Microsoft Counted As Key Linux Contributor

alphadogg writes "For the first time ever, Microsoft can be counted as a key contributor to Linux. The company, which once portrayed the open-source OS kernel as a form of cancer, has been ranked 17th on a tally of the largest code contributors to Linux. The Linux Foundation's Linux Development Report, released Tuesday, summarizes who has contributed to the Linux kernel, from versions 2.6.36 to 3.2. The 10 largest contributors listed in the report are familiar names: Red Hat, Intel, Novell, IBM, Texas Instruments, Broadcom, Nokia, Samsung, Oracle and Google. But the appearance of Microsoft is a new one for the list, compiled annually."

Comments

whoa

[Anonymous Coward]

Did hell freeze over already??

Re:whoa

[Soilworker]

No. Microsoft just found a way to make money on open source OS.

Re:whoa

[ILongForDarkness]

My understanding is a lot of the stuff they contribute is to get things that should be interoperable there, eg. smb and of course interop helps sell a more hetrogenous environment to corps (so they don't all run and flee to linux, but also linux doesn't break when talking to a Win server).

Re:whoa

[eternaldoctorwho]

Why not? It looks like this will be the year of the linux desktop!

Re:whoa

[tibit]

IIRC from reading the forums and bugreports, samba has accumulated plenty of printing regressions since 3.2 or so, and nothing was ever done about them. It's been quite long since one could use, say, driver for HP LaserJet 8000/8100 directly via samba, without using a local printer port :(

Re:whoa

[CAIMLAS]

If that's the case, they've got a lot of explaining to do. Windows/Samba interoperability has been getting progressively worse over the past several years. Not only have updates to Windows broken Samba file servers (particularly, things which haven't been fixed or won't be fixed at any point, relying on registry hacks instead), but Samba updates have clobbered quite a few things, as well.

What is your basis of understanding?

My impression has been that almost all of their efforts have been put forward towards making linux work better for their virtualization efforts with HyperV (such as driver contributions and scheduler), but then, I've not been paying much attention.

Re:whoa

[realityimpaired]

IIRC from reading the forums and bugreports, samba has accumulated plenty of printing regressions since 3.2 or so, and nothing was ever done about them. It's been quite long since one could use, say, driver for HP LaserJet 8000/8100 directly via samba, without using a local printer port :(

It's also been a long time since I've seen a network-connected printer that didn't have an IPP server built in.

Come to it, it's actually been a long while since I've seen anybody try to use SAMBA to host a print server. Just use CUPS or some other IPP server if you don't have a printer with built-in print capability.

Re:whoa

[tibit]

It's a windows domain environment. You log in, you see printers, the drivers get autoinstalled. How again would I do it with CUPS/IPP?

Re:whoa

[tibit]

Someone on a mission, ah?

Re:whoa

[ogdenk]

Seems to work fine in OSX. Not sure what you're talking about. IPP printers can be autoinstalled as well as SMB. Can even participate in a Windows Domain and be managed by the domain if you want including scripted mapping of printers and shares. Linux can enjoy most of the same goodies with a little effort.

Quit acting like Microsoft invented LDAP and autoconfiguration. Been around a long time. If it doesn't work in your environment, ditch the retard MCSE and hire a real network admin that knows what he's doing with a broad scope on more than one platform.

Re:whoa

[ILongForDarkness]

I heard a talk somewhere about SMB 2.2 features and how the standards were going to get published to help others adapt. You're probably right that most things are Hyper-V somehow I mentally mapped published protocol to "help with protocol".

Re:whoa

[hairyfeet]

Actually IIRC it was stated most of what they did was for their Windows VM software (Hyper V? I can't keep up with all the VM names anymore) so that you can run Linux and Windows VMs on a WinServer. Why this would actually make news I don't know as there are tons of companies that add support to Linux for their products,.

Re:whoa

[YoungSaint]

My understanding is a lot of the stuff they contribute is to get things that should be interoperable there, eg. smb and of course interop helps sell a more hetrogenous environment to corps (so they don't all run and flee to linux, but also linux doesn't break when talking to a Win server).

My experience has been the exact opposite... Win breaks when it tries to talk to Linux. But yeah, interoperability with Window's "standards" is nice.

Re:whoa

[tibit]

You missed my point, completely. Sure I know it works fine on OS X and on any recent Linux distro, duh. IPP printers don't work like that on Windows, though. What users need, and expect, and what you as an admin need for your sanity, is that a machine is joined to the domain, the user logs in, and their printers are automatically reconnected. For this you need either a Windows Server, or Samba, but recent Samba versions broke this important functionality. I use OS X clients, Linux (RHEL) servers and clients, and Windows clients in a mixed environment, so I'm supposed to know from experience what I'm talking about. If Windows worked like OS X does when exposed to Cups/IPP printers, I wouldn't worry about printing horkage in Samba. I wouldn't have to expose any printers via Samba, then.

Re:whoa

[tibit]

BTW, I have no clue where you got the idea that I implied anything about LDAP and autoconfiguration :(

Re:whoa

[ogdenk]

Hmmm I mistook your post for sarcasm.....sorry. My fault.

I know it sucks but can you roll back Samba to a version that worked for you until they fix it? What about Login scripts attached to GPO's in the domain to connect to IPP printers based on what OU the machine belongs to? Should be doable though a pain.

The problem is most other vendors go out of their way to work with most other vendors. MS doesn't. I always have a Windows Server box somewhere just to manage the Windows machines because MS goes out of their way to NOT be COMPLETELY interoperable. They actively PUNISH you for using non-MS products. Try setting up clients to netboot from a FreeBSD box using their DHCP server for example. Can be done. Pain in the ass and non-obvious.

Re:whoa

[ILongForDarkness]

Probably because WinServer has about 80% market share. I really don't get it though, *nix is still around because it is rock solid and free. Why you'd want to pay for a WinServer license, have all the real or imagined instability associated with WinServer, and then run linux too is beyond me. To me you cough up the money for win because you want or need it not so you can run linux. That said hyper-V might have some cool close to metal features that make it better for some workloads than VM ware, virtual box etc.

Re:whoa

[dudpixel]

Yeah same for me too, I don't know about that "year of ..." stuff, but I do plan to keep running it until it stops being so useful and awesome.

Couldn't agree more. Just stick with what works, that matters a hell of a lot more than market share.

Re:whoa

[RobbieThe1st]

It's likely so you can have your win server and run the Linux that you need for a vendors LAMP-based application in a VM. Because running it natively means one less license for MS... and one more reasons for hardware vendors to try to improve linux hardware support. At least in a VM, you are using MS's drivers, and can keep Linux safely away from the hardware... and at some point drop compatibility if needed without any recourse for customers.

Re:whoa

[ozmanjusri]

I heard a talk somewhere about SMB 2.2 features and how the standards were going to get published to help others adapt.

Yes, Microsoft published SMB standards out of the goodness of their hearts, and the threat of continuation of fines of US$2.39 million/day unless they complied.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Microsoft_competition_case

Then they promptly changed their OS so it wouldn't interoperate with the standard...

Re:whoa

[jimicus]

It's actually surprisingly difficult to do that in Windows XP (though I don't recall it being such a problem in Vista and later).

XP will print via IPP, sure, but automating the configuration is an absolute pig when compared with automating the configuration of an SMB-hosted printer.

If it's an SMB-hosted printer with the drivers in the appropriate share and published to Active Directory, it shows up more-or-less straight away in the Wizards, you can script adding it to a PC with a single line and it's relatively straightforward to make that script generic so all you have to do is pass it the location of the printer. If it's not available via SMB, XP doesn't make any of that easy. What you have to do is:

  - Set up a virtual printer port for the OS to talk to. For some reason best known only to the FSM, Microsoft decided that any sort of network printer that isn't made available over SMB would connect via something classed as a "local port" (as opposed to network ports) so if you walk through the wizard, you have to do something non-obvious at the first prompt: tell it you're setting up a local rather than a network printer.
  - As part of doing this, you tell the computer where on the network to find the printer. XP won't browse the network seeking out IPP printers, so you have to know the printer's IP address or hostname.
  - XP will now contact the printer and try to figure out how best to communicate with it. Out of the box, most network printers support a whole lot more than just IPP; the most common mechanism XP will choose is RAW on port 9100. You can override XP's decision, but if you do so you're heading straight into unknown territory because you won't be presented with a list of "ways in which I think I can communicate with this printer". You'll be presented with a list of "Ways in which XP is physically capable of communicating with any printer, with no attention paid as to whether or not the printer in question is even remotely likely to support any of them". So if you haven't memorised or written down what you need to select at this point, you're pretty much heading into guesswork territory.
  - Once you've done that, you can now load the driver for the printer. XP may interrogate the printer to find if it needs a driver it already knows about. If it doesn't know about the driver, you're about to hit another roadblock. XP won't choose a sensible default like "Generic Postscript" or "Generic PCL". You have to tell it what driver to use, and even if it's just a plain Postscript printer you can't just give it a PPD file and have done with. You need a driver built for Windows.

Scripting this isn't much better. Microsoft don't provide a nice easy way to script this in XP, at least not one you can be certain is available on any old Windows XP computer. So as part of the setup, you actually have to call the libraries that do the configuration from a command line in the same way as the Wizard does - there's no easy command-driven wrapper around the libraries.

Basically, Windows XP does everything in its power to make using anything other than the Official Sanctioned Microsoft Solution (TM) so damn difficult to work with that you give up and buy all the necessary Microsoft products to follow their official solution.

Vista and 7 are better in some ways at this, and worse in others.

Re:whoa

[realityimpaired]

IPP printers don't work like that on Windows, though.

They do in Vista and 7. Turn the printer on, go to add network printer, have it search for printers, and there they are. No need to tell Windows anything at all, if the printers are on the same subnet as the PC. Install it, and it automatically connects on login.

And you *can* have any good quality network-connected printer join a Windows domain. Getting it set up to print to the right printer with roaming profiles is a question for your autoconfiguration script, not the printer.

Re:whoa

[ILongForDarkness]

Well no one says you have to follow standards even if they are yours ;-)

Re:whoa

[tibit]

I'll have to check into that. It'd certainly help. Somehow it didn't pick our cups server by default...

Re:whoa

[realityimpaired]

It uses UDP:631 for the auto detect, but CUPS only accepts connections on TCP:631, if I recall correctly. That may be a configuration in CUPS itself. :)

That being said, you can always configure it with a login script. :)

that's for virtualization.

[Janek Kozicki]

I was wondering "why the hell?" TFA says:

"Much of the work Microsoft did centers around providing drivers for its own Hyper-V virtualization technology. Microsoft's Hyper-V, part of Windows Server, can run Linux as a guest OS."

Why that couldn't be included in the summary?

Re:that's for virtualization.

[0racle]

It's a summary, not the whole article.

Re:that's for virtualization.

[miknix]

Why that couldn't be included in the summary?

The author wanted us to think, April fools!

Re:that's for virtualization.

[Chris Burke]

It's a juicier narrative to portray it in the way the summary did--that even though Microsoft once depicted Linux as a "cancer", Linux must now be so awesome that Microsoft is one of its key contributors. Providing context buffs out some of that luster.

Yeah, instead it's that Linux is so awesome Microsoft can't afford not to ensure it is compatible with their hypervisor. Of course it's no surprise that in the virtualization market being able to virtualize Linux is a key feature.

I find it far more intriguing that the key contributors to Linux are companies and not independent individuals, since the old storyline used to be that devoted hobbyists were gathering on the internet to do a better job than commercial companies, back when the "year of Linux on the desktop" was always right around the corner.

That hasn't been the case since Linux became Linus' job. Though those hobbyists -- including Linus -- did a good enough job that they companies took notice, now didn't they? For over a decade the many contributions of companies to Linux -- not least of which being distros like Red Hat -- have been used as proof that Free Software doesn't mean the death of the paid programmer.

Of course anyone who thought it did in the first place didn't understand the market for programmers. It's always been the case that the majority of programmers are employed solving the specific business needs of specific companies, not creating shrink-wrap per-license software.

Re:that's for virtualization.

[wiedzmin]

Why that couldn't be included in the summary?

Simple. Wouldn't be as sensationalist for those who didn't bother to read TFA and jumped straight to posting about hell freezing over. More comments, more ad views.

Re:that's for virtualization.

[Sarten-X]

As I recall the story, yes. They also invented using it poorly.

The idea was pretty decent: name variables with what kind of data they held. Not in the "string vs. integer" sense, but where user-entered data would be markedly different from safe and sanity-checked data heading for a database. At a glance, a reviewer could tell that "safeString = unsafeString" is a security hole, and should be fixed.

Then another team (within Microsoft) got hold of the idea, thought it was great, and mandated its use on all variables, even where it didn't really make sense. That's where we get the tradition of silly things like strFoo and intBar.

Re:that's for virtualization.

[Dr_Barnowl]

They didn't get the RIGHT idea ; it was originally deployed on Excel. Integers for columns looked much like integers for rows, and absolutes looked much like relatives. A prefix carrying whether it was an X or Y coordinate was very helpful (you should rarely add X to Y).

Charles Simonyi (the Hungarian) documented this as "type", without imagining that someone would think this meant "datatype". He later stated that he should have said "kind".

The VBA / VB team got ahold of it and started the horrible gobbledegook standard of prefixing every variable with a truncated version of it's datatype, which is redundant (the compiler knows what type it is, and a good IDE should be able to tell you pretty quickly), misleading (when you change the type but not the prefix) and tedious (when you DO bother to change the prefix and mess up your version control history with reams of pointless changes).

Remind me ...

[lysdexia]

... to ship that fur coat to Satan. I'll bet he's cold down there.

Re:Remind me ...

[marcello_dl]

LOL, but those who believed that the last decade MS declaration were truthfully evaluating linux and FOSS have probably given all their money to a nigerian prince, dunno how many are still here.

Re:Remind me ...

[AnotherAnonymousUser]

It's in the subject line.

I call B.S.

[PCM2]

Last I heard, all of Microsoft's contributions to the Linux kernel have been strictly to improve Linux support for Microsoft products, e.g. to allow Windows Server to be a host for Linux clients. That's fine, but it hardly counts as "key" contributions in my book.

Re:I call B.S.

[TWX]

If it increases interoperability, that is a rather high priority for any operating system whose proponents wish it to remain viable. I am no fan of Redmond, but I have managed to make a lot of money supporting their products.

Re:I call B.S.

[John Mister]

Last I heard, all of Microsoft's contributions to the Linux kernel have been strictly to improve Linux support for Microsoft products, e.g. to allow Windows Server to be a host for Linux clients. That's fine, but it hardly counts as "key" contributions in my book.

Why wouldn't it count as key contributions? Windows has market share of 95% on desktops and almost 50% on servers (used more on internal servers like exchange than your typical apache+centos cheapo host). Still, MS works to maintain some compatibility when they really have no reason to. I think that deserves some appreciation.

Re:I call B.S.

[PCM2]

If you make a closed, proprietary system that is not interoperable, then work to change everybody else's system so that it can work with yours, do you really deserve a pat on the back for that? Every action from beginning to end was wholly self-serving.

Re:I call B.S.

[maroberts]

Last I heard, all of Microsoft's contributions to the Linux kernel have been strictly to improve Linux support for Microsoft products, e.g. to allow Windows Server to be a host for Linux clients. That's fine, but it hardly counts as "key" contributions in my book.

A large number of contributors put in source code which is "relevant to their interests". e.g. graphics card manufacturers contribute towards open source drivers and improvements to X.

Personally I see nothing wrong with this, and quite frankly makes a good change from when Microsoft did everything possible to hide how their stuff works e.g. *cough*Samba*cough*

Re:I call B.S.

[PCM2]

Still, MS works to maintain some compatibility when they really have no reason to.

No reason at all? Are you sure you've thought this through?

Re:I call B.S.

[PCM2]

Red Hat's involvement is also self-serving.

Your point?

How is that the same thing?

Fundamentally, what Microsoft is doing here is submitting changes to the Linux kernel that allow Microsoft to maintain a closed, proprietary product line that competes with free alternatives. If Microsoft's proprietary virtualization technology did not work with Linux, it would fail. So Microsoft has made its proprietary virtualization technology work with Linux ... by making changes to Linux. There's nothing "wrong" with that, but there's also nothing particularly admirable about it, either -- and to trumpet a headline claiming Microsoft is "a key Linux contributor" only serves Microsoft's anti-Linux marketing goals.

Re:I call B.S.

[Anonymous Coward]

Every single contribution to the linux kernel (or any open source project) is inherently self serving. Every one of the companies listed benefits from the contributions they provide. That's the entire point of open source, you modify it to suit your needs. So what if you don't like Microsoft, too fucking bad.

Re:I call B.S.

[PCM2]

Every single contribution to the linux kernel (or any open source project) is inherently self serving. Every one of the companies listed benefits from the contributions they provide. That's the entire point of open source, you modify it to suit your needs. So what if you don't like Microsoft, too fucking bad.

Yes, but unlike Microsoft, most of the companies who contribute hardware drivers to the Linux kernel (such as Broadcom, for example), don't have a history of trying to destroy Linux. In this case, the fact that Slashdot is claiming Microsoft is suddenly "a key Linux contributor" is even more valuable to Microsoft than the actual kernel contributions it has made. Framing the story in this way helps Microsoft craft messaging that subverts Linux.

Re:I call B.S.

[Chris Burke]

In this case, the fact that Slashdot is claiming Microsoft is suddenly "a key Linux contributor" is even more valuable to Microsoft than the actual kernel contributions it has made.

No it isn't. They want to sell their hypervisor. Customers want to run Linux. If they can't virtualize linux, or can't virtualize it efficiently, then the customers won't buy Microsoft's product. Being a player in the virtualization market, which is an increasingly large portion of the overall server market, is worth much more to Microsoft than a little "What, us destroy linux?" P.R. that only slashdotters care about and only slashdotters will notice.

The real story here is that Microsoft can no longer afford to use incompatibility as a lever against Linux. The fulcrum has moved, and now Linux has the leverage in that fight.

Re:I call B.S.

[tibit]

I don't think you know how it all works with virtualization. Linux will run, albeit not all that smoothly, without modification on many virtualization platforms, including Microsoft's. To provide better performance, they need to have drivers that let the client OS talk through to the virtualized devices in the hypervisor using a better abstraction layer than that written for real hardware. VMware does it, MS does it, Oracle does it (for VirtualBox). The claim that "what Microsoft is doing here is submitting changes to the Linux kernel that allow Microsoft to maintain a closed, proprietary product line that competes with free alternatives" is technically inaccurate. Even if MS's hypervisor was FOSS, Linux would still need drivers for it. There are AFAIK no hypervisor driver standards, so everyone rolls their own, MS is no worse and no better than competitors. I mean, heck, even XEN clients need custom drivers!

Re:I call B.S.

[Kalriath]

I'm confused. If there's implementations of it in key open source operating systems licensed under OSS terms such as GPL, can you really call it "closed, proprietary" any more? One suspects you'd have to call it "open" then.

Re:I call B.S.

[CAIMLAS]

It doesn't increase interoperability. It increases the likelihood (or possibility) of dependence.

Re:I call B.S.

[pankkake]

But Microsoft's hypervisor does not have that market share, even on Windows.

Re:I call B.S.

[ogdenk]

If it increases interoperability

With THEIR software. Only a priority for those suckered into MS's VM solution. The rest of us don't give a crap and would rather see HyperV burn. MS helping themselves is no surprise. I'm actually quite surprised they haven't intentionally crippled Linux performance on their VM compared to Server 2008. Wouldn't be a surprising tactic. They've tried to break things before and blame it on the rest of the world being "crippled".

I am no fan of Redmond, but I have managed to make a lot of money supporting their products.

Me too but anybody can make bundles of cash supporting a buggy mess. You don't even have to be good at it. Just have to know more than the customer does or make them think as such. The sad thing is most people in this field REFUSE to learn other products because they lack the prior knowledge and don't see it as important. It's not MS so it doesn't matter. They'd be lost trying to configure a machine without something like Wizards and MMC holding their hand. An IT pro should NOT need a Wizard.

Jaguar mechanics make lots of money too for fixing those overpriced pieces of s**t. Often.

Re:I call B.S.

[ignavus]

Still, MS works to maintain some compatibility when they really have no reason to.

Oh come on!

MS is doing it because BIG customers are demanding it. Unless MS lets Windows servers play nicely with Linux virtual hosts, those big customers will take themselves off to VMware or some other virtualisation vendor. MS doesn't own the virtualisation market, so they have to play nicely with Linux virtual hosts if they want to compete. MS doesn't maintain compatibility if it owns a market, only if it is facing real competition from other products.

Competition is what forces MS to play nicely. And competition is what MS tries to destroy.

Re:I call B.S.

[Sigg3.net]

Interesting. The long-term goals of most contributors include a future Linux. Microsoft's contribution must be seen with another long term goal; namely the destruction or making obsolete of same kernel.

Most contributions are mutually beneficient, but not those of someone whose aim is to obliterate rather than cooperate.
Luckily, the license should protect it. Cross your fingers for a free and democratic future.

Re:I call B.S.

[Snowbat]

Citation needed. If Wikimedia's "OS version, non mobile" stats are any indication, Windows market share has fallen to about 84% on desktops.

Re:I call B.S.

[PCM2]

You have a point, but is Microsoft the only one providing virtualization technology?

Is Microsoft providing drivers/code that will make Windows run better as a guest OS on Xen hosts? Nope.

Is Microsoft providing drivers/code that will make Linux run better as a guest OS on Windows hosts? Yep.

Don't you see the difference? One is putting Microsoft's proprietary software on equal footing with Linux free software. The other is making Linux free software subservient to Microsoft proprietary software. It's shocking to me that /. of all forums would be arguing the other way.

Hyper-V

[Enderandrew]

I do believe they've basically only added support for running Linux as a guest OS within their VM solution, Hyper-V. They haven't contributed to the betterment of Linux on the whole.

Re:Hyper-V

[Trepidity]

I do think that's a legitimate contribution, even if it's obviously self-interested. To the extent that people use Hyper-V, it's good for Linux to have support for running under it, and it's good that Microsoft contributed the resources to make that happen instead of leaving it for other contributors to try to get it working. Similar to how Sun/Oracle employees contributed a considerable amount of the kernel's Xen support.

It is fair to be aware that that's the entirety of their contribution, so it doesn't signal some more general engagement with kernel development.

Re:Hyper-V

[Enderandrew]

I don't disagree with your assessment. I was just trying to make it clear what they contributed because the headline can easily be misconstrued. In proper /. fashion, I didn't read the article.

Re:Hyper-V

[Anonymous Coward]

The hivemind approves of this post.

Re:Hyper-V

[leonardluen]

how is that any different than Red Hat's contributions to linux? aren't they also self serving? They make their money by providing support for linux, so it is in their own interest to make sure the OS remains relavent so that people want to use it.

Re:Hyper-V

[TheNinjaroach]

They haven't contributed to the betterment of Linux on the whole.

I was with you on this for the past decade. Then on November of 2011, they went and did this. Real Linux drivers for SQL Server? Yeah!

And if you don't think that counts towards the betterment of Linux, then we're just going to have to disagree!

Re:Hyper-V

[Alex Belits]

It's not legitimate at all. No one uses Hyper-V other but by mistake, or out of loyalty to Microsoft. Microsoft is trying to legitimize the use of its product at the expense of running Linux properly, and sabotages "Linux systems" that are built under virtualization.

Re:Hyper-V

[ianare]

It's an improvement change in behavior from outright war, yes. But closed sourced drivers are rarely an improvement long term.

Re:Hyper-V

[Kalriath]

Oh fuck off. People choose to use whatever product they want, and who are you to decree that they are doing it by mistake because you dislike their choices.

God, OSS zealots piss me off more than "social media marketers".

Re:Hyper-V

[ogdenk]

They'll sell a bunch more copies of SQL Server and you'll start to see the Linux driver stagnate until it's near useless. They will then blame it on new drivers implementing features impossible on Linux and customers should migrate to the much superior Windows Server 2010 since it'll have those features they used on Linux anyway along with genuine microsoft support!

As an example look how pathetic .NET is on anything but Windows these days.

Re:Hyper-V

[ogdenk]

MS does things like this so as competitors gain steam they can attempt to pull the rug out from under them by no longer supporting their "obsolete" platform while touting their products as "killers" or the only sane and logical "replacement".

Re:Hyper-V

[Raenex]

I'm a big proponent of open source, and people like the one you responded to piss me off too. Blindly hateful, leading to stupid statements.

Re:Hyper-V

[Alex Belits]

Same would apply to radium toothpaste.

Is this news to anyone?

[John Mister]

Microsoft has always been one of the best innovators about new technology. Against the popular belief on Slashdot, they have contributed a lot to computer technology, innovations, and of course, Linux too. Stop the hate and accept that Microsoft also has many technically knowledgeable persons who also contribute to Linux. When reading this hate about MS I can't but think that YOU are who is having problems with dealing with it.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[lattyware]

I didn't see any hate there, just surprise that a company was contributing to what is essentially a rival product. That's pretty reasonable, and doesn't portray Microsoft in a bad light at all.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope this was meant to be funny.

Of course not. Microsoft has contributed more to the knowledge base of predatory marketing, monopoly abuse, and price manipulation than any other company in recent memory. You would have to go all the way back to Standard Oil to find a company that has given us more in these important fields. Many companies look up to Microsoft and use their history as an template for themselves, and like Microsoft, they are much richer for it.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that roughly three quarters of the things Microsoft brags about being their own "innovations" are actually things that all of the other Operating Systems (or software projects) have already had available for years. Then the things they actually do innovate that are worth using, they barely talk about. Further, your over-reaction makes you look like a paid shill - the GP post wasn't hating on Microsoft, it was asking why the specifics of the contributions were not included in the summary, when they're very much relevant. Specifically: Most of Microsoft's contribution to Linux was geared towards making it run more smoothly inside of their own operating system. It was pointing out that they weren't doing this to be altruistic, they were doing it to further their own products and services. (Which is of course, what they should be doing, as a publicly traded company with a responsibility to their shareholders. Acting against those interests by making charitable contributions to their own competition could land them in trouble.)

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[__aaeihw9960]

I would argue that linux, in the scheme of home computing, isn't a rival product. How many regular joe-schmoe characters see linux as a viable alternative to windows?

I bet that number is pretty small. Does that mean linux is less valuable (before the firestorm), no, no it does not. Does that mean that linux doesn't matter, no, again, it does not.

Does it mean that Microsoft could care less about linux in its current form as a rival? Maybe?

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[C3ntaur]

I'm a pretty technical user and have been using Linux as my primary desktop for over a decade. Lately, even I am having trouble seeing it as a viable alternative to windows.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[Sarten-X]

In terms of Microsoft's future, I certainly see them as competitors. Microsoft's innovation (and especially growth) has been practically stagnant over the past decade. Apple, on the other hand, is poised to take over the desktop market leveraging their huge mobile device market share. If Windows 8 (or whatever follows) doesn't hold consumers' loyalty to Microsoft, I expect to see a quick change in the market numbers as current Windows machines become obsolete.

On the other hand, Microsoft's lock-in in the business world is nearly complete. It's a royal pain in the ass to migrate entirely off a Windows system, so Microsoft has a steady market there. That's also right where Linux is making and can continue to make substantial growth, as startups and small businesses look for easy ways to just get a working business system running, so they can get on with their real work. Microsoft can solidify their market share by cleaning up their licensing mess (costs, limitations, and options, primarily) and Linux's outlook can improve with the help of tools like Webmin to make administration easier for GUI-loving and non-Unix folks.

That's how I see it, at least. I expect interesting times ahead.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[cpu6502]

It really doesn't make much sense. They are helping Android Linux to beat Windows Phone.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[SplashMyBandit]

> Microsoft has always been one of the best innovators about new technology. Not really. Microsoft are early adopters, but they are not really innovators who discover new stuff (with a few exceptions). Ask yourself who invented: TCP/IP? virtualization? 3D graphics? MP3s? the web browser? DOS? vector display graphics and printing? the spreadsheet? the word-processor? the smart phone? Javascript? VM based applications (nb: .NET is a Windows-oriented re-implementation of the JVM that has been extended in useful ways)? blah blah. Unfortunately it seems you don't you your computing history at all (easy for those who pre-date it to remember what went on). The rest of your post is true though - but don't believe the mythos that Microsoft created the computing environment we have today - they are genius' at moneytizing it, but they didn't invent it.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[darkpixel2k]

I'm a pretty technical user and have been using Linux as my primary desktop for over a decade. Lately, even I am having trouble seeing it as a viable alternative to windows.

Try switching away from Ubuntu. Try Debian, Mint, Fedora, etc... That should stop your worry.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[ericloewe]

The Linux portion of Android is about the same as the MS-DOS portion of Windows 9x. Everything else runs on a VM.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[tlhIngan]

In terms of Microsoft's future, I certainly see them as competitors. Microsoft's innovation (and especially growth) has been practically stagnant over the past decade. Apple, on the other hand, is poised to take over the desktop market leveraging their huge mobile device market share. If Windows 8 (or whatever follows) doesn't hold consumers' loyalty to Microsoft, I expect to see a quick change in the market numbers as current Windows machines become obsolete.

Unlikely. First, Apple's in a *really* nice spot on the computer side. It's a spot everyone else doing Windows PCs wish they were in. They're making money hand-over-fist on computers - and they move less product that say, Dell. Yet Dell's not making much (if any) more money on computers than Apple is, but Dell's shipping at least 10 times more computers than Apple.

Sure Windows 8 may move some more people to Apple, but not enough to make a significant dent for Microsoft. After all, Apple has deliberately chosen not to participate in several PC markets - like low-cost (sub $500) market. They only have one portable computer below $1000 (and really, at $999 it's splitting hairs).

Apple's strategy is to stick to premium products - nicer screens (1366x768 is fine on an 11" screen, but not a 13", and the top end comes with 1920x1200 (not 1080) by default), nicer processors (Mini uses an i5, not say, an Atom or even i3) and so forth. Sure there's some lock in (iMac hard drive anyone?), but the premium experience is what Apple is selling.

And Apple's concentrating more on iOS than OS X these days, given how people have established they want a "computing device" but without all the hassles of owning a fully-functional computer. A locked-down experience is perfectly fine for them without worrying that that "Your PC in infected!" popup will steal all their information.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[tibit]

In all seriousness, there's some cool stuff coming out from Microsoft Research. Everything else, if it can be considered innovative, is half-baked. The dimwits who specified and documented winapi had no clue how to formally specify stuff. Thus all the undocumented behavior that applications exploit in light of no documentation and no clear direction as to the rationale and intended uses behind various APIs. Thus we have stuff that MS had to work around over and over to maintain compatibility with broken applications; stuff that wine people have to deal with as well. As far as MS complaining that app writers are getting things wrong: well duh idiots, you can't write the docs, you'll pay for it. Yeah, I've been consistently pissed about that, even back in the times of 16 bit winapi -- even as a kid back then I realized that they were not saying things that should have been said.

Of course with various non-standard Linux APIs, you're entirely on your own. But at least there's no pretense of documentation, and you can look at the code.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[tibit]

Preemptive multitasking was in daily use well before Commodore or Atari got incorporated. Video and music playback on workstations also predates consumer computing availability of the same.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[s.petry]

Microsoft has always been one of the best innovators about new technology. Against the popular belief on Slashdot, they have contributed a lot to computer technology, innovations, and of course, Linux too.

First, I really hope you do some investigation on the history of Microsoft and the products that they claim to have innovated. You will find that many of us have very legitimate bias against Microsoft and their so called "innovation".

Example: Microsoft during Windows 95 release was adamant about not producing a TCP/IP stack for Windows claiming that the Internet was a waste of time and there is nobody in their right mind that would use it. Microsoft released and poured cash into their own proprietary network protocol (NetBUI).

When the hopes of crushing the Internet were dashed, Microsoft started releasing a TCP stack which broke communication with non Windows hosts. The original TCP/IP specification was to respond to an ACK once. Microsoft released a stack which sent and expected 2, and invented the term "Crippled Network" for anything that did not respond that way. Throttling bandwidth to any non-Microsoft host to make it appear that anything was slower than Microsoft. (An interesting piece of trivia is that most *NIX was still faster than Windows at networking even with the throttled bandwidth.).

Sun found the (to be kind) quirk that Microsoft had build in to their TCP/IP stack. This was reported everywhere, and most vendors started releasing similar code because Microsoft refused to follow the specification. As vendors migrated their stacks, Microsoft increased the ACK count again. At least they stopped reporting any non windows host as "crippled" which stopped many of the complaints to other vendors about "Why does windows show your OS as crippled?"

This is a company that has done the same with any open specification that they adopt. Kerberos, NFS, LDAP, and the list can go on and on and on.

When it comes to "innovation", Microsoft does do a good job of watching the market and buying up things that appear to be good. Often times, this puts many other good companies out of business. Example here is that in WIndows 98 time, there were several web rating companies. NetNanny, Cybersitter, and more. Windows liked their ideas so much, they put a very limited and broken version of that service in to Windows and put all of those companies out of business. Not so much innovation here, but rather a predatory method of dealing with competition which people dislike.

Stop the hate and accept that Microsoft also has many technically knowledgeable persons who also contribute to Linux. When reading this hate about MS I can't but think that YOU are who is having problems with dealing with it.

Honestly, I think Microsoft has done a good job at giving people a consistent look and feel on a computer. For some odd reason, they do away with in Windows 7, and Office 2010 and the "Ribbons" which is why there is such a low adoption rate and Microsoft started losing more market share than they should.

Outside of the look and feel, Microsoft has not innovated anything in the market. I wish that was a troll statement, but nothing they have done has been "new" or innovative. That's not to say that they have no patents, but every patent I have seen could be invalidated in court. Look at the 7 they are suing B&N for as an example. All 7 of those are either obvious or have prior art. Groklaw has lots of information

When you see all the hate for Microsoft, do you ever wonder if it's warranted?

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[crutchy]

keep your friends close, and your enemies closer

...or just contribute dodgy code to their kernel that introduces all sorts of vulnerabilities for those that use it, which might make those poor suckers give up running a superior rival product as a guest on top of a dodgy one

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[crutchy]

how many joe-schmoes would have any idea what an OS is or that there is ANY alternative let alone a superior one?

if microsoft wants to cater to ignorance, i say let them. do you see boeing or airbus trying to build aircraft that can be flown by any joe-schmoe?

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple is gaining on them though. Lately, MS has been one of the good guys (shame I'm not that found of their software solutions)

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[DigiShaman]

Yes yes yes. But you know what really pissed you off about Microsoft? I'll tell you. If it wasn't for them creating an OS for the average consumer (not computer scientist, programmers, or data entry types) and marketing it in a manor that will sell, the Internet and technology ushered behind its further development and acceptance would quite likely been pushed out another 15+ years later. Perhaps longer. That's what's really making you angry. Admit it!

Just thing about all that has became because of Microsoft Success both directly and indirectly. Faster CPUs, the GPU, online game genres, consoles, web based anything applications including social media... The list goes on and on. To imagine a world without Microsoft today is like trying to imagine an alternate history if WW2 never started.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[Anthony Mouse]

Lately, MS has been one of the good guys

So they claim. But it seems to me more that they're on the back foot and therefore incapable of acting too overtly malicious without causing excessively many customer defections. I mean they're still doing this, and patent trolling, and pushing automatic updates to Internet Explorer that default to making Bing your search engine even though nobody likes it, etc.

They've still got a ways to go before anyone ever trusts them again. Like years. That's what happens when you ruin your own reputation.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[Grishnakh]

No they haven't. They're just as evil as ever, the only thing different about now versus 10 years ago is that they've become much more impotent, while Apple has become much more powerful and its evil is more easily felt. 10 years ago, a free software user likely didn't care much one way or the other about Apple, but now with their newfound power their evil is much more noticeable (as can be seen by all their patent lawsuits).

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[Grishnakh]

+1 Informative.

The Linux desktop is looking pretty bad these days, and most of it is because of Ubuntu and that POS Unity. Gnome3 isn't any better, however. Try a KDE distro instead. A lot of people are switching back to KDE (4.8) now that it's shaped up, and because Gnome has shot itself in the foot.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[TedHornsby]

...marketing it in a manor that will sell,...

So they're marketing it in a large residential property or dwelling? Windows for Mansions?

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[jo_ham]

The iMac hard drive thing has been blown out of proportion. They used a custom firmware to repurpose the LED activity light pin (they they don't use) to carry temperature information to cut down on parts and part variability. However, their own documentation has instructions for what to do if installing a non-special firmware drive in that bay (eg, one of Apple's own SSDs if you specify that as a BTO option, or a third party replacement drive); you install a jumper to short two pins together and it carries on as normal, and knows not to attempt to monitor the internal temperature of a non-special drive.

If you get an iMac from the factory with an SSD in that bay, the pins come pre-shorted with a little jumper installed at the factory. They just didn't tell anyone about it, since they don't consider the internals on an iMac to be user serviceable.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[ogdenk]

Bullshit. MacOS existed LONG before Windows was anything more than a glorified DOS shell. The internet was in full swing on UNIX boxes and Macs before crappy Windows machines flooded the net via AOL. Most PC users were late to the party and saddled with a shitty IP stack (remember Trumpet Winsock?) and buggy software. And DOS wasn't even REALLY "their" innovation. They bought a half-assed CP/M clone from some guy named Tim Patterson and claimed they had an OS the whole time to IBM.

We existed just fine before Win95. We had slick GUI-based machines like the Atari ST, the Amiga, and the Macintosh that were ALL superior to MS's offerings. And not in a small way.....we're talking LEAPS AND BOUNDS more advanced. And all were capable of online connectivity. All had more capable graphics and sound than PC's of the same time period.

The ONLY thing MS brought to the table was "Good Ol' Boy" predatory business tactics, manipulation and extortion. They INVENTED absolutely NOTHING and forced an industry into shoving unreliable cheap PC clones down our throats with their software bundled. I hope Gates and Ballmer choke on their breakfast. F**k them.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[aiht]

In all seriousness, there's some cool stuff coming out from Microsoft Research. Everything else, if it can be considered innovative, is half-baked. The dimwits who specified and documented winapi had no clue how to formally specify stuff. Thus all the undocumented behavior that applications exploit in light of no documentation and no clear direction as to the rationale and intended uses behind various APIs. Thus we have stuff that MS had to work around over and over to maintain compatibility with broken applications; stuff that wine people have to deal with as well. As far as MS complaining that app writers are getting things wrong: well duh idiots, you can't write the docs, you'll pay for it. Yeah, I've been consistently pissed about that, even back in the times of 16 bit winapi -- even as a kid back then I realized that they were not saying things that should have been said.

Of course with various non-standard Linux APIs, you're entirely on your own. But at least there's no pretense of documentation, and you can look at the code.

Wow, you've really managed to piss off an AC today, huh?

As a fun example of winapi, I happen to have an MSDN page open right now on the GetDIBits function. It copys bitmap pixels around, and it returns:
on success: nonzero or "the number of scan lines copied from the bitmap." (because that's very helpful)
on failure: 0
Then it also says "This function can return the following value: ERROR_INVALID_PARAMETER"
And what is the value of ERROR_INVALID_PARAMETER? 87
How does someone sit down a design an API that returns a positive value on succes, and also on failure?

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[cpu6502]

>>>Preemptive multitasking was in daily use well before Commodore or Atari got incorporated.

False. Maybe in large-scale mainframes and $100,000 workstations, but certainly not in PCs aimed at the home market for $1000 or less.

By the way Commodore and Atari were incorporated in the 1950s and 1972, respectively. Microsoft/Apple computers didn't get the technology until Windows95 and OS X (2002). Waaaaay behind the Commodore Amiga's preemptive OS in 1985.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[C3ntaur]

I'm on Fedora 16 and yes, Gnome3 is a challenge. But the biggest problem I'm facing is interoperability with the Microsoft world. I have to bring up Windows in a VM just to do simple, everyday things like email and calendaring, WebEx conferencing, documentation and diagramming.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[DigiShaman]

You missed my underlying point. I'm not arguing who had the best product. I agree, it wasn't Microsoft. We got to this point in consumer technological advancement primarily because of Microsofts marketing. The best products and services won't amount to a hill of beans without marketing. That alone changed the world. Forever.

That's is why people hate MS. It's the truth that never should have been. To the parent, it pains them too much to admit it. It's where idealism and reality clash head on.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[LordLimecat]

Example: Microsoft during Windows 95 release was adamant about not producing a TCP/IP stack for Windows claiming that the Internet was a waste of time and there is nobody in their right mind that would use it. Microsoft released and poured cash into their own proprietary network protocol (NetBUI).

Funfact: When I was working on my A+ back around 2004, the course material we used indicated that "one" of the communications protocols was TCPIP, but it was esoteric and of course everyone used NetBEUI.

I think I still have the book talking about how the future is NetBEUI and how TCP/IP is some backwoods protocol that noone uses.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[tibit]

Way to miss my point. I presumed Commodore came to be in the 70s, but that's my only mistake. I never mentioned any PC home market anywhere, I don't know why you bring it up. MS did not have to copy the ideas of multitasking etc. from Commodore/Atari because, as I pointed out, those ideas were well established at the time. You made a general statement that MS had to copy from Commodore/Atari. They definitely did not have to copy from Commodore/Atari. The only innovation in Amiga was that it was available for the home market. All the technology was available way before that, some parts of it as much as 20 years before (ever heard of the mother of all demos? -- look it up).

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[tibit]

Yup. And even that falls quite short from any semblance of formalized specification. Such would need to use some formal semantics notation to express exactly what is it that various functions do, say in terms of some idealized stateful interface. There has been at least the Z notation that would have been available to MS in the 80s, but of course they never realized what it means to have formal documentation...

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[ogdenk]

You missed my underlying point. I'm not arguing who had the best product. I agree, it wasn't Microsoft. We got to this point in consumer technological advancement primarily because of Microsofts marketing.

Wrong. You missed my point. We advanced a LOT QUICKER before they arrived and dominated the industry through force.

We already had great inexpensive machines that were advancing quite fast. The difference is your great grandmother didn't and we didn't give a shit. To be fair to the elderly though, my WW2-vet granddad had an ST and then a Mac. Long before Win95.

The best products and services won't amount to a hill of beans without marketing. That alone changed the world. Forever.

That's is why people hate MS. It's the truth that never should have been. To the parent, it pains them too much to admit it. It's where idealism and reality clash head on.

Most of the groundwork for the "technological advancement" you see today existed in the early 80's. Marketing only made the Walmart crowd care and drove x86 PC prices and quality down. We were better off without them. It changed the world for the worse, not the better and has held TRUE advancement back a decade or two.

3D accelerated graphics existed before Windows. Web browsers existed on machines more capable than the PC in 1992. Gopher before that. Hi-rez displays and 24-bit color existed before Windows. Broadcast quality hardware-accelerated video playback existed before Win95. Advanced sound chips existed before Windows. Touch screens existed before Windows. Pen-based input has existed since 1952 on mainframes. Preemptive multitasking existed before Windows. GUI's have existed in various forms since the 70's.

MS also wasn't the first to combine this functionality but when everyone else did it, their machines were written off as scientific workstations, gaming toys or "just for creative types". You don't seem to realize the Amiga didn't die in 1990. Neither did the Atari ST/TT/Falcon. They were just forced out of the general US market because people were content buying a more expensive and less capable Packard Bell.

The only advancement that happened was the PC sucking up everyone else's hard work and research as they languished with MS claiming they invented something. You're right that MS won, you're wrong thinking we gained from it. We lost. Big time.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[rtb61]

Now that's the whole silly point. Linux doesn't have to be a rival product, M$ choose to loudly and publicly make it a rival product. M$ are just as free to use it and distribute it as anyone else and if they had shifted from licensing to service and support with proprietary software on top they would have done just as well. Now they will be roided.

Of course for Linux, Android is just a simple compatibility layer away.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[DigiShaman]

Just so I'm clear. Are you saying that the mid to late 90s IT technology boom would have happened regardless of Microsoft and within that time frame (if not earlier)? I'm not so convinced. Just look at the historical sales chart below in the following URL.

http://jeremyreimer.com/postman/node/329

Also, the Atari ST, Amiga, C64, TRS-80 all started to take a massive nose-dive ranging from the mid-80s to early-90s period. The PC clone platform dominated by Microsoft kept on growing market share however. Just look at the parabola in growth. Simply unmatched in the industry!

http://static7.businessinsider.com/image/4f1784c6ecad048c37000007-614-835/chart.jpg

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[bondsbw]

...but Dell's shipping at least 10 times more computers than Apple.

Not so. Gartner estimates that Dell shipped a little less than double the number of computers as Apple in 4Q11.

http://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/2012/01/12/apple-remains-in-third-place-with-116-us-computer-market/

It's more that Apple's profit margins are multiples of that of other manufacturers:

http://www.kitguru.net/apple/benjamin/apple-pc-profits-are-seven-times-higher-than-hps/

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[ogdenk]

The trash-80 was doomed from the start. The Atari 8-bit and C64 languished until the mid-90's due to a devoted user base. The ST and later TT/Falcon had quite a few professional applications in DTP and MIDI work. They found niches for a while and persisted until they got axed. The Amiga was popular for 3D modeling and video editing work. In pure numbers the PC outnumbered them but they remained dominant in quite a few niches for years afterward because the PC well......sucked. Even with more raw clock speed the PC......sucked. Only very recently has the PC sucked a lot less due to absorbing a lot of the features that made machines like the DEC, SGI and Amiga machines cool.

I don't care about growth. Retards will buy anything you can convince them they need. I care about real, honest-to-god innovation and engineering. MS has brought very little new to the table. Without MS the PC still would have had a dominant business foothold thanks to Novell, IBM OS/2 and various UNIX versions and wait......*GASP*..... LINUX which predates WinNT even. MacOS has been network-capable since the Mac Plus IIRC. Berkeley and Sun on the UNIX side contributed a lot to small-scale IT as well. The IT boom was already in full swing and growing fast before MS even got on the boat. Even infant Linux was around for the party on a small scale.

MS was the axe-wielding disruptive psycho latecomer in server-side business IT that seemed really good at sweet-talking execs.

Ethernet's been with us since the 70's thanks to DEC (RIP), Xerox and Intel. Localtalk's been around since I was a little kid. Small offices have been hooking computers together for ages. Ever even SEEN coax ethernet? You really think that crap came from the post-Win95 era? I helped run a bit of it though twisted pair wasn't far around the corner. Believe me, people saw value in personal computers before Windows existed. Especially in cubicle farms. Get off my lawn. Ever even HEARD of Digital Research and CP/M, DR/DOS and GEM (also used on ST)? They could have easily carried MS's torch had Gates never been born.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[FireFury03]

I'm a pretty technical user and have been using Linux as my primary desktop for over a decade. Lately, even I am having trouble seeing it as a viable alternative to windows.

Is there a reason why you don't see it as a viable alternative to Windows?

I'm genuinely interested - For work use, I've been using Linux exclusively for 12 years, and around 10 years for home use. This has probably left me rather out of touch with what goes on in the Windows world (I've basically not used any Windows newer than 98 in any kind of serious way), but from what I've seen, for techies, Windows still seems to be less capable than modern Linux.

For non-techies, I'm not convinced there's much to choose between Windows and Linux so long as you don't need to use Windows-only software and have hardware that's well supported by Linux. My Fiancée is an OS X user, but seems to have no trouble at all using my Fedora laptop (and from the "so long as you don't need Windows-only software" perspective, OS X has the same problem, but has a pretty big market share so I'm not sure that's as big a factor as people often make out).

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[Alioth]

NetBEUI (NetBIOS) isn't even a Microsoft protocol, it was developed in 1983 by Sytek. So they didn't even innovate there.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[nukenerd]

Digishaman wrote :-

We got to this point in consumer technological advancement primarily because of Microsofts marketing. .... That alone changed the world. Forever.

That's is why people hate MS. It's the truth that never should have been. To the parent, it pains them too much to admit it. It's where idealism and reality clash head on.

What tosh. I was around in the 1980s when there were plenty of non-intel and non-MS personal computer stuff around both in corporates and for the home. People were very excited about it. I had an Amstrad at home myself.

Most of this stuff fell by the wayside because people went Intel/MS crazy. But if Intel/MS had never existed this area would still have gone forward fast. Probably faster.

Wasn't it MS who held PCs back for 10 years by pedalling their rubbish Win3.x, W95-WinME stuff long after they could have given us a lightweight version of WinNT, which even entry-level PCs wer capable of running by then.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[nukenerd]

Ditch Gnome 3. Go for KDE, I use it on OpenSUSE

You need Windows for e-mail, documanting and diagramming? What the heck are you doing?!

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[disi]

AFAIK, they contributed a driver to make the Linux kernel run on the MS Hyper-V. That driver made it into the staging of the Linux kernel and then nothing was heard from MS developers for a long time. So it was announced it will be removed from the kernel soon (2.6.33 I think). It didn't meet standards and needed to be cleaned up. So MS needed another 600 patches to clear up the code and that is all they did.
MS does nothing for CIFS etc. or to help make Linux talk to MS products.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[__aancvu2993]

I agree with you generally but WTF is this FUD you spread about 'crippled OS'? Citation needed.

Last week I made a Win 3.11 VM for fun. To transfer Netscape I installed TCP/IP for Win 3.11 and the FTP client worked well with BSD relesase 9.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[__aancvu2993]

Wow, hey, I like the golden era as much as you but get the history right. The PC was crap when I was enjoying an ST, or playing fantastic Mac games at friend's places or at Uni. I agree.

But a Mac, or an Indigo with a color display or accelerated 3d hardware cost as much as two cars. Almost no one could afford a high end Mac and graphical workstations were in CS departments and professors hogged them. Yesterday I set up a quad core machine with 12 GB or RAM and I will virtualise the heck out of it to have fun and learn things meanwhile. To do this then would have cost around the high end of 5 figures. Today it's less than Eur 1000.

Nobody forces you to like what the masses like. Use your freedom. What if the ignoramuses buy shiny crap? It allows innovation to happen, just not at the ivory towers of our youth, but at mundane places where wage slaves with three degrees crank out products. Some of them are very good. This machine will stop when its(1) fuel runs out.

(1) Notice how its is used(2).
(2) Educating slashdotters at no charge!

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[jones_supa]

I can recommend both Fedora and openSUSE at their current state. Fedora's GNOME3 + Gnome Shell desktop gives you a polished and simple interface that does not get into your way (and runs faster than Unity). For a more flexible desktop, openSUSE is a great KDE4 platform. Good times.

I also agree with the point about Microsoft interoperability. Having good, real-world Office and Exchange compatibility would be another really powerful improvement for desktop Linux.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[lwriemen]

Yes yes yes. But you know what really pissed you off about Microsoft? I'll tell you. If it wasn't for them creating an OS for the average consumer (not computer scientist, programmers, or data entry types) and marketing it in a manor that will sell, the Internet and technology ushered behind its further development and acceptance would quite likely been pushed out another 15+ years later. Perhaps longer. That's what's really making you angry. Admit it!

Sorry. This is revisionist bullshit. As others have pointed out, consumer oriented PCs were around long before Microsoft and the IBM PC existed. Online access was available (albeit costly and slow) to all of these systems. For example, Compuserve got started in 1969. Competition between Apple, Commodore, Atari, etc. created the PC market.

Just thing about all that has became because of Microsoft Success both directly and indirectly. Faster CPUs, the GPU, online game genres, consoles, web based anything applications including social media... The list goes on and on.

Again this is wrong! Faster processors would be in demand, no matter what computing system was dominant. Online games also existed before Microsoft. Consoles are orthogonal to PCs, but they also existed before Microsoft. Web based applications are orthogonal to desktop computing.

The funny thing is that the opposite of your claims is probably what effect Microsoft has had on the computing industry. The Microsoft monopoly's stifling of competition has slowed innovation, and we would probably be 15 years ahead of where we are now. There would have been more hardware competition on PCs, so we would probably have better CPU architectures; this would be due to a PC sized market driving innovation vs. an embedded sized (think in '80s/90's terms) market.

All of the competing PC vendor lineups would have driven standardization better, so we would have standardized device driver libraries on all platforms, standardized document formats, etc. The reason would be that people would demand to take their data with them when they switch platforms. With equally distributed PC market share, this is possible. With a one company dominated PC market share, the one company can close it's formats, set hardware direction, and sit back on it's laurels until competition is somehow reintroduced. Without the USA and European courts reigning in Microsoft's predatory practices, we might be even further behind in our computing development.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[ogdenk]

But a Mac, or an Indigo with a color display or accelerated 3d hardware cost as much as two cars.

I agree on the Indigo but that sort of 3D hardware inspired the cheap GPU's we enjoy now. Everything started as multi-million-dollar exotic hardware at one point.

Later PowerPC Macs had support for PCI 3DFX and early Radeon cards just like the PC's of the era.

As for the price of an earlier 68K color Mac, the Mac IIfx was godawful expensive but a Mac LC-series machine wasn't so bad and could be had reasonably cheap not too much later. I had a IIci for a long time.

Almost no one could afford a high end Mac

You could buy a LC or Performa at comparable prices to a cheap PC. A well-equipped monster Mac IIfx or Quadra 950 was on par with an SGI workstation price-wise.

and graphical workstations were in CS departments and professors hogged them.

I'll give you that one but older workstations were frequently available fairly cheap on the used market. Do what every other starving student does. Scrounge.

Yesterday I set up a quad core machine with 12 GB or RAM and I will virtualise the heck out of it to have fun and learn things meanwhile. To do this then would have cost around the high end of 5 figures. Today it's less than Eur 1000.

And it would be the same had Windows never existed. Everyone else used SIMMs too. Even the later Amiga and Atari machines. So would PC's running OS/2 or whatever. Multiprocessor desktops have been around forever. Multicore was the next logical step. Cheaper, more efficient, affordable multicore CPU's after that.

Do I think it's cool I can build a hackintosh for $300? Yeah. Was it worth the price in actual progress for a stupid race to the bottom leaving a tyrannical little software house leading the industry? No.

Nobody forces you to like what the masses like. Use your freedom. What if the ignoramuses buy shiny crap? It allows innovation to happen,

Really what innovation? All I see lately is shiny locked-down devices becoming popular that are easy for computer-illiterate folks to use but far less efficient than a real computer to get real work done. The masses are choking out the market for devices that changed my life in a useful way and attempting to replace them with far less useful poke-and-drool toys with crippled interfaces.

How much longer do you think a general purpose expandable desktop will be inexpensive when they aren't selling because most idiots prefer an iPad?

just not at the ivory towers of our youth, but at mundane places where wage slaves with three degrees crank out products. Some of them are very good. This machine will stop when its(1) fuel runs out.

(1) Notice how its is used(2).
(2) Educating slashdotters at no charge!

Did you seriously try to give me a lesson on proper use of parenthesis and footnotes in an unofficial Slashdot post? Really? Do these carry the same weight as an edited published work to you?

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[hcs_$reboot]

All of this is true, 100%. Maybe only the (few) people who were in the IT business from the 80's are able to understand, feel and appreciate the level of relevancy of this post. Of course recently, especially since the popularization of the Internet, Microsoft had to smooth the rough edges, and the IT 2000-newcomers - of which a lot of them know only Windows - would flag your post as FB.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[Sigg3.net]

For those too young to remember, I can recommend "Accidental Empires". Gives a nice overview from a personal acquintance of Bill Gates.

Here's what MS rules at: machiavellian business strategy and building a following using re-branding of existing concepts and methods (much like a cult).

People who use Windows usually can't help it (either from not knowing the alternatives, or work situation. Most Apple users are wilfully ignorant, however.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[Dr_Barnowl]

Here's a similar issue cited : Vista refuses to work with some DHCP servers - the presence of a registry setting to turn this behaviour off (the default value is "1" for on) reveals that rather than just stick to a DHCP client that works as standard, MS deliberately broke it so it would be harder to work with any DHCP server that wasn't Windows.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[C3ntaur]

On the off chance this isn't a troll... My employer uses a hosted Exchange 2010 provider. Evolution doesn't interoperate with it, and OWA is a joke. Everyone I do business with uses Microsoft Office, and although OpenOffice and LibreOffice often get document conversions correct, they have failed often enough that I find it's not worth the bother. Diagramming: Visio wins, hands down. I used to use dia, but finally saw the light.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[cpu6502]

So why did it take Microsoft PCs til circa 1995 to catch-up to the Amiga or ST's multimedia and preemptive tasking abilities? MS should have had it back in the 80s, just like Commodore and Atari did. Just copy the idea from the workstations (as you claim).

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[C3ntaur]

Is there a reason why you don't see it as a viable alternative to Windows?

Interoperability, see the thread above. Everyone I do business with uses Windows.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[cthulhu11]

They sure have -- look how it only took them 13 years to ship TCP/IP with their OS.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[tibit]

1995?! In 1988, Windows/386 (2.1x) was preemptively multitasking the windows subsystem with one or more DOS virtual machines. I used it, I remember that. DESQview provided multitasking for DOS in 1985; I've got it in 1986 IIRC. 16 bit windows applications were multitasking, but cooperatively. There's nothing wrong with that, other than too many people not knowing how to code up nonblocking code. It has performance benefits, and the idea is hardly dead. Look at quantum leaps QP framework: it takes cooperative (run to completion) multitasking quite far, and it's a joy to use.

As for what they "should have had": they were a business, it was a business decision to make. It had nothing to do with technical prowess of anyone. If you'd be running a business doing stuff just because you can, you'll run it into the ground. It has to make sense, on multiple grounds.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[columbus]

Somebody mod parent up please. I'd never seen those graphs before and they're pretty interesting.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[toddestan]

What in the hell are you talking about? Hard drives don't have pins for the LED activity light. At least, not anything made since drive sizes were spec'd in megabytes. Certainly nothing with a SATA port on it. The temperature information on any modern hard drive is read through the SATA cable just like everything else. No need for special cables or firmware. I'm not sure what exactly Apple is doing (though it reeks of their typical proprietary hardware lock-in schemes), but people like you blatantly making shit up doesn't contribute anything to the discussion.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[jo_ham]

"Proprietary Lock In Schemes". My goodness.

Whatever they are doing, it does repurpose a pin that is used for something else on a normal drive (if it's not an activity pin, then it;s something else - I stand corrected), but it is easy (and Apple designed!) to be bypassed by using a jumper to short two pins. In other words, it was designed from the outset to be able to take modified and stock whitebox drives - hardly "proprietary lock in".

In the same generation of redesign (when they switched to Core i CPUs) they moved to MXM graphics cards (upgradable) and socketed CPUs (also upgradable). Just about the only non-standard bits of the iMac now are the physical case itself, the LCD, PSU and the Logic board. Not bad for an all in one machine.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[__aancvu2993]

Thanks, I asked for a citation and got one. Reading it shows that it seems to be the usual microsoft blunder programming too much cleverness into standards implementations. I also hate this but it's in no way a domination attempt to break the Internet. It's unlikely that a company with much power over the idiots in the IT world would go so subtly about world domination, burying a little subversive broadcast flag in its DHCP implementation. It's more likely that they tried to fix some brokenness in obscure appliances that didn't follow spec in the first place and then put a way to disable the fix somewhere in the registry. I see no serious attempt at bending the rules for their benefit, and Vista is a flop anyway (the posts are from 2008). Microsoft knows they cannot play these tricks and win, specially in Europe and other civilised places.

On a related line, I don't know about others but I'm responsible for an IT department. Therefore I have the last word about what gets installed. This is how history is written and battles are won, little by little. I use my freedom. I don't have to buckle to corporate pressure, I don't see the problem. Others are afraid to speak their mind to ignorant management but I'm not. It works.

Re:Is this news to anyone?

[chromaffin]

Microsoft has always been one of the best innovators about new technology. Against the popular belief on Slashdot, they have contributed a lot to computer technology, innovations, and of course, Linux too. Stop the hate and accept that Microsoft also has many technically knowledgeable persons who also contribute to Linux. When reading this hate about MS I can't but think that YOU are who is having problems with dealing with it.

this belief in slashdot is not due to the fact that many knowledgeable persons are working in MS, of course there are..or else MS would not have gathered the desktop market as it has today..this belief is for the attitude that is of general conception that MS has towards linux or open source..if you are paying for something its yours right..??? its your choice whatever u do with it..you wont like to be called a pirate for just lending your OS to your brother to use..would you like that?? i am speaking of this attitude here that MS has..

What other than Hyper-V drivers

[BagOBones]

It mentioned that most of it was Hyper-V drivers so you can run linux as a virtual machine on top of windows, but what else? If that is it, then it isn't a big deal and how little is everyone else contributing if this made them rise up the chart so much?

In other news...

[Lohrno]

Several backdoors were found in the latest versions of the code...

Re:In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Several backdoors were found in the latest versions of the code...

And the new kernel displays the Blue Screen of Death on a random basis.

Remember - they were threatened

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember - they were threatened with having their HyperV drivers removed due to lack of support.

And that could easily have spelled disaster for their cloud capability.

Re:Remember - they were threatened

[Chris Burke]

And that could easily have spelled disaster for their cloud capability.

Indeed, and I can't help but smile thinking about the reaction I would have had if back in 1997 you'd told me that one day Microsoft would be screwed if they didn't support Linux. :)

compiled annually?

[ILongForDarkness]

This is linux, there list needs to go to daily builds :-)

688 changes

[sl4shd0rk]

I would be interested to see what these changes are. There is no link TFA.

Re:688 changes

[the eric conspiracy]

Probably something they hold the patents on.

You don't understand

[warrax_666]

"Microsoft Serves Self" wouldn't be controversial enough for New Slashdot.

Canonical

[gtirloni]

Nice to see Canonical finally contributing something to the Linux kernel.

Wait... Nevermind, my bad.

Re:Canonical

[lysdexia]

My ears are ringing from all those rimshots.

Resistance is futile

[gestalt_n_pepper]

All your OS are belong to us (eventually.....)

Where are you Canonical?

[Volanin]

My first though when checking out the report was: "Whoa, Microsoft contributed more to the linux kernel than Canonical itself"... but later I realized that Canonical is not even listed there. Maybe I am wrong, but I have this inner concept that Canonical would contribute to these projects just like Red Hat, since they are the most "open-source-focused" companies currently... Well, I guess they indeed are completely different companies with completely different goals, and Canonical is somewhat more focused in the userspace experience (which surely is just as important).

I, for one,

[djdbass]

I, for one, welcome our new top-contributing Microsoft overlords.

Still a big deal

[nurb432]

I think its still a big deal, for many enterprise customers that need to run Linux VM's and dont want to ( or cant ) spend the money on the ( better ) VMware solution.

It just goes to show how silly the list is

[SmallFurryCreature]

MS contribution is for stuff to make Linux work on MS virtualization and interoperate with MS software since MS failed to convince all its customer to go pure windows so rather then risk customers going fully Unix, they now enable a mix. Pretty smart but it is self serving.

Meanwhile Canonical has done a lot in making a distro with the linux kernel that is easily usable. Its install program is one of the smoothest I have seen, far superior to either MS or say a Red Hat, but that has nothing to do with the kernel.

So, who is more important to the opensource operating system with a GNU userspace, a gnome/kde desktop and a Linux kernel? ALL, the very wide support shows a totally different picture then a few years ago. Drivers used to have to be made by a user who with his own money reverse engineered the code with the constant threath of a legal challenge. Now, things are open. Sure, it is far from perfect but for a long time linux was purely the domain of geeks who never even saw a girl outside their mother. Now it is being used by people who got their hands on actual boobies. Granted, their own as they are female but still, it is progress. One day the male and female linux user will meet and breed and the 7th sysadmin of the 7th sysadmin will be born.

Re:It just goes to show how silly the list is

[aiht]

... geeks who never even saw a girl outside their mother.

Hey! Some of us never even got a date inside the womb either, you insensitive clod!

Top 20 varies quite a bit

[pavon]

About 24% of changes are the result of people who have not declared an association with any company, and there is a very long tail of companies that have small changes, so while the top 5 corporate contributers are fairly consistent, the top 20 varies significantly from release to release.

In this case, these drivers have been 2.5 years in the making. They had been held out of the kernel for that time because their quality wasn't up-to-par before finally being approved. The metric used in this report basically comes down to git commits, and includes all the commits that were made in private git branches before being folded into the mainline kernel. So Microsoft has 2.5 years worth of work on Hyper-V credited to them during the 6 months in question, which amounts to 1% of the changes in that time period. It is a one-time blip, and not indicative of a trend.

Re:Top 20 varies quite a bit

[tibit]

+5 insightful.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish...

[stobesel]

'nuff said.

Re:Embrace, Extend, Extinguish...

[Ken_g6]

Embrace? Check.
Extend? Check.
Extinguish? This part seems to be Stallmanned.

MS a key contributor?

[CosaNostra Pizza Inc]

And yet, they haven't updated the linux version of Skype since they acquired the company. I have to wonder what their motivations are.

Re:MS a key contributor?

[Shippy]

The acquisition wasn't complete until October of last year. Not even six months ago. I'm sure one of their motivations for spending $8.5 billion includes getting their stuff to work on Windows Phone before worrying about Linux.

Not forgetting

[frisket]

SCO. Whoops, did I really say that? Wipe, wipe, wipe...

Subject lines...

[Anonymous Coward]

...often have what you think is missing.

Re:Subject lines...

[jones_supa]

But he might not notice your explanation from the subject line, as he didn't see it in the first place.

rank quality/utility/nonpartisan/etc...

[crutchy]

...and microsoft would disappear off the list again.

it would also disappear if a team of competent kernel developers had a closer look at microsoft's contributions and cleaned out all the bloat

Very old news: lwn.net had this in July 13, 2011

[nick_urbanik]

I'm surprised to see this as news; it was discussed about nine months ago in Jon Corbet's article in LWN.net.

K. Y. Srinivasan topped the list of changeset contributors with a massive set of cleanups to the Microsoft HV driver in the staging tree; it's impressive to see how much cleanup less than 15,000 lines of code can require.

It appears that Microsoft's contribution needed a lot of cleaning up to bring it up to scratch.

Key Linux contributor my ass

[peppepz]

They only contributed code that was needed to run Linux on their own product. And they were forced to do so by the GPL and way Linux development works. Their code won't be useful to anybody else. On the other hand, they're extremely active in trying to kill Linux through patent trolling and FUD spreading, and apparently their campaigns have reached Slashdot, too. Microsoft is as evil as ever. Linux does not owe them anything.

Gandhi said it best

[alfiejohn]

First they ignore you,
then they laugh at you,
then they fight you,
then you win.

Aha

[ACE209]

They are trying to destroy Linux from within now. :)

Re:Aha

[Reservoir Penguin]

yeah, kill it with LOVE :)

Linus@Redmond? Wired's alternate reality come true

[D4C5CE]

I'll never forget your line: "Come on, Linus, infect the mothership."
I still believe that was the best recruiting pitch ever uttered.
We both took a lot of criticism from our partisans, but look what we've accomplished.
The world is using software that doesn't suck!

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/microsoft.html

Linux should beware of Microsoft barring gifts!

[OldHawk777]

Linux and all L/FOSS should beware of those (monoliths of bad software) barring gifts!

Oracle, Microsoft ... are not there for fun; So, suspect (unintentional) damage to Linux and all L/FOSS is probable.

I must use MS Vista and Office at work. MS products following XP have been problematic to say the least and have not gotten any better.

Making Linux and all L/FOSS look bad is a marketing method that would make MS products look more secure and much better.

ACCEPT -BUT- VERIFY everything.

Re:whoa, Just more BS MS Marketeers

[OldHawk777]

BS MS Marketeers on /. ,,, W3 are funded and rampant.

MS advertising has gone 607-viral

INTEL not m$ to be credited for protected mode

[Anonymous Coward]

actually I primary thing i object to in your ignorant post is that you attribute implicitly multitasking on the pc to microsoft, as if it was some advance they mythically took from ibm during collaboration over os2, FALSE.

in fact INTEL should be credited with the creation of protected mode, in the 286. Then with page tables for virtual memory in the 386. Microsoft would not adopt it because their code was not as fast and people would happily run 16x bit windows .. lol.. which used "extended memory" to only switch to protected mode briefly to copy data down into a 64k chunk so that windows apps could pretend they had lots of memory.

It comes down to the price scheme that microsoft pushed for NT vs 95/98/me. Microsoft could have urged developers to a much cleaner model much much earlier but didnt because of performance and I believe primarily so that they could squeeze the entire market. just think, everytime you spend hours doing a reinstall for a friends windows machine, despite only using linux yourself for years, microsoft is directly benefiting from your labor covering the defects they disavow liability of but none the less they profit, youve kept them one more customer. How much did you get paid?

Wait...

[binaryhat]

Is today April 1st?

No

[galanom]

MS is just stuffing patents!

What happened to the borg graphic

[greenreaper]

. . . used for Microsoft topics? I miss that!

Re:What happened to the borg graphic

[Anonymous Coward]

ad revenue from microsoft ads?

money greases many wheels!

Wait for them to patent it

[gelfling]

It's coming. MS will patent parts of Linux that they created and everything that uses it.

What Microsoft contributed to the Linux kernel

[dgharmon]

And these contributions are all for the Microsoft Hyper-V driver.

Microsoft needs to evolve

[techfun89]

For Microsoft to find a new groove, it needs to try new areas. Though I agree with previous posters, this will spawn new MS/Linux patent possibilities. This was how Apple does things though, take someone else's work and make it better.

look at the license

[dhammabum]

Yeah, great, "Reay Linux drivers" - are just binary blobs. No source code. DId you look at the license? All the usual can't modify distributed code, etc. And a specific clause (under 2.iii) that excludes inclusion with GPL'd code.

Linux 3.2 Home Premium Edition soon?

[jcfandino]

The changes where so good that they had to increase the major version number!

Re:An OS for the average consumer

[DigiShaman]

The world is governed by assholes. Snarky, but true.

As you said. If not for Microsoft, another just as bad. Hey, kind of like Apple today. Imagine that!

Re:You should not trust any company

[Anthony Mouse]

Trust is not binary. It has gradations. Moreover, this is a particular insidious failure of a sentiment:

If the choice is between "do good" and "increase shareholder value" they are obliged to follow the latter.

The reason that it's insidious is that it's technically true. But the circumstances where it actually comes into play are such as when a CEO's wife dies of cancer and he decides to donate all of the corporation's assets to the American Cancer Society. That isn't allowed; it goes too far.

But corporations are perfectly well permitted to make donations to charity, or plot a course that goes out of the way to avoid screwing over customers and employees, etc. And some of them do. And some of them don't. Your argument is that we should ignore that distinction and treat them all the same, not trust any of them. That line of reasoning is pernicious for at least two huge reasons.

The first is that you want companies to do the right thing regardless why they do it. I mean let's even ignore the fact that corporate executives are human and humans are capable of acting altruistically (or not) regardless of their legal obligations. Suppose they're all perfect automatons who only refrain from screwing everybody over in those instances where it will maximize shareholder value, and never because it makes them feel warm and fuzzy or because they have any kind of a moral compass. Think about the signal it sends to companies when you say "don't trust them, even when they do good" -- it makes it so that doing good no longer maximizes shareholder value because they stop getting credit for it. Which makes them stop doing it. It reduces the market demand for reasonable and considerate corporate behavior, which inevitably causes a reduction in supply. Your philosophy causes more evil to exist in the world.

In addition to that, for the corporations that actually do the right thing more times than not, or do so in predictable ways, it actually as a factual and game theoretical matter makes it so that you can trust them, at least in certain circumstances -- because after they spend a sufficient amount of resources building a good reputation for themselves, the cost of violating the trust they built exceeds the value they can attain through the violation. They can violate your trust, but only once -- that's how trust works, for corporations as well as people. After that they lose your business, and you can't make any money with no customers. Which makes it so that they -- the companies with a history of scrupulous behavior -- won't do it, because it isn't in their interest to lose your business over it.

What if you counted USED lines of code?

[daboochmeister]

I wonder where their contributions would rank if you counted the actual use of the lines of code, instead of simply raw changes. Changes is bad enough already, in that code desperately in need of support, and thus requiring lots of SLOC to fix, can "reward" a contributor by boosting his ranking ... but even worse if the code is hardly ever used.

Has anyone seen a preponderance of Linux running under Hyper-V? I sure haven't, in spite of having been involved in a fair number of datacenter and private cloud initiatives. It certainly sounds like a very niche function point to count.

Texas Instruments surprises me more than Microsoft

[pecosdave]

I won't buy Texas Instruments products to this day due to their old "802.11b +" cards that had a partial G draft implementation that would do 22Mbps - but only with Windows and absolutely refused to work with the open source community to support the cards.

Later I had major issues with their 1394 chip and Linux, plus a couple of other things that turned up with TI chips that flat wouldn't work with anything but Windows.

Then there was the whole rattling the saber over cracking their calculators open.

There aren't many companies of that size I can think of that have been less open source friendly. How can they contribute the the kernel while hating on Linux so much at the same time?

wtfishyperv

[vjoel]

What does this article have to do with white fishy pervs? Some days tagging just does not make sense to me.

Re:Very old news: lwn.net had this in July 13, 201

[jazzy_jeph]

Funny I was just thinking i'd read all this before so i'll assume it's been reiterated just to set all the fanboys at each others throats, how sad.

Re:Texas Instruments surprises me more than Micros

[Alioth]

Large companies usually suffer from the sydrome of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Corporate schizophrenia is the norm, not the exception.

Re:I am a -SUBJECT- field!

[jones_supa]

Technically you are correct - a good writing etiquette includes having the complete content being readable without the subject line.

Microsoft stinks

[Cherubim1]

Microsoft contributes nothing but pain and misery. Their Linux "efforts" have more to do with Hyper-V and being forced to offload some code as GPLed.

When's the patent/copyright lawsuit?

[ebvwfbw]

Maybe I'm just paranoid. Maybe they are helping so they can come back in 10 years and claim the code was stolen?

Belated April 1st joke

[NewYork]

Today is April 3rd