because nobody else is a credible threat in the browser arena. People who say that Microsoft is simply interested in making things better for their customers are blind. Microsoft had no interest in making IE better because they had no interest in the browser as a platform. It did not further their ability to control.

Microsoft would prefer a smaller and less innovative market that they completely owned to a much larger market in which they were simply a player, even if they could make a bigger profit in the larger market.

So your request to look for hidden dangers is a cogent one. And we should be looking for dangers in which Microsoft sacrifices profitability for control and destroying competition. Microsoft has repeatedly shown a willingness to do that in the past.

Re:What hidden dangers?

[MaskedSlacker]

There's a difference between doing something because it's good for you, and doing something because it's bad for other people. One is selfish, the other is malicious.

Re:What hidden dangers?

[Blakey Rat]

God the paranoia on this site is thick. It increases the value of Hyper-V to Microsoft clients, as their Linux virtual machines will run more efficiently in it. That's it. That's all. Relax. Breathe into a paper bag for a few minutes until you're under control again. The sky is not falling. Dogs and cats are not sleeping together.

Re:What hidden dangers?

[blueg3]

Easy -- they think people will be more likely to use Microsoft's HyperV if its Linux performance is better. They're in competition with other virtualization software makers. They can either release an appropriate Linux driver or tell HyperV users to have decreased Linux performance and functionality. Clearly they think the former is a better business deal. It doesn't really add a lot to Linux, since if you're in the market for virtualization, you probably aren't trying to decide if your guests will run Linux or Windows, but already have specific requirements.

Re:What hidden dangers?

[BitZtream]

No shit?

EVERYONE EVERYWHERE IS ALWAYS IN IT FOR THEMSELVES.

No one does anything that doesn't benefit them in some way.

Some times its because it makes them feel good. Some times its because it makes them profit.
Some times its because they don't want to see someone else get hurt, or they want to see someone else happy.
Some times people do things because they would rather hurt themselves than have the guilt of hurting someone else.

But in the end, no matter how you look at it, every single thing a person does is for themselves in one way or another.

You can pretend that the world doesn't work that way all you want, but thats all you will be doing, pretending.

Stop acting like MS doing something for themselves is any different than how you live every single moment of your life, its not.

How they go about it defines who they are, but your comment is no more of a revelation than 'water is wet when its a liquid'.

Everyone is selfish. Some of us are actually capable of realizing it and admitting it.

Re:What hidden dangers?

[jonbryce]

The motive is quite simple. To sell more copies of Hyper-V server by having it better able to run linux guests than VMWare and Parallels and as good at running them as Xen and KVM.

Re:What hidden dangers?

[DaHat]

Sell more copies of Hyper-V server? Good sir, that might be tricky given Hyper-V Server 2008 is free. Don't believe me? Go grab a copy for yourself here (do note the site that is hosted on).

Re:What hidden dangers?

[HiThere]

Some people pay attention to recent history.

Trusting Microsoft is a *very* bad idea. Even if you don't know why they're doing something, it's safest to assume that it's against your long term best interest. (In this case motives are pretty obvious. It's only useful if your underlying system is MS.)

Re:What hidden dangers?

[jonbryce]

Yes, and it requires Windows 2008 in order to work. You won't find a free download of that on microsoft.com.

Re:What hidden dangers?

[VanessaE]

What, no mass hysteria? Damn.

Re:What hidden dangers?

[DaHat]

Spoken like someone who has not given it a try yet.

While the system requirements on the download page seem to require Server 2008... that is not fully accurate... instead I'd consult the full system requirements page.

Hyper-V Server is a stand-alone, bare-metal hypervisor which is installed directly onto a machine without the need for a paid version of Windows sitting below... but which is also installable as a separate role under the full versions of Windows Server.

Ideally once it's all installed (the stand-alone version), you need only join it to an Active Directory domain in order to easily administer it from another Vista or 2008 box using the Remote Server Administration Tools... but even that is optional really as it can be administered without as well as in the end administration is just DCOM and WMI.

Re:What hidden dangers?

[DaHat]

Also, yes you can find Windows Server 2008 as a free download on microsoft.com.

Re:What hidden dangers?

[jonbryce]

A 240 day trial copy doesn't really count.

Re:What hidden dangers?

[DaHat]

So the need for Windows 2008 goes away AND I demonstrate where you can download a copy of Windows Server 2008 (note you never said what kind) and you still manage cry that what they do give away for free isn't free enough?

Oh right... I almost forgot where I was.

Re:What hidden dangers?

[smash]

If you can find a business (with more than say, 3 employees) willing to use a 240 day trial as their enterprise virtualisation platform, you may have had an argument.

Re:What hidden dangers?

[DaHat]

Again... Windows Server 2008 is NOT required to run or administer a Hyper-V Server box.

Re:What hidden dangers?

[rbanffy]

And exactly how IBM not being a bunch of code-hugging hippies makes Microsoft a bunch of altruistic GPL coders that only want to make Linux a nicer operating system?

Re:What hidden dangers?

[Omnifarious]

Well, yes it does. :-) Apple's only virtue is that they are not big enough to make it stick except in certain (currently smallish (well, OK, the iPod/iTunes store is not that small)) markets.

For some bizarre reasons technology companies consider free markets to be incredibly scary and avoid them at all costs, which is kinda funny given the rhetoric they usually spew.

Re:What hidden dangers?

[martyros]

Except that Microsoft has a 25-year history of screwing people over. Go back and read the "findings of fact" from the 2000 anti-trust suit, and see if Microsoft, as a company, was worth trusting then; and then look at their handling of OOXML and see if they're still worth trusting. If someone you never met did something nice to you, you'd be paranoid to look for ulterior motives. If someone you've seen be a selfish, manipulative jerk for 25 years did something nice for you, you'd be an idiot not to look for ulterior motives.

Incomplete list

[gmuslera]

4) ???
5) Profit!

stand by for heavy rolls

[mr_death]

Perhaps Microsoft's lawyers found a weakness in the GPL, or they want to litigate the FSF into the ground.

"Beware of G[r]eeks bearing gifts".

Interoperability to defend Windows business

[javacowboy]

I guess a few years Microsoft finally got the memo that they can't protect sales of Windows by attempting to force lock-in to their entire Windows ecosystem. They realized that many of their customers mix technologies together. Examples are Java/JBoss on Windows server, Windows desktops and Linux servers (Samba), working with Mozilla developers to port Firefox to Vista, and iPhones connecting to Exchange servers (licensing ActiveSync to Apple).

By taking these actions, Microsoft ensures the continued relevance of the Windows platform instead of potentially dooming it to a proprietary ghetto.

The flip side of this focus is that Microsoft will still push Windows to OEMs to fend off other platforms. An example is their actions in the netbook space among which was to essentially give away XP. So for at least some things, Microsoft is still up to their old tricks.

Re:Interoperability to defend Windows business

[value_added]

I guess a few years Microsoft finally got the memo that they can't protect sales of Windows by attempting to force lock-in to their entire Windows ecosystem. They realized that many of their customers mix technologies together. Examples are Java/JBoss on Windows server, Windows desktops and Linux servers (Samba), working with Mozilla developers to port Firefox to Vista, and iPhones connecting to Exchange servers (licensing ActiveSync to Apple).

I think that may be a generous interpretation.

Microsoft isn't interested in interoperability. If they did, they simply stop "not interoperating".

What they are interested is licensing deals. The ex CFO of Microsoft (previously with IBM, IIRC) recently published a book in which he describes how he built up an entire department to do just this and how much money the effort has been bringin in. Your ActiveSync example is just one example of many.

You could make some kind of argument for JBoss and Firefox, but Microsoft's primary directive remains maintaining their monopoly. Anything they do that in that regard I don't see as a charitable attempt at interoperability, but rather a clever and strategic effort at leveraging it. Cracks in the "ecosystem" may be increasingly acceptable. Threats to their monopoly will never be.

It's no surprise that Microsoft wants a piece of the virtualisation market. If offering up a few thousand lines of code does that, then they've conceded little. I'd suggest even go farther and suggest that the "open for interpretation" nature of their gesture is excellent PR that can be used in future FUD campaigns.

As for Samba, I believe that the recent progress is the direct result of the EU's legal actions.

Re:Interoperability to defend Windows business

[javacowboy]

So how do you explain Microsoft's patent-less interoperability agreement with Red Hat?

I'm impressed... NOT!

[Osvaldo Doederlein]

Some drivers to make Linux work better inside MS's Windows Server Hyper-V virtualization platform? How altruistic...

I'll be more impressed when MS, for example, helps with the SAMBA project. Or at least, doesn't actively screw up with such interop projects from the FOSS community. No GPL code required, just give people decent, up-to-date, open specs; and no patents bullshit.

Or at very least, when MS stops enforcing such patents (see TomTom / FAT32, or again SMB in MS/Novell "agreement").

Re:I'm impressed... NOT!

[plague3106]

Oh, you mean like this: http://www.onekit.com/store/review/microsoft_deal_gives_samba_access_to_windows_protocol_documentation.html

Also, did you consider that TomTom had some patents on thing MS might be using, and thus only sued to get a deal to be struck? http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/20/0215215

Na... just let your beliefs obscure any facts.

Re:I'm impressed... NOT!

[gaggle]

So that's, what, eight years ago? You had a problem with a genre of drivers notorious for being problematic (network issues have always been a constant pain), on a platform known for its millions of hardware combinations? And they got it wrong with your specific combination, oh woe is them... maybe it's time to kiss and make up?

I don't really care what you do man, and I'm not saying my rephrasing of your problem is any more "right" than what you posted. It just sounds like maybe its time to revisit your feelings and test if the underlying reasons remain valid. Maybe, just maybe, Microsoft's VM department really do want to give their customers the best Linux experience possible. Sounds like basic business to me, so I imagine the drivers will work pretty well for what they're for.

Re:I'm impressed... NOT!

[mcgrew]

I didn't get XP until about 2005. That's only 3 1/2 years ago, and XP had been out for enough years that its bugs should have been exterminated years earlier. There was no reason to replace the driver, especially since network drivers are notorious for being problematic.

Microsoft's VM department really do want to give their customers the best Linux experience possible.

That's a dubious assumption when you look at their history.

Sounds like basic business to me

I've never seen MS operate on the same principles as any other business. It seems basic business practices would have precluded letting Vista be released; no other company could have released as bad a turkey and still survived.

Re:I'm impressed... NOT!

[jonbryce]

Samba got that after fighting all the way to the European Court of Justice.

Re:I'm impressed... NOT!

[plague3106]

Samba never stepped foot into court. MS took that step after losing an appeal in the EU, but the step hadn't been dictated to MS by the EU either. Regardless, that was over two years ago, so for someone today to be claiming MS is actively getting in the way of the Samba project is nothing but FUD.

Re:I'm impressed... NOT!

[Just Some Guy]

I'll be more impressed when MS, for example, helps with the SAMBA project. Or at least, doesn't actively screw up with such interop projects from the FOSS community. No GPL code required, just give people decent, up-to-date, open specs; and no patents bullshit.

You sound like some of the parents from my kids' sports teams. It's not good enough that they do one thing right. No, they have to do everything right, every time, before they'll ever get your praise. I don't like MS any more than the next Slashdotter and don't own any of their stuff aside from a couple of trackballs, but it's OK to encourage them whenever they do something right. Releasing code under our chosen license is one of those things we want them to keep doing, you know?

Re:I'm impressed... NOT!

[nschubach]

So that's, what, eight years ago? [...] maybe it's time to kiss and make up?

If Jeffrey Dahmer was still alive and invited you over to lunch, would you go? ;)

He did things to other people that wouldn't be considered the best interest to society and Microsoft did things to competitors that wouldn't be in the best interest of the market. They both screwed up in the past, have pretended to be nice and stabbed the person they were being nice to in the back (... literally) and you want to pretend none of it happened? You want to pretend that they've changed and aren't out to kill off their competitors?

Re:I'm impressed... NOT!

[beuges]

No, MS's motto was never "dos aint done til lotus won't run", and it frustrates me that people that continually repeat these lies get modded up, which helps to spread the misinformation.
Microsoft puts immeasurable effort into ensuring backwards compatibility. And because Lotus was the predominant spreadsheet for quite a while, Microsoft went to great lengths to ensure that lotus would most definitely run on newer versions of DOS. Who would buy a newer version of DOS if their spreadsheet didn't work on it?

Slashdot itself ran an article that showed it to be a myth. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/02/2219208
Please stop spreading these untruths. And don't bother calling me a shill or an astroturfer - it just makes you look childish.

Re:I'm impressed... NOT!

[drsmithy]

Back in the day when Lotus was king and Excel was buggy crap (the opposite of today), MS's motto was "DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run."

Ignoring for a second the sheer stupidity of this statement, can you provide any examples - including versions - of DOS breaking Lotus ?

Re:I'm impressed... NOT!

[Xenographic]

You may be right that they weren't sabotaging Lotus 123. I don't remember much about that story (though there WAS a big lawsuit over some of those things, unless I'm confused by all the many lawsuits Microsoft has been through).

That said, in spite of your talk about them "bending over backwards to maintain compatibility" it's not like they'll do that to help their competitors. Read this, for example.

Don't get me wrong. They DO preserve compatibility with their own stuff, even to ridiculous degrees (it often causes bugs, like that huge hole in image previews caused by support for a really ancient, terrible file format nobody has used for at least a decade).

But don't try to make it sound like they're altruistic about compatibility or that they're above using cutthroat tactics against their competition.

Re:I'm impressed... NOT!

[mcgrew]

You have to tolerate bugs, they are inevitable in our primitive times. All you can do is try to minimize them and try to find software that has the fewest.

Bugs aren't the only problem or even the worst; "it's a feature, not a bug" should actually be stated "it's a design flaw, not a bug".

There are some focus issues in KDE that someone obviously thought was a good idea that I absolutely hate, but I've never had Suse or Mandriva (the only two distros I spent any time with) replace a perfectly good driver with one that didn't work at all.

Replacing a working second-party driver automatically is brain-dead stupid, IMO. I can't imagine what dimwit came up with that idea, and why Microsoft didn't fire him (indeed, how he got hired in the first place). Not the guy who wrote the driver (anybody can make a mistake) but the guy who decided to include it in an automatic update. If I wasn't a nerd I'd have spent lots of money trying to solve the problem.

Re:I'm impressed... NOT!

[geminidomino]

Excel (which was new) was at a tactical disadvantage, because the Windows overhead made it slower in an apples-to-apples spreadsheet run.

Hell,it's for this reason that, to this day, I mourn the death of console spreadsheet programs.

What I wouldn't give for a nice, lightweight expressCalc clone for linux...

Re:I'm impressed... NOT!

[weicco]

Some drivers to make Linux work better inside MS's Windows Server Hyper-V virtualization platform? How altruistic...

Yes, yes. And every other company releasing code under open source license is acting purely on good faith and not to make money out of it, like Redhat perhaps?

Re:I'm impressed... NOT!

[Jamie Lokier]

There is still patents bullshit with the Samba stuff.

The agreement means Samba can implement the protocols covered by patents without being sued by Microsoft, but You are not protected if you rip that code out of Samba and use it for something else.

Not very GPL, that.

Re:Hyper-V? Never heard of it.

[Dotren]

Hyper-V

Basically, its a virtualization system that runs as a role on Server 2008. Parts of it work a lot like VirtualPC does (Microsoft's desktop virtualizaton system) but it also has some nice features such as automatic save-state when the host OS is shutting down which also can automatically restore when the host OS comes back up and starts the Hypver-V role.

Greeting Fellow Multiversers

[mindbrane]

I honestly don't know how I got here. I just woke up and here I am in your universe, AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE TO MY OWN HOME UNIVERSE. IT'S TRUE! You can't imagine how glad I am to be here. I'm definitely not going back. Things are bad where I come from.

Re:Greeting Fellow Multiversers

[Darkness404]

Am I the only one wondering what a Ubuntu repository was doing with this article?

Re:Greeting Fellow Multiversers

[Hurricane78]

Our rain is made out donuts too.

*continues eating his ice cream like a chameleon* *slurp*

Re:Greeting Fellow Multiversers

[Hurricane78]

Also, you should not say that forbidden word that starts with "o" and ends with "f". It's like NI, but worse. (*tries to cover up the missing word in his original post*)

Re:Greeting Fellow Multiversers

[mqduck]

Also, you should not say that forbidden word that starts with "o" and ends with "f". It's like NI, but worse.

$ grep '^o.*f$' /usr/share/dict/words

Whichever one it is, I'm in for it now. (Note: Slashdot's lame filters won't let me paste the output of that command.)

Re:Hyper-V? Never heard of it.

[CarpetShark]

Hyper-virtualisation. Running OS's under other OS's. In other words, this is a patch for Linux to make it run well on Microsoft systems, so customers will feel less need to actually install Linux on servers. It's not a friendly gesture to make normal Linux systems work better, as the title suggests.

The Thing M$ Likes about the GPL

[StCredZero]

Microsoft has never been interested in anything other than its self. One must question its motives...

The GPL is about maintaining control. (Imagine Yoda reading that sentence.) The author maintains control over the source. Why wouldn't Microsoft like that? Microsoft is not against anything that lets it maintain control. What Microsoft doesn't like is what lets you keep control. Conclusion: Microsoft is likely to be fine with the GPL, so long as it's the only one who ever uses it. Granted, that's a long term goal...

Re:The Thing M$ Likes about the GPL

[Omnifarious]

The GPL is about maintaining control.

The GPL is about maintaining control huh? Tell that to Oracle. Who has control over the future of MySQL? Oracle or the people who are contributing code to it?

Re:The Thing M$ Likes about the GPL

[superdana]

I think you have this precisely backwards. The GPL is about protecting the rights of users to modify the software they use and distribute those modifications. So it does, in fact, give control to the end user--the sort of control that Microsoft does not tend to give--while the author relinquishes some control.

Re:The Thing M$ Likes about the GPL

[maxume]

If an author of a GPL program accepts significant changes from another contributor (without some sort of copyright assignment), he essentially loses control of the combined version of the code.

Depending on how you interpret copyright and the GPL, if he closely studies the implementation of various features, he may have trouble later claiming to have developed an independent version (and there certainly is not substantial legal precedent to look to in such a situation).

Re:The Thing M$ Likes about the GPL

[sam.haskins]

Well, I think you might have it a little off too... The GPL protects the rights of the *code* to always be open-source and freely distributable. If I want to modify the software and distribute those modifications, but not release the source to my modifications, the GPL takes control, and denies me that privilege. GPL protects the freedom of code, BSD protects the freedom of coders.

Re:The Thing M$ Likes about the GPL

[MaskedSlacker]

Who said MS would ever accept code contributions?

Re:The Thing M$ Likes about the GPL

[palegray.net]

MySQL has been dual-licensed for a long, long time. The GPL version of MySQL is the copyrighted properly of the company. Reference: assigning copyright to another entity when you contribute code.

Re:The Thing M$ Likes about the GPL

[Omnifarious]

Who said they had a choice? If they don't, someone else will and that person will become the de-facto maintainer.

Re:The Thing M$ Likes about the GPL

[Omnifarious]

It has indeed, and non-Oracle versions of MySQL will not be able to be released under a dual license, they will only be able to be released under the GPL. So I ask again, who controls MySQL? Oracle, or the people who work on it?

Re:The Thing M$ Likes about the GPL

[drsmithy]

The author maintains control over the source.

No, the author creates control over other people's source.

If you're only interested in your own source code, then the BSDL is fine. If you want to influence other people's code, you need the GPL.

Re:The Thing M$ Likes about the GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

The GPL is about maintaining control. (Imagine Yoda reading that sentence.)

Maintaining control the GPL is about

Re:The Thing M$ Likes about the GPL

[palegray.net]

That depends entirely on which product actually gets used the most post-fork.

Just imagine...

[Dotren]

Serious discussion on this aside for a second, who else is anxious to see people's reactions (visually or even just message board posts) the first time they see a driver in their favorite distro that says something to the effect of "Publisher: Microsoft"?

Re:Just imagine...

[silent_artichoke]

It will look a lot like this.

when the devil offers you chicken soup...

[martas]

you call the CDC.

Re:when the devil offers you chicken soup...

[CarpetShark]

Ahh, the Choruses for Devils Choir. Such sweet tones.

Microsoft is going to kill VMWare

[mewsenews]

I think Microsoft gets upset if any other company talks to the BIOS besides them. Here's a page from VMWare that compares their own product to Microsoft's Hyper-V. Hyper-V only debuted as a beta a year ago and they're already compromising company policy to release Linux kernel level code.

Wikipedia page for Hyper-V

Re:Microsoft is going to kill VMWare

[FunPika]

No, Microsoft is going to f***ing kill VMWare. ;)

Re:Microsoft is going to kill VMWare

[Darkness404]

VMware will always win on Macs though. I know a lot of people who have bought Fusion so they don't have to dual boot in order to use XP. MS hasn't made any quality software on Macs, let alone replaced any product with decent marketshare.

Re:Microsoft is going to kill VMWare

[Anonymous Coward]

i think most people are missing the point...

the move on microsofts part is to help its partners (citrix and xenserver) product line and provide easier means for transfer of vms between the two. both of which have a goal of crushing vmware.

once vmware is toppled, and microsoft has full interopratability with citrix/xenserver, microsoft can then transition to knock citrix/xenserver out of the market and become the virtual machine leader...

this is just an intermediate step needed to further this goal

Re:Microsoft is going to kill VMWare

[mewsenews]

Yes, exactly.

Re:Microsoft is going to kill VMWare

[javacowboy]

VMware will always win on Macs though. I know a lot of people who have bought Fusion so they don't have to dual boot in order to use XP. MS hasn't made any quality software on Macs, let alone replaced any product with decent marketshare.

Let's tackle these one at a time shall we?

1) VMWare Fusion... Perhaps it doesn't run Windows as well, but I find the free VirtualBox fulfills my needs for a VM on Mac.
2) MS still distributes Microsoft Office for Mac, and it's still the #1 office program on OS X, albeit limited to just Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Keynote may beat PowerPoint hands down, but Word is arguably better than Pages and Excel is definitely better than Numbers. MSN Messenger also works decently on Macs.

Re:Microsoft is going to kill VMWare

[AvitarX]

Funny, I remember MS as some of the early adopters of new Apple APIs, with Office even being a heralded launch for one o0f the version of OSX.

Additionally IE for OS9 was a decent browser.

Re:Microsoft is going to kill VMWare

[jonbryce]

Isn't Parallels the market leader on Macs?

I believe Office 2008 has a pretty decent marketshare.

Re:Microsoft is going to kill VMWare

[Stu101]

This is so timely. I spent the last 3 days fighting VMWare. Microsoft don't need to try and kill VMWare. VMware is doing an excellent job of that by itself. We are a small gov branch that spend a measly $40,000 a year with VMWare and then we realised that why shouldn't we get educational discounts from VMWare. We get top level discounts from MS,Novell,Oracle etc.

VMWare, nope sorry. No can do. After 3 days of getting to the right person the answer was no, because your courses you teach aren't long enough. FFS!

So I mentioned that we had a top line educational select agreement with MS, and Hyper V is free! They really didn't give a toss. Give it a year and they will be so hurting. It's a pity because the software is top notch but there is no "getting the business" aspect of it. Once Hyper V is matured, they are done!

Re:Microsoft is going to kill VMWare

[TheRaven64]

This is about server virtualisation, not desktop. And on the Mac, for desktop virtualisation, VMWare's big competitor is VirtualBox, which is Good Enough(tm) and free, while VMWare's product costs money.

Re:Microsoft is going to kill VMWare

[smash]

Doesn't mean office for Mac was *good*. New API or not, it was a pig of a product. One could pose the argument that they put it out to make the mac look bad, even.

Re:Microsoft is going to kill VMWare

[BitZtream]

What about all the advances that VMWare makes while Hyper-V is catching up to what they already have?

They may compete with VMWare, but they aren't just going to blow them out of the water.

Worst case VMWare turns its price into roughly the same as the licensing cost for the same sort of Hyper-V setup.

So okay, you'll go with MS because of your discount. I won't. I don't get those discounts. Also, I've seen what happens when you put all your eggs in one basket. I will NEVER be an 'MS' shop, or a 'Linux' shop, or any other product. When you pile all of your stuff onto one product line/company you realize later how that was a retarded move when they go a different direction than you need.

I've been there, done that. I'd much rather deal with integrating several different distinct systems than be completely screwed over AGAIN when the vendor decides to change gears or drop a product. Any of my vendors can disappear tomorrow and I'll have some work to do, but most of my systems won't require complete replacement. You go ahead and tie yourself into MS for everything, and when they drop the product line or whatever, you deal with having to retool EVERYTHING at one time.

Re:Microsoft is going to kill VMWare

[Ilgaz]

IE 5.2.x which has become a security threat because it is not updated can still run on Leopard flawlessly without a single warning at console.

When they let Developers do their job without adding any "evil", they can produce great software and in fact, community supports them in process too. Mac users have chosen IE over Netscape without anyone forcing them. IE was basically way more standards compliant and trouble free. Of course, it was just an "app" in /Applications , nothing like Windows junk.

Office as you mention always keeps up with whatever API Apple recommends and the latest one actually is Cocoa application built with stock XCode as far as I followed. Mac community pays back too, it is always on top spot at Apple top seller software. When you mention it, people doesn`t believe you. It is a good way of explaining developers why they should ignore certain loudmouth people.

As nobody can convince me that MS doesn`t know how to code for PowerPC, Silverlight story is the one which the "evil" factor got intervened in process. They released V1, we said "OK, stop being anti MS, lets see this thing" and it was OK as a plugin. Than, V2 shipped dropping PowerPC support while Adobe moved to parallel processing in Flash 10 for PPC. Now, that is what happens when the evil gangs inside that large company goes into action.

Re:Microsoft is going to kill VMWare

[agnosticnixie]

1 - Agreed
2 - Part 1, partially agreed on popularity, less on quality, but I haven't touched MS Office since the 90s as a kid
Part the 2nd - (MSN Messenger also works decently on Macs) - I feel the need to let out a slight LOL, from a circle of people I've seen, it's fairly universally poor compared to the multiprotocol alternatives, although, true, the only alternatives for msn are libpurple based afaik.

Re:Microsoft is going to kill VMWare

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

Microsoft isn't killing vmware, vmware is killing vmware. Have you tried using VMWare Server 2 lately? They replaced the decent standalone executable admin application in version 1 with a web interface which is excruciatingly slow, buggy, and painful to use. Its one of those web apps where the idiot designers inexplicably decided to write their own crappy windowing system in Javascript. And of course, you still need an executable to use the console of the VMs, so the web interface was pointless to begin with.

2) product evangelism

[bertoelcon]

They are using GPL as a ploy to gain more fanbois, and sadly it may have worked if they were not generally hated by those that aren't already fanboy status.

Re:2) product evangelism

[AndrewNeo]

Unless of course, Microsoft wants to get it into the kernel source, like described in the summary, and then it needs to be GPLv2.

Once and Done Project

[mpapet]

This reminds me of Microsoft's 'commitment' to other document standards.

The likelihood it will ever be sufficiently maintained by Microsoft is 1%. So, they can say "Works with Linux!" when it might work for one version at one point in time of SLES.

Re:Once and Done Project

[m.ducharme]

I haven't read TFA, but my impression from other posters who have is that this driver enables users to run vm's of linux on Windows host boxes, using Microsoft's vm software. In other words, the better this driver works, the happier Microsoft is going to be.

Patent\IP Protection

[markkezner]

The code has been released under an acceptable OSS license, but does that guarantee protection from Patent or IP litigation? Does this protection extend to downstream distributors and users? What were the reasons for selecting GPL v2 instead of v3? These are important questions to ask.

The OSS community has been criticized in some cases of distrusting Microsoft as a knee-jerk reaction, but given Microsoft's long history of antagonistic behavior, I can't say that I blame them.

The motives are quite simple

[brunes69]

If you have a mixed environment and need to host both Linux VMs and Windows VMs with optimal performance, until now VMWarea and Xen were your best options, because Linux performed sub-optimally under Hyper-V.

Now with this patch Linux will probably perform just as good under Hyper-V as it does in VMWare and Xen.

So now you might be able to be convinced to host your VMs on MIcrosoft's Hyper-V platform, where before it was not even an option.

Re:The motives are quite simple

[nschubach]

Yep, I think that's the crux of it. It's a point of control. If they can remain the closest to the hardware, they control the system no matter what's running on it. If they can get Linux to run under Windows and they successfully outpace other VMs, then they can start adding "compatibility" code and making Linux perform worse than Windows Virtual systems.

It's also well documented that Microsoft would rather give away their technology to get people using it than let people use a competitor.

Re:The motives are quite simple

[brunes69]

There is no such sinister motive and I was not trying to imply as such.

They are simply trying to make their Hyper-V product better.

I don't see people harping on VMWare, when they do the exact same thing.

Simple, can the fork survive?

[SmallFurryCreature]

Forking sounds very nice but for this situation it would require NOT just for people to be willing to DO the fork but then to keep the fork up-to-date.

Remember MS sale technique. The first one is free. What if they release the base module as GPL, then put everything you are going to need once you started to use it as closed source? MS owns the code after all, so they GPL'ed this version but can keep any future version closed source just as long as they keep other peoples code out.

Read up on exactly WHAT Embrace, Extend, Extinguish means and remember that MS has NEVER EVER played nice. It will even hurt it self it thinks it can spite its customers. Look at the Zune. Why did it bend over backwards to introduce all kinds of restrictions? To appease who? The music industry? Why? The iPod didn't and Apple does just fine with the music industry. No, MS did it because MS will ALWAYS try to squeeze the last bit of money out of anything.

I personally do not believe for a SECOND that MS will NOT introduce some sort of tierd service that somehow is going to screw anyone who is going to build their business on this tech. Just as MS did with the MP3 companies that build their business on MS music store only to not enable its own tech in its own player.

or use the time tested strategy

[nimbius]

of muscling into the industry only to release a flop product, and blame it on linux...while your virtualization of the same type works just fine

Re:or use the time tested strategy

[Orion Blastar]

Technology Microsoft bought via VirtualPC from Connectix instead of inventing it themselves, also technology borrowed from Citrix that got put into Terminal Server and later merged with VirtualPC with Microsoft Virtual Server and then used in Windows 2008 Server.

Whomever controls the virtual machine technology, controls the future. This may be an attempt by Microsoft to attack VMWare, Citrix, Oracle/Sun's VirtualBox, and insert their own virtualization code in Linux and other platforms.

Windows 7 uses VirtualPC technology to run an XP Virtual machine in Windows 7 Pro and up for "legacy Windows software".

Re:or use the time tested strategy

[rbanffy]

"its like placing a 7 year old at the controls of a breeder reactor!"

I think a PWR reactor would be a more appropriate analogy. IIRC, breeders are not as fragile.

MS NEVER "shifts"!!

[SpaghettiPattern]

Remember DHCP? MS came with that as an extension of bootp and with an RFC too. Surely a fortunate bug somewhere -that never was fixed- causing WfW not to comply, resulting in MS DHCP servers.

Remember NetBIOS over TCP? Where a clear algorithm was defined to map NetBIOS names to DNS. Not too unfortunately, in WfW the algorithm wasn't implemented causing incompatibilities between OS/2 and WfW, and making a transition from NetBIOS over NetBEUI a bigger pain than it should have been.

There must be more recent examples which I don't know about.

MS never gives a little without getting a lot. Stay clear of the b'stards.

Re:MS NEVER "shifts"!!

[nxtw]

Remember DHCP? MS came with that as an extension of bootp and with an RFC too. Surely a fortunate bug somewhere -that never was fixed- causing WfW not to comply, resulting in MS DHCP servers.

Remember NetBIOS over TCP? Where a clear algorithm was defined to map NetBIOS names to DNS. Not too unfortunately, in WfW the algorithm wasn't implemented causing incompatibilities between OS/2 and WfW, and making a transition from NetBIOS over NetBEUI a bigger pain than it should have been.

There must be more recent examples which I don't know about.

Do you have any examples from the past 5 years? Anything from the past 15 years?

Re:MS NEVER "shifts"!!

[Blakey Rat]

There must be more recent examples which I don't know about.

That's a shame, since your examples are ancient and petty. Making a transition from NetBIOS a bigger pain? That's seriously the best you have?

Hell, you don't even make it clear Microsoft did anything wrong on the second example... ok so there was "a clear algorithm" defined, but was it a standard? Had Microsoft ever signed off on it, or even see it for that matter? Was it not implemented out of spite, or was it a simple bug?

Reading your post, I almost feel like your opinion just cemented like 15 years ago, and now you're completely unwilling or unable to re-consider anything. Is it the same with all the opinions you hold? For example, are you wearing hammer pants and a hypercolor t-shirt right now because they're so cool? It's fascinating.

Re:MS NEVER "shifts"!!

[Anonymous Coward]

from the past 15 years - Win 2000 and non-standard Kerberos extensions

from the past 5 years - Vista and non-standard wireless ARP requests.

Re:MS NEVER "shifts"!!

[Daniel_Staal]

Hmm, I haven't followed to closely, but let's see... How about when they distributed their own implementation of Java, that didn't quite work to the spec? Or Internet Explorer 5/6, which had an issue with computing a dimension to the CSS standard. Or, of course, there is MS's version of the ODF standard, and their own competing XML document format.

That's what I can think off of the top of my head. I'm sure someone who's followed more closely can think of more.

Re:MS NEVER "shifts"!!

[mqduck]

b'stards

Okay, you'll have to help me out here. What accent is it that drops a vowel between Bs and Ss?

Re:MS NEVER "shifts"!!

[Ilgaz]

I remember their JVM before becoming evil was better than Sun JVM, supporting 64bit really early times. I also remember some developer friends say "Hey, now I can check that Java thing."

Of course, they couldn`t become the standard on Java virtual machine, they had to "embrace and extend" it so it became 500 million dollar court thing for them. I keep wondering how people in charge of such stupid decisions can stay in management.

Big deal. Such drivers are trivial.

[Animats]

Big deal. Such drivers are trivial.

Virtualizing physical I/O devices on PC-like architectures requires code in the hypervisor to emulate the device. The driver in the operating system does stores into "device registers" as if talking the real device. Each such store or load causes a trap to the hypervisor, which has a device emulator watching the register changes and pretending to be the real peripheral. When the right registers have been loaded with the right values, and the final register store is made that would start the I/O operation, the device emulator then figures out what the OS wanted to do, and makes a call to the hypervisor's I/O system to do it.

In many cases, the device driver in the OS is doing all the optimization for the device controller of a real disk, doing angular optimization and head movement minimization. Since the real device underneath may be completely different, most of this is wasted work, and may reduce performance instead of increasing it.

So it's common to have dummy device drivers for virtual machines that just pass the OS's request through to the hypervisor, without trying to manage a real device. Such drivers don't do much, and are usually trivial, although Microsoft will probably try to complicate them somehow.

This isn't a new idea; it first appeared in IBM's VM for the System/370, where such calls were passed through using the DIAGNOSE instruction (an opcode used for hardware diagnostics only, and thus never used in ordinary programs and available as a spare opcode.)

One of the hypervisor vendors calls this "paravirtualization".

billg has left the building?

[Natasha]

So is it just me or did Microsoft get more friendly toward Open Source about the time Bill Gates retired?

Re:"It's a trap!"

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

"If Microsoft didn't have a past history of trying to sue over Linux, people like me wouldn't be this paranoid."

It is not paranoia if they really are out to get you.

Precedent?

[DaMattster]

Microsoft seems to have set a precedent for itself for being late in the game and then overpowering competition ... except for this time. Do you remember when Bill Gates made the pronouncement that no one would adopt TCP/IP as the networking standard? When everyone did, Microsoft hastily added Winsock to its Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. Do you remember how Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer made the pronouncement that open source would never take on and never cause any serious competition? Whoops, again, the great bastion of computing was wrong. Now, Microsoft is seeking to overwhelm Red Hat and Novell in Virtualization? I would say the deck is stacked heavily against Microsoft in this arena. Both Red Hat and Novell are using relatively mature virtualization engines when compared with the one MS just open sourced. Why would I choose MS's virtualization engine when Red Hat and Novell have ones that are more mature? What does Microsoft offer that would make me choose it over Zen, VMWare, or KVM? My guess is not much since I have tried their product and it does not perform as well as its competitors.

Re:Precedent?

[Thundersnatch]

Why would I choose MS's virtualization engine when Red Hat and Novell have ones that are more mature?

Because Hyper-V, in BETA, was better than any KVM-based virtualization solution. Seriously.

VMware ESX is the competition for Hyper-V. Xen is the enemy of Hyper-V's enemy, and so they share an open-standard disk format and management API with Hyper-V.

Getting KVM going with clustered storage, live migration, virtual VLANs, etc. costs about a man-year of staff time. And the solution will be very, very brittle.

VMware can provide way more features, performance, and stability with a few hours of work. Xen and Microsoft are behind, but still way better than anything based on KVM.

Re:Hyper-V? Never heard of it.

[rufus t firefly]

Hyper-virtualisation. Running OS's under other OS's. In other words, this is a patch for Linux to make it run well on Microsoft systems, so customers will feel less need to actually install Linux on servers. It's not a friendly gesture to make normal Linux systems work better, as the title suggests.

I think I'm way more likely to virtualize *Windows* servers on a Linux host than otherwise. The company I work for doesn't run Windows on bare metal anymore.

A good reason for that is that Windows isn't really administrable via a serial console, so that if networking is blown, you'd require either an iLO/DRAC type hardware solution or would have to go with relatively costly KVM over IP.

Honestly, I don't think this is big news. The host component isn't being opensourced, so you need a Windows-whatever server to run Linux hosts under it. I think I'll stick to Xen for paravirtualization and VMware/Virtualbox for full virtualization, thank you.

Re:Hyper-V? Never heard of it.

[shutdown -p now]

In other words, this is a patch for Linux to make it run well on Microsoft systems, so customers will feel less need to actually install Linux on servers.

It's not quite true - Hyper-V is specifically pushed as a server virtualization solution (while usable as a virtual desktop, it has a number of rather annoying limitations in that role, such as no resolutions higher than 1600x1200, and rather slow video). Thus, the ability to run Linux as a Hyper-V guest OS implies running Linux on (virtualized) servers. If this was about desktop Linux, we'd see release of similar drivers for Virtual PC (specifically the new version of it that comes with Win7).

running that

[codepunk]

Running those drivers would be about as smart as running Dr. Dos on windows....What do you mean it crashed?

Re:Quite strategic...

[schon]

M$ can claim that their windeuce servers can virtualize Red Hat very effectively, so that if a buyer were considering a Linux server, M$ can claim it works well on their systems.

Only if RedHat ships this driver with their kernel, which isn't guaranteed. There are a lot of in-tree kernel modules that RH doesn't ship or support (various FS drivers, for example.)

Just because it's in the kernel mainline tree is no guarantee of RedHat (or any other distro) shipping with it.

The plan:

[Hurricane78]

1. Collect the most patent/copyright protected parts that you can get your hands on.
2. Weave them into device driver code in a way that makes it impossible to notice the source of the code, unless you are the one who might sue (=yourself).
3. Release them as GPL and let it grow into Linux.
4. ...
5. Sue Linux to death! (=Profit)
</humor>

Re:The plan:

[BitZtream]

And then Linus says 'Here is the GPL'd patch to rebuild your kernel without the MS drivers so you don't get sued to death'.

This sort of thing is one of GPL's strongest strengths, since everyone can get the source, they can remove the offending code, make new binaries and tell MS to piss the fuck off.

I don't think a judge would let someone actually get sued and pay out if they immediately made an effort to remove the offending code sense MS has put them out there for us to use its implied that its okay to use them.

They can't wait 10 years then sue, that doesn't go over well anywhere, even in America, Land of the Ambulance chasing lawyers.

MS Nuclear Option: MS Linux distro

[cenc]

I have never encountered anyone so far discuss the possibility that MS could simply wipe out open source linux (or seriously damage it at least) as a possible contender on the desktop by creating and marketing its own MS linux distro.

Yea, I am sure everyone is chuckling at that thought, but think about it.

It would slam the door shut on any encroachment by linux and open source in general. Yea, Linux would be adopted on a wider scale, but fully under the marketing and monopoly control of MS. What is to stop them from doing it, and what is to stop them from doing the same with other open source projects? Essentially a World of MS forks of open source projects, that rebrand open source projects as MS projects and products. The end consumer will likly be just sufficiently stupid to buy a MS linux distro for instance as a low cost version that does not need to be presented in the best light. Something perhaps that makes Windows looks good, and Linux look like a poor mans free software.

There is nothing in the GPL or other license that says people that use the software have to present it in the best light, or they can not use it.

Re:MS Nuclear Option: MS Linux distro

[bcmm]

Well, either they'd put their own API or window system or something over it (think MacOS X or Chrome OS), in which case it wouldn't compete with proper Linux any differently than Windows already does, or they'd make a real distro, in which case they'd suddenly be much more compatible with the competition, lowering the barrier for people wanting to switch.

I don't think there would be anything too bad about a world with a set of different vendors making mostly compatible operating systems/distributions, even if one of them is Microsoft.

Even worse...

[Osvaldo Doederlein]

...from TFA: "That documentation must be kept "in confidence" and "under non-disclosure" by PFIF and Samba. "

Not what I'd consider openness yet; not by a LONG shot.

Re:Even worse...

[plague3106]

Ya, its not open, even though the resulting source code is open source? Interesting. Also, the GPs quip was "I'll be more impressed when MS, for example, helps with the SAMBA project." Samba now has the documentation... short of writing the code themselves, what more do you want MS to do to help the Samba team?

Re:Even worse...

[Rockoon]

The more insane here might, in a very round about way, argue that Microsoft should be donating programmers to the project.

You see this same sort of round-about thinking elsewhere...

examples:

In the round-about-way they argue that Microsoft should have been and continue to be forced to improve Internet Explorer at their own expense, for the sake of standards.)

In the round-about-way they argue that Microsoft should be forced to do open source, and open specifications, again at their own expense.

Does pretty much everything that Microsoft does have the expectation of leading to profits for Microsoft? Absolutely. Thats what most companies do, and thats what publicly traded companies must do (at least here in America.)

The code in this case is GPL2.. so umm.. whats not to like? Sounds like a win for everybody not in direct competition on the virtualization front.. and competition on the virtualization front, regardless of the players involved, is a good thing for everyone using virtualization.

What a load of bullshit.

[jotaeleemeese]

GPL is not about maintaining control. It is about making software available to all to inspect it and change it if required. With GPL the original source of a program no longer has an absolute say about how the program evolves. If somebody else gets crossed abut the direction a project is taking then that person can fork the project without asking permission from anybody.

How that is to keep control in your mind is a real mystery.

All the BSDites complain exactly about not wanting to give control away when licensing under the GPL, they rightly see it as a tool to undermine the control of the programmer, this in exchange of collaboration with others.

Windows wasn't done until DR-DOS wouldn't run

[Osvaldo Doederlein]

Here, I fixed that for you. And this one is NOT a myth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code, http://www.ddj.com/windows/184409070?pgno=4

Re:Windows wasn't done until DR-DOS wouldn't run

[beuges]

I suggest you read up a bit more about the AARD code before jumping to conspiracy theory conclusions. There were technical reasons for including it:

http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2004/08/12/213681.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2004/08/13/214338.aspx

"Insurgent"

[rgviza]

LOL now that's Microsoft for you.

You clearly don't understand the GPL.

[jotaeleemeese]

Once a piece of code is GPLed, anybody can do whatever they want with the code: fork a new project for example, without asking further permission from anybody, as long as they release everything under the GPL when the software is distributed.

It is amazing how people without the sightliest idea about how the GPL works feel qualified to comment about these news with such abandon.

Re:You clearly don't understand the GPL.

[MaskedSlacker]

Once a piece of code is GPLed, anybody can do whatever they want with the code: fork a new project for example, without asking further permission from anybody, as long as they release everything under the GPL when the software is distributed.

Yes. This is true.

That doesn't mean the forked version will be the one included in the kernel.

It is amazing how people without the sightliest idea about how the GPL works feel qualified to comment about these news with such abandon.

It's amazing how assholes on the internet can summon the strength to condescend to people they know nothing about.

Sure you can fork the code. Doesn't mean a thing, and MS knows that. If your fork breaks compatibility for someone using MS's version, then they'll stay with MS's version. It's easy for MS to maintain control of their version of this driver, and as long as people use their version, who gives a fuck that you can fork it?

It's amazing how people without the slightest idea about how MS runs their business feel qualified to comment about this news with such abandon.

Re:You clearly don't understand the GPL.

[Intron]

I read your comment twice and I'm not a bit amazed by anything that you called amazing. What am I missing?

Re:You clearly don't understand the GPL.

[MaskedSlacker]

The /sarcasm tags I didn't bother to type?

Re:People in the U.S. culture can be very misleadi

[Sam Ramji]

You are really funny! Actually, I'm the head of Open Source and Linux Strategy for Microsoft Corporation. I'm from Oakland, California.

Sam
sramji@microsoft.com

Re:And what of Microsoft?

[genghisjahn]

Flamebait? Dude...it was a joke.

But there is a real difference.

[jotaeleemeese]

If the code is GPLed then the competition can use it.

If MS makes shitty code or plays dirty tricks (how could they do that with software that is open to all to see?) it would be obvious to all, and the problems could be fixed and the improvements used by others.

I dislike Microsoft strongly, you just have to read my comments on this website, but I have also argued that if they play fair they should be welcomed, cautiously of course, but I really struggle to see how MS could undo the effects of GPLed software released by them...

Re:But there is a real difference.

[nschubach]

It doesn't have to be about the driver code...

HyperV is distributed for free with every Server Professional (right?) so if they can get the world to run their server and put Linux in VMs under it, they have control of the VM. Now, big corporations see this as a point of sale. Look, we can run our Linux servers on this Windows machine instead of another Linux machine, this VM is pre-installed and free! Microsoft releases or markets HyperV as a faster more reliable solution (even if it isn't) and they convince the corporate types that only trust big M because they use them so widely already. "Let's make our next server a Windows box..." This continues for a few years. MS plays nice and people think all is well. Open projects start to lose interest and support, companies start relying more and more on HyperV. Then MS sneaks in a virtual machine side compatibility patch that makes Linux start to run slower and slower. You won't be able to see this because HyperV isn't open. And all those other VMs that were competing with HyperV before have fallen behind and can't keep up. MS starts sending out comparisons of their OS running in a their modified VM comparing it to Linux running in their VM. Bloggers/Websites eat that up and soon enough, it's on the front page of Slashdot. "Windows runs better in VMs than Linux."

Call it a conspiracy theory if you like, but you couldn't prove one way or another without seeing Microsoft's code... and that's not happening.

How?

[jotaeleemeese]

The GPL tries to stop exactly that.

You, and other people commenting on this history will have to come with a credible scenario before claiming they can follow their normal tactics.

Re:How?

[sFurbo]

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1308785&cid=28760379 There you go.

Re:People in the U.S. culture can be very misleadi

[Anonymous Coward]

Having an Indian name doesn't make somebody an idiot; public promises from Microsoft are legally binding

No, but believing that does.

Patently False

[ciroknight]

No they don't. DRI/Direct Rendering Manager and a whole host of other device drivers are BSD-licensed and is maintained within the Linux tree, for example. This is so that they can be used within other operating systems (e.g. FreeBSD) without having to relicense back and forth.

A bug in the GPLv2

[Pinky's Brain]

A bug for which exploits have been seen in the wild, DjVu blatantly abused it for instance.

Oh, please.

[JAlexoi]

There is this public secret, that Microsoft will do anything to keep it's OS dominance. Even if it takes on the form of letting Linux run under the Windows Server 2008 HyperV.
It's not the usual Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. And GPL makes sure that that technique does not work as expected.
I would bet, that Sam Ramji had to explain how this move would not hurt Microsoft in any way.
I see Microsoft going the way of IBM, and only doing the thing that is beneficial to their own strategy when contributing to OSS. IBM is a great supporter and contributor, but it does not compare to contributions like people at Sun did. What Sun did, was really altruistic.

Re:Oh, please.

[Rockoon]

"...which is why they folded." - Mr Obvious

Re:Oh, please.

[Ilgaz]

They must be really patient people who has decent gift of ignoring "community". Them and to some extent, real networks who did nothing but favour to Linux community and desktop users especially with Helix project. You see the "thank you"(!) they get from the community whenever their name got mentioned.

Last time, Real offered million dollar worth patents to GPL projects for free and all I read was some lifeless idiots whining "spyware" on Slashdot. Same goes for Java which is GPL now.

Re:Oh, please.

[Rockoon]

Real, just like Sun, is a failure too.

Being generous for its own sake is not good business.

Re:Oh, please.

[Ilgaz]

2 billion devices run J2ME, Java instantly became military standard when it got open sourced. Real is enjoying its kingdom on devices and Linux based appliances.

Being open didn't cost them anything, they earned.

Re:Oh, please.

[Rockoon]

Where are they now?

You seem to have confused 'gained market share' with 'earned', because if they actualy 'earned' a profit on those 2 billion devices, they wouldn't have had to sell themselves to oracle.

Embrace and extend

[wonkavader]

New Theory: MS got tired of embracing and extending things already out there, so...

Biased

[Anonymous Coward]

Good to see that the users of /. are completely biased against Microsoft no matter what they do. Glad to see how open minded this community is. This Microsoft = Evil crap gets really old after awhile. They are one of the most innovative companies out, produce quality software, offer much of it for free (Virtual PC? SharePoint Designer?) to the development community, and now they're trying to put out drivers for Linux under a license that garuntees they will be open and free and still everyone on /. is going to bash them and say this is a conspiracy.

I've taken Software Engineering classes at 3 different Universities (Drexel, George Mason, and West Chester). At every University they presented studies comparing open and closed source software. Closed source wins on almost every level; fewer errors, quicker fixes, better performance. Open source is a great ideal but just because someone COULD go through and edit and contribute code doesn't mean someone WILL go through and fix the errors or even find them in the first place. When I was 16 this open source evangelism had me convinced; a Masters Degree in Computer Science and 10 years in the industry have convinced me that open source is more hype than anything else and very few people are going to sit day after day and produce quality code and products if they don't get paid for it. Microsoft has contributed more to computing than any single company but everyone on this site just loves to hate them for no real reason; and I'm sure you'll all be jumping into anything Google produces (such as Chrome OS) despite the fact that your Holy Google is nothing but DoubleClick 2.0.

I thought this was an open-minded community once; now I realize it is nothing but a bunch of like minded extremists who only want to hear their opinions confirmed without any real argument or debate. When Microsoft does something to promote software interoperability with your open source products I would think that these open source advocates would be happy; instead you assume it is a giant conspiracy to overthrow the open-source community. Grow up.

Re:Biased

[rdebath]

Sorry you feel abused, that's how we feel too, however, our feeling has a name because it's happened so many times before. Many people have been "Microshafted" before now and while the exit of Billg appears to have made changes it's not yet clear if they are for better or worse.

As for Microsoft's "Free" software, you should go to a few MS events. They will tell you that they aren't important, the important thing is "The Stack" the bottom of "The Stack" must be Windows, the top is Office. The bits in between are either required for Office (eg Exchange) or just 'check box' items to make sure nobody has a good reason for leaving. That is after all the core of lockin.

Re:Biased

[Jedi Alec]

Good to see that the users of /. are completely biased against Microsoft no matter what they do. Glad to see how open minded this community is. This Microsoft = Evil crap gets really old after awhile. They are one of the most innovative companies out, produce quality software, offer much of it for free (Virtual PC? SharePoint Designer?) to the development community, and now they're trying to put out drivers for Linux under a license that garuntees they will be open and free and still everyone on /. is going to bash them and say this is a conspiracy.

I've taken Software Engineering classes at 3 different Universities (Drexel, George Mason, and West Chester). At every University they presented studies comparing open and closed source software. Closed source wins on almost every level; fewer errors, quicker fixes, better performance. Open source is a great ideal but just because someone COULD go through and edit and contribute code doesn't mean someone WILL go through and fix the errors or even find them in the first place. When I was 16 this open source evangelism had me convinced; a Masters Degree in Computer Science and 10 years in the industry have convinced me that open source is more hype than anything else and very few people are going to sit day after day and produce quality code and products if they don't get paid for it. Microsoft has contributed more to computing than any single company but everyone on this site just loves to hate them for no real reason; and I'm sure you'll all be jumping into anything Google produces (such as Chrome OS) despite the fact that your Holy Google is nothing but DoubleClick 2.0.

I thought this was an open-minded community once; now I realize it is nothing but a bunch of like minded extremists who only want to hear their opinions confirmed without any real argument or debate. When Microsoft does something to promote software interoperability with your open source products I would think that these open source advocates would be happy; instead you assume it is a giant conspiracy to overthrow the open-source community. Grow up.

There's a different between bias and distrust that has grown over the years. Microsoft has shown time and time again that they're willing to do pretty much anything to get rid of the competition. Heck, they've even been ruled against based on unfair monopolistic practices on 2 different continents, so it's not like it's just a bunch of rabid Slashdotians who feel this way.

Now, if your 19 year old kid has been misbehaving, lying, cheating and stealing since he was 6, you're going to be very very wary before giving him your wallet to go and get some groceries. If Microsoft wants to play nice with the OSS community, they're going to have to work hard to *earn* that trust (back). Concrete example: Sharepoint. Don't get me wrong, I like it and I use it a lot at work. However, I still consider it to be a "lockin tool". Now, if Sharepoint were to interface properly with file formats from companies that compete with MS in other software fields such as Office applications, that'd be something to write about. Heck, making it work 100% with anything but IE would a nice start.

Re:Biased

[zrq]

Good to see that the users of /. are completely biased against Microsoft no matter what they do.

Not everyone is biased, your comment got moderated insightful didn't it ?

This Microsoft = Evil crap gets really old after awhile.

I agree BUT, based on their history, it may be wise to look at what the motives for this move may be.

They are one of the most innovative companies ..

For things like virtualization and Hypervisor:

• the original hypervisor was CP/CMS, developed at IBM in the 1960s
• The major UNIX vendors, including Sun Microsystems, HP, IBM, and SGI, have been selling virtualized hardware since before 2000
• As of late 2006, Solaris, Linux (Ubuntu and Gentoo), and FreeBSD have been ported to run on top of Hypervisor

Microsoft doesn't appear in the list until 2008, so they can hardly claim to be 'one of the most innovative companies' in this particular field.

.. and now they're trying to put out drivers for Linux under a license that guarantees they will be open and free

IF this is the case, then I agree, this move should be welcomed.

.. At every University they presented studies comparing open and closed source software.

Are you basing your statements on what the University studies said, or do you have personal experience of working with both open and closed source software yourself ?

Closed source wins on almost every level; fewer errors, quicker fixes, better performance.

As always your mileage may vary, and if this is what you have found then then this is good. This hasn't been my experience having working in IT developing both open source and closed source software. Many people find that closed source software does exactly what they need, which is fine by me. Best tool for the job and all that.

Open source is a great ideal but just because someone COULD go through and edit and contribute code doesn't mean someone WILL go through and fix the errors

Having worked in (closed source) commercial software for a number of years, I know from experience that the same applies there too. Wherever you are, priorities are subject to a cost benefit analysis.
Just becuse we COULD fix a bug, doesn't mean someone WILL go through and fix the errors, until an important customer notices it.

It could also be argued that Microsoft were able to contribute because the Linux kernel is open source. How many people have the opportunity to see and contribute to the code for the Windows kernel ?

.. very few people are going to sit day after day and produce quality code and products if they don't get paid for it ..

Indeed, and some of the best open source software is produced by people explicitly employed to do just that. By companies like IBM, Sun, Redhat, Oracle, Canonical ... and many many more. I am currently working on a project funded by the UK government to produce open source software for the science community to use.

Microsoft has contributed more to computing than any single company ..

Um, not convinced on that .. I suspect that companies like IBM might be a better contender for that title. Not only do they have a longer history and a wider range, they have also contributed some their patents to the community.

.. but everyone on this site just loves to hate them

Re:And what of Microsoft?

[silent_artichoke]

I hope they don't find anything bigger than a womp-rat.

Re:translation

[mqduck]

"we based our code on existing GPL'ed code; by the terms of the GPL itself we must therefore open source our code. This is what the linux devs asked for by choosing the GPL."

Seems pretty clear to me. Nicely done, Microsoft, keep up the good work.

Sure, but I'm even more inclined to say "nicely done, GPL, keep up the good work." This is why copyleft is good for Linux, good for the world.

This is not weird at all.

[malevolentjelly]

Am I the only one who doesn't find this strange at all? They're submitting drivers for Hyper-V to strengthen Windows Server as a host for mixed OS environments where UNIX servers need to be virtualized. They're working on interoperability to strenghten their product. For instance, Windows Server has a great NFS implementation. Some in our organization consider it the best, actually, so they replaced many of our UNIX NFS servers with Windows Servers.

Interoperability sells and linux kernel drivers are written under the GPL. This is an action Microsoft took both in self-interest and conformance with standard practices for submitting linux kernel code. It's a time saver to just use the GPL and submit kernel code than to go through the awkward trouble of maintaining a binary driver, which is only helpful in special cases, like where Nvidia is replacing much of the X/DRM stack.

Virtual Machines

[dontgetshocked]

I am a newbie for sure on this but if it allows Linux to run better and we still can be safe then why not? Remember the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Insert name here ______.

YAIANALC

[Kickasso]

(yet another "I am not a lawyer" comment)

Microsoft has Patent X. Microsoft incorporates X in Software Y. Microsoft distributes Y under License Z.

Now, if you use Y only as permitted by Z, why do you need a separate license for X, distinct from Z? One certainly would not expect a need for a separate license if Z == Microsoft EULA, so why GPLv2 should be any different?

Re:Hyper-V? Never heard of it.

[Andy Dodd]

I think you misinterpreted what he said.

I'm fairly certain that when he said "less need to actually install Linux on servers" meant "install Linux as the sole or host OS on servers, pushing Windows out of the server market"

Re:Big deal. Such drivers are trivial.

[Eil]

Big deal. Such drivers are trivial.

Baby steps and all.

A decade ago, this article's headline would have only appeared on one particular day of the year.

(Also, this could mean that before the year's end, I should finally be able to purchase my very own spaghetti tree.)

worthless without Microsoft proprietary code.

[xilun]

This is worthless without using tons of Microsoft proprietary code. So why is this interesting?

Re:Hyper-V? Never heard of it.

[shutdown -p now]

It could be interpreted either way. Another perspective is that it gives Windows shops the ability to experiment with Linux on the servers, and/or to use it for some tasks where it makes sense even in otherwise all-Windows environments (e.g. firewall, web server) to cut costs.

Explanation of why people are so untrusting:

[Futurepower(R)]

Sam, I mean this sincerely:

Microsoft has a long, long history of letting its mid-level managers and employees believe one thing, when the top managers intend something else, something very unfriendly and sneaky.

For example, Microsoft employees believed that they would be allowed to finish their work. But, in spite of strong opposition inside Microsoft, Windows Vista was released.

Other products released before they were finished:
Windows XP (Okay after SP2, a lot of grief before)
Windows ME
DOS 3.0

Since Microsoft has acted against the best interests of its customers in many ways in the past, people think that will happen this time.

I listened to this interview of you: Sam Ramji of Microsoft Tells all. It's obvious that you are intelligent and well-meaning. I would tend to trust anything you say if you have control over it. However, I think it is likely that you have no control. I'm guessing that it is likely that some vicious Microsoft top manager has some plan to cause trouble.

Why do I think that? Because sneaky behavior by Microsoft has cost me tens of thousands of dollars over the years.

show us the patents

[jipn4]

I think before there can be any dialog with you, you should show the community the 200+ patents you claim Linux infringes, or else retract that claim.

What about it?

Re:People in the U.S. culture can be very misleadi

[Runaway1956]

Those who fail to learn history's lessons are doomed to relive history. Or, something like that.

Microsoft has history, people. Embrace, extend, extinquish. I want to see a lot of new attitudes, actions, and history before I trust Microsoft. Even if Sam Ramji is the most honorable person in the world - Sam isn't Microsoft. He works FOR Microsoft, and he can be over ruled if/when Microsoft decides that it is to their advantage.

Forgive me, but I'll take a pass on sleeping with snakes.

Re:People in the U.S. culture can be very misleadi

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

Except for the part where there are numerous public facing documents on the web by microsoft saying that they are legally binding. Thus, if they later try and claim they aren't, I wouldn't think that would fly in court. ... obligatory IANAL.

Re:Good answer, Sam!

[styrotech]

You read my mind.

I'd love Windows to have a built-in rsync client/server component that could be enabled in the control panel. Although I'd still want a built-in SSH component too.

Re:People in the U.S. culture can be very misleadi

[The End Of Days]

And a lot of people have religious fervor and the belief that they know what is best for everybody else.

Re:People in the U.S. culture can be very misleadi

[Akzo]

You might not want to put a full email address unless you have a very good spam filter.

Facts versus beliefs

[KwKSilver]

it is a fact that that Microsoft sued Tom-Tom. It is your belief that they had some passion for some [unspecified] Tom-Tom patents.

Assuming that you are 100% correct, I don't get a warm fuzzy felling about it. YMMV. Examining the same set of facts, it looks to me like a calculated act of cold brutality, an act that was certain to get an awful lot of attention. Nothing to sing "Koombaya" about that I can see. Were I guessing, I'd guess that Microsoft decided it was time to teach everyone a lesson, obviously, "Fear us!," That probably makes sense from their perspective, after all, Microsoft's savage destruction of Netscape (which had the gall to refuse to join Microsoft in an illegal partitioning of the browser market) is practically ancient history. Miscosoft will always be happy to offer linux, the BSDs et al. ropes, 'cuz they own the boss-end. Feel free to tie it around your neck and ... whatever. Pardon me, if I don't join in the celebration, I gotta go look up the words to Koombaya. Can it be sung to "Siegfried's Death March from Goetterdaemmerung?

Trojans Unite

[zaivala]

So Microsoft is reviving the ORIGINAL meaning of "Trojan Horse", is that it?

Re:People in the U.S. culture can be very misleadi

[INowRegretThesePosts]

You might not want to put a full email address unless you have a very good spam filter.

I doubt a spam filter could handle an email inbox after its address having been posted in a widely read website. This would bring an amount of spam so big that a spam filter would need a very low false-negative rate, and such an aggressive filter would likely have a false-positive rate high enough that he would have to check the spam folder frequently to check for important emails.

So Sam should probably
1-) Use another address for important email needing quick replies.
2-) Do use a good spam filter on this sramji AT HISEMPLOYER DOT com inbox.
3-) Check the spam folder of the widely published inbox every couple of days

Microsoft did indeed purposefully sabotage Lotus

[Anonymous Coward]

It is too bad that magazines like Infoworld cannot (or do not) bring their old material into the World Wide Web. As the debacle unfurled, Infoworld sent an editor to interview the highest guy at Microsoft in charge of DOS. The interview went like this:

IW: "Lotus 1-2-3 is the most popular application running on PCs today. Your new version of DOS does not work with it. Didn't you do any testing?"

MS: "Yes of course we did testing."

IW: "What were the results of your tests?"

MS: "We knew there would be problems."

It was only afterward that the phrase "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run" was exposed.

In case you didn't live through this history (I did):

Microsoft was a partner in the L.I.M. specification that allowed programs to access extended memory. L.I.M. = Lotus, Intel, and Microsoft.

Microsoft changed Windows and (and through it their new spreadsheet product, Excel) to do LIM access on word boundaries instead of byte boundaries. Then they changed the LIM driver to only work on word boundaries, and to cause a fault in the programs that attempted access on byte boundaries. Super conveniently, they didn't bother to notify Lotus (or Intel) that they implemented a we-are-going-to-break-all-your-programs change to the L.I.M. spec.

They shipped DOS first, and apologized later. Except they didn't apologize. They ran advertisements picturing a jet fighter pilot crash helmet. "Crash proof. Doesn't it make sense to get your applications from the people who make your OS?"

More history: the first time you launched Lotus 1-2-3 in Windows with the new DOS, the dialog box said "This program has violated system integrity. You should reboot to ensure proper operation of the system. If it happens again, consult with your application vendor."

Clearly the blame was pointed at Lotus 1-2-3 by Microsoft in Windows. But what changed?

DOS was finally done when Lotus wouldn't run.

Infoworld also interviewed people at Lotus. Infoworld asked if Lotus was going to sue, and the Lotus person said no, for two reasons. One, that Lotus was still dependent on Microsoft and DOS (reading between the lines, it looked like they were saying they've sabotaged us once already, and could do it again). Two, the lawyers at Lotus asked the engineers about the change, and came to the conclusion that Microsoft would claim they made the change because "it is better". Word boundaries for memory access are easier than byte boundaries.

The evil here is that the change was made with malice aforethought toward Lotus, AND, the notification of the change was withheld from Lotus.

Lotus would probably have agreed that word boundaries were better. The crime was they were denied an opportunity to prepare for the change.

But proving to a judge (and this was before judges were at all tech-savvy) that Microsoft didn't innocently bungle a line of communication or two was not a case the Lotus lawyers thought they could win. The technical argument "it is better" would have to be offset by "no it's not. it is memory wasteful" which in the age of 2MB RAM machines meant something.

As for your claim that people wouldn't buy the new DOS - they didn't. Microsoft slip-streamed the new version of DOS to Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, et. al. They told HP (and everybody) "Here is a new version of DOS. Include it with your new machines instead of the old version of DOS." As the debacle unfurled, HP had to quick issue old versions of DOS to everyone that that got screwed. (I was one of those HP customers at the time).

I realize that you are probably a Microsoft shill that will always attempt to discredit the deliberate damage Microsoft inflicted on it's biggest competitor. Which is why I am going to call you out on it. If you don't want to be called a shill, then you need to not be a shill.

The truth is Microsoft changed DOS and knew it would completely screw over Lotus. They had tested it. They wrote a Windows error message to shi

Re:People in the U.S. culture can be very misleadi

[martyros]

Two points.

First, Microsoft has a 25-year history of lying and using these kinds of "leverage" techniques to "embrace, extend, extinguish". This has included multiple claims of "turning over a new leaf"-style committments to openness and interoperatibity that turned out to be more "embrace, extend extinguish" tactics. That leads to a well-deserved distrust from others, especially from the open-source community. This distrust is not going to be replaced by trust unless it's earned.

Second, as someone has pointed out, Microsoft releasing code under a GPL license doesn't commit Microsoft. They have not exercised use of the GPL, and are thus not bound by its terms. MS are extending the license to the driver code now, but they may be able to recall it later.

If your division really wants to grow faith, then you can do something which will be a legal "point-of-no-return" for Microsoft: distribute Linux binaries with the MS code in it. That's putting your money where your mouth is: MS wouldn't be able to retract the license then, since doing so would expose them to copyright-infringement lawsuits from the Linux community.

Re:People in the U.S. culture can be very misleadi

[FishWithAHammer]

There's at least one idiot in this discussion who doesn't know what promissory estoppel is.

Leverage this opportunity?

[philtmp]

Well... if Microsoft wants so bad to have its drivers in the kernel, maybe Linux kernel developper should ask a simple deal to MS: "Ok, we take in your driver, but you sign this contract stating that MS will never again sue anyone for some patent litigation over Linux usage". Anyone to draft the contract? ;-)

Re:Microsoft did indeed purposefully sabotage Lotu

[alexo]

Shall I tell you about the FIVE different ways Microsoft wrote / altered programs to screw Novell?

Yes, please do.

Re:People in the U.S. culture can be very misleadi

[Ang31us]

Good for you (and us), Sam! Please don't pay any mind to the skeptics and nay-sayers. We need more people like you and your team at Microsoft to build bridges between these technologies. The work you're doing is important and benefits everyone. Keep up the good work!