Microsoft Thanked For Its "Significant Financial Donation" To OpenBSD Foundation

McGruber writes: Microsoft has donated a considerable amount of money to the OpenBSD Foundation, becoming its first-ever Gold level contributor in the process. From the OpenBSD Journal: "The OpenBSD Foundation is happy to announce that Microsoft has made a significant financial donation to the Foundation. This donation is in recognition of the role of the Foundation in supporting the OpenSSH project. This donation makes Microsoft the first Gold level contributor in the OpenBSD Foundation's 2015 fundraising campaign."

Comments

Why do I get the funny feeling that

[ClaraBow]

Microsoft has a hidden agenda behind this donation?

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[halivar]

Probably because you haven't yet realized that the Halloween Emails were 17 years ago.

Maybe it's time to move on.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[bloodhawk]

Microsoft has a hidden agenda behind this donation?

Microsoft wants to see BSD succeed, that is hardly a hidden agenda. They have leveraged BSD assets greatly over the years (as well as contributed back to them).

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[wasabiiiiiii]

They're adding SSH support into windows. It behooves them to make sure the foundation is well supported.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[ClaraBow]

I'm trying -- but it's hard!

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

Move on? Move on!? How can we move on when M$ and the rest of Bill Gate'$ cronies are oppressing the Linuxian? Just yesterday, a man using Ubuntu was beaten almost to death by Steve Ballmer. Closed source software is a crime. The people are entitled to have access to all source code. Proprietarists will be gassed.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

"Extend, Embrace, Extinguish"

Yeah, I get that funny feeling too....

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

no matter how many legitimate, sane, logical reasons you present there will always be the tinfoil hat wearers like the OP that would rather believe in sinister conspiracy theories. You may as well try arguing logic with a god botherer, They will drag you down to their level of ignorance and beat you with experience.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

Never forget!

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm trying -- but it's hard!

Actually, it's not hard, and it's very very tiny.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[zenlessyank]

Something is afoot at the Circle K.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

> adding SSH support into windows

But the previous three times they tried to do that, they failed and gave-up on the attempt. What makes you think they're going to be successful this time? My wife is a contractor on the QA team testing it, and she's afraid since it works so poorly that someone will decide at any day to give-up and layoff everyone associated with that project.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[ClickOnThis]

I'm trying -- but it's hard!

Actually, it's not hard, and it's very very tiny.

That's why they're called Microsoft.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[sexconker]

We used to be able to call out bullshit posts like yours just based on the mention of "wife".
However, with gay marriage now legal in all 50 states...

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, indeed. Pay less tax, benefit yourself in the process. Wow that's so hard.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[HiThere]

Yah. And ever since then they've been a model of ethics and righteous behavior.

Uh huh.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

There are only 6 states?!?!?

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[EEPROMS]

Well with more and more companies worried about security breaches and the inability to audit deployed code for back doors I dare say Microsoft has a logical and very marketable reason for supporting OpenSSH and the OpenBSD foundation. The marketing guys can sell openssh as an open and proven secure feature although supported by Microsoft is developed as a separate entity. Think about it, you can't even buy a CISCO router now without worrying about the thing having NSA/Chinese/Unknown Spook Organisation having back door in the thing any more. There are now small companies building switches from scratch and offering the customers the option to install their own code or even compile it themselves then install it (usually some BSD or Linux toolset) as it is the only way of knowing your routers have not been compromised.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[drunk_punk]

>What makes you think they're going to be successful this time?

He's probably your wife's new Boss... Sorry dude.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe. But my bet is Steve Ballmer is turning over in his grave about this.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

Ballmer turning over in his grave?
And a million creaking strained chairs screamed out in pain before being suddenly silenced.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to move on...but still realize they're a for-profit corporation. It's not like they're all all warm and fuzzy now, sounds like they're tending toward neutral.

In any case, the bottom line is that anything they do will always be based 100% on a profit motive. Whether through ultra-aggressive illegal techniques like in the past, or perhaps now by simply competing smartly and innovating (yes Virginia even for Microsoft it's possible!).

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe. But my bet is Steve Ballmer is turning over in his grave about this.

Steve Ballmer died???

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[the_B0fh]

If Theo is willing to give up the $2million DoD grant because he felt he should speak up against the Iraqi war, what makes you think a piddling $50k is going to affect Theo's code or design?

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[QuietLagoon]

how me someone from the open source community who has helped and donated more...

No one from the open source community has used a monopoly to take profits out of the PC industry and profited from it as Bill Gates did.

.
Gates' money is tainted, and it appears he is trying to buy his way into a good place in history.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[gweihir]

Microsoft has a hidden agenda behind this donation?

Wit 50k? Hardly.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Holi]

No one has driven more profits into the PC industry either.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[phantomfive]

There are many people in the open source community who have dedicated their lives to making the world a better place. That is a much bigger contribution than giving some amount of money that doesn't even affect his lifestyle.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[phantomfive]

Divide and conquer, of course.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[__aaclcg7560]

He died, went to hell and bought a basketball team. NBA rules prevent him from tossing chairs on to the court.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't seem to understand the word "monopoly", son.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Bing Tsher E]

In the classic essay 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' the people writing the Cathedral code were the GNU Emacs development team.

Just sayin'.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[whoever57]

Microsoft wants to see BSD succeed,

Indeed, Microsoft wants BSD to succeed over Linux. BSD can be controlled, Linux can't due to the licenses used.

I'll probably be modded down to troll for this but: Microsoft indirectly sounded the death knell for a product today that was killed by Linux -- Windows Phone.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

what a load of bullshit. take your tinfoil hat off. BSD as a group are far harder to control as they aren't off on zealotry crusades or out to dominate, they just get stuff done. Many commercial companies have had long term involvement with them including MS, this isn't new.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

> adding SSH support into windows

But the previous three times they tried to do that, they failed and gave-up on the attempt. What makes you think they're going to be successful this time? My wife is a contractor on the QA team testing it, and she's afraid since it works so poorly that someone will decide at any day to give-up and layoff everyone associated with that project.

They didn't fail, the company rejected their plan according to:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2015/06/03/looking-forward-microsoft-support-for-secure-shell-ssh.aspx

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[viperidaenz]

Where? The United States of Australia?

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[petermgreen]

Do they really need one?

I can't find an exact figure for the donation but according to http://www.openbsdfoundation.o... it was in the $25K to $50K range. That may be a lot for an opensource project running on a shoestring budget but it's pretty trivial to MS. If they get some good PR and some help with the windows port of openssh out of it then it's probablly money well spent.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

It's probably to get help on making SSH work right on Windows. Even if not, it cost them only $25k-50k. That's pocket change for Microsoft and should improve their image a bit.
Microsoft is evil, make no mistake, but there's nothing clearly evil in this specific case.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Pseudonym Authority]

Putting an operating system that you don't like does not make the money tainted. Simplifying licensing by issuing site licenses to PC makers is not evil. Get over yourself and get some perspective. Much more horrible things have been done in the pursuit of money than making a bunch of hippies at the FSF pissed off.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Pseudonym Authority]

That is a much bigger contribution than giving some amount of money that doesn't even affect his lifestyle.

That's stupid. A bigger personal sacrifice perhaps, but there is no way that it's a bigger contribution. Suppose you donate time to a soup kitchen on a Saturday. That's great, good for you[i]![/i] You fed maybe fifty bums. A million dollar donation, though, could keep twenty people doing it full time employed for an entire year. That's over 18,000 hungry bellies filled.

So, which is a ``bigger contribution''? Being visible while helping so that everyone knows what a good person you are, or maximizing the amount of good actually done?

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[tepples]

Microsoft wants to see BSD succeed

The PlayStation 4 game console runs Orbis OS, which is based on FreeBSD. If *BSD wins, does Xbox lose?

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[phantomfive]

That's stupid.

You're stupid

A bigger personal sacrifice perhaps, but there is no way that it's a bigger contribution.

It pretty much depends on how you measure 'contribution,' wouldn't you say?

So, which is a ``bigger contribution''? Being visible while helping so that everyone knows what a good person you are, or maximizing the amount of good actually done?

Bill Gates has done a good job being visible.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

You don't seem to understand the word 'ecosystem', son.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Hadlock]

More specifically, Powershell is getting native SSH support. They didn't announce PS 5.0 will get it, but it's possible 5.1 or 6.0 will see it, version releases have been getting more frequent. A major change like full SSH support would warrant jumping a whole version number, I would think. Maybe released with the next version of Windows Server, sometime next year? That would be great news.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[FranTaylor]

Well with more and more companies worried about security breaches and the inability to audit deployed code for back doors I dare say Microsoft has a logical and very marketable reason for supporting OpenSSH and the OpenBSD foundation.

Well duh, with Office for OSX, they are the #1 vendor of BSD applications in the world. All of the profits from their OSX division depend on a healthy BSD infrastructure.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[FranTaylor]

The linux developers have collectively donated the value of Linux, (roughly estimated at $10.8 billion), to the community.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

There are many people in the open source community who have dedicated their lives to making the world a better place.

Who? Doing what? And don't say, "making free software."

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

BSD software can be forked to GPL anytime, and then that fork is closed to commercial use. If MS makes OpenBSD great and then becomes a shit, OpenBSD can be forked to a GPL state and MS gets to keep the pieces it paid for.

Seems like a great relationship to me.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[brianerst]

Whoooosh!

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Zeromous]

I know right? For linux its systemd thar controls us and everyone know once microsoft kills PID1 that's it for us!

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Billly Gates]

Microsoft has a hidden agenda behind this donation?

Because Microsoft has stated they wanted to use OpenSSH for Powershell and remote desktop in future versions if you Google past stories here. In essence they are paying them to do the heavy lifting for them and the community wins too.

THis is something desperately needed as it could be a great vulnerability if someone can crask the SAM database and impersonate a domain admin and do major damage via powershell which by the day is more and more powerful. In Server 2016 they will really hit taking out the GUI hard and have 100% of every task from the command line in Powershell.

OpenSSH will create a much needed additional step to do the damage and could be the next killer feature of WIndows Server 2016.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[arkane1234]

SJWs?

super java writers? what does SJW mean?

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[arkane1234]

That's an ecosystem like Europe was an ecosystem during the dark ages.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[arkane1234]

"So, Mr Lincoln, how was the play otherwise?"

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

The moron that modded my post down didn't consider both the hardware and software companies that made heaps of money through MS's monopoly, which was the point being made. I'm actually a bit shocked that I have to explain that.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[AJWM]

It probably comes from reading the licenses, which you should try sometime. Note also the word forked.

You take some BSD-licensed code, make changes to it (creating a derivative version), then GPL-license the derivative. Anyone is still free to find the original BSD sources and make their own derivative, but they can't do anything with the GPL-licensed fork without following the GPL -- which includes GPL'ing any work derived from that.

Of course unless the changes introduced by the fork are particularly compelling, nobody is going to care. But it's still a possibility. The BSD licence allows it, just as it allows someone to make totally proprietary derivatives.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Culture20]

He should have bought Indiana University. I hear NCAA rules encourage chair throwing.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[aliquis]

Yeah. Microsoft contribute $25,000-$50,000 towards a project whose product it uses.

Surely something must be fishy with that! Considering it's such a huge amount of money for Microsoft and so on (Who just decided to write of 8 billion on their purchase of Nokia mobile phones for instance..)

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[ranton]

There are many people in the open source community who have dedicated their lives to making the world a better place. That is a much bigger contribution than giving some amount of money that doesn't even affect his lifestyle.

You either meant to say "That is a much bigger sacrifice than giving some amount of money ...", or else you are simply incorrect. The level of contribution is not dependent on the level of sacrifice, the motives, etc. of the person doing the contributing. The magnitude is the only factor when measuring the level of contribution.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[whoever57]

More importantly, it can be forked into a closed-source version.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

Because you're a delusional retard.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[mcrbids]

$50k doesn't even cover the cost of MS TV advertisements for a single day. This is roughly the cost of 1/2 to 1/3 of their typical developer salary for a year.

This isn't significant; this is laundry lint.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Yeah yeah yeah, I hated rebooting my machine several times a day during the 90's, too.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[phantomfive]

ok, you suck at definitions. There are multiple ways to measure things, and you've only thought of one.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

You take some BSD-licensed code, make changes to it (creating a derivative version), then GPL-license the derivative.

You can GPL your code, not the whole thing. You cannot add a few lines to OpenSSH and make this derivative solely under the GPL. You could add new code to it and have that covered under the GPL, but the whole would have to be distributed with multiple licenses. Additionally, because you are still distributing BSD licensed code, the original (4, 3, or 2 clause) license must be attached.

The BSD license allows it, just as it allows someone to make totally proprietary derivatives.

As long as the obligations of the BSD license are followed; it is not a free-for-all.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

It is the new slashdot. An AC makes a pretty good but old joke and stays at 0 moderation. Someone else ruins it by explaining the joke and gets +5 informative.

Next up, something about Natalie Portman and breakfast food gets moderated -1 for being a sign of the patriarchy systemic in STEM.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[TWX]

Yeah yeah yeah, I hated rebooting my machine several times a day during the 90's, too.

I hate that I still have to reboot my Microsoft boxes regularly; the tablet crashes far too often when docking or undocking or coming out of sleep and there have been too many times that the servers have had problems during expected operating hours that they are rebooted every scheduled maintenance window whether they're serviced or not.

The Linux boxes get rebooted either when something really critical needs updating or when the power goes out in the office area. The OSX box I'm typing this on has been up for a little over 222 days, is put into sleep several times a day, and travels with me from time to time.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

What has changed? MS still is based on pc-monopoly and they are not giving it away. Any open standard or code is a danger for closed dictatorship.
Maube this is a marketing trick (so you loyal followers can praise it) or just traditional devide and rule policy.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[lucm]

what does SJW mean?

Software Justice Warriors. The SJW are people who are mad because they were born too late to fight the actual software injustices of the past, such as the Netscape debacle or the decision to call the unix command "umount" instead of "unmount", so they join digital lynch mobs at the slightest hint of possible software controversy, hoping to fill the void in their existence with strongly worded paragraphs of significantly misinformed opinions about problems that either don't exist or that are blown out of proportions.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[lucm]

The moron that modded my post down didn't consider both the hardware and software companies that made heaps of money through MS's monopoly, which was the point being made. I'm actually a bit shocked that I have to explain that.

"Moooooooooommy, a stranger on internet says I'm not awesome."
          -You

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Apparently I'm having quite the lucky streak.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

With benefits included, more like 1/3 of their entry level developer. It's the laundry lint left over after cleaning out the trap.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[newbie_fantod]

A mod-point, a mod-point! My kingdom for a mod-point!

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do I get the funny feeling that Microsoft has a hidden agenda behind this donation?

BSD is contributing code to Microsoft in the way that they use the BSD license. Microsoft takes the code and use it in their own products.
Typical for non-paid work is that it tends to be focused on implementing fun new features.
Typical for someone who wants to use others code is that they want it to be cleaned up and bugfixed.

The agenda is hardly hidden.
The crappy code with too many neat features and too many bugs that Microsoft needs fixed is in this case mentioned if you click the link in the summary:

This donation is in recognition of the role of the Foundation in supporting the OpenSSH project.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

So can any GPL project as long as you don't redistribute it.
Not that it matters to Microsoft, they have the money to pay the copyright holder for a non-GPL fork.
In the cases where the copyright holder is hard it is hardly a new problem, in the music industry the action is to deal with those that can be found. If the others don't speak up then they aren't a problem and can be ignored. If they do speak up you deal with them then.
It's never a large company that is hard to find, just some random dude. If he is of the delusion that he can come out on top in court against a multinational corporation he will still be easily discouraged and then he will settle for a smaller amount than it would have taken to find him before intruding on the copyright.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

So you are saying that it is better to be inefficient? Incompetent contributions are better than competent ones because they take more of your time?

"Tries hard" only goes on your report card when there is nothing better to say.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

You should add a net on top of your head so you can catch all the things soaring over it.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it's not going to happen but I like the thought that Microsoft could switch Windows entirely to OpenBSD. That would be awesome. :-)

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[stooo]

>> Well duh, with Office for OSX, they are the #1 vendor of BSD applications in the world

OSX is not BSD. it's a closed source derivative of a derivative of BSD....

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[dunkelfalke]

Thank you. Now I feel old.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft has a hidden agenda behind this donation?

AC's can't mod parents up dang it!!

um. Yes, it would *hypothetically* seem some variation of "you scratch our back" and "we'll scratch yours *could* *hypothetically* be in play. Who knows how likely, right? Could "be anything". Looking at the comments right now from TFA I see somebody put the following comments.

-

FROM- http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20150708134520

Re: Microsoft Now OpenBSD Foundation Gold Contributor (mod 1/1)
by First name Last Name (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) on Wed Jul 8 19:24:14 2015 (GMT)
If you can't beat them, join them.

Re: Microsoft Now OpenBSD Foundation Gold Contributor (mod -1/1)
by Anonymous Coward (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) on Thu Jul 9 06:36:49 2015 (GMT)
Considering the unusually high amount of comments...
Why do I get the feeling that a lot of them come from some PR drones?

-

Honestly, I understood it well enough from the /. headline and don't need to read all of the comments on that site. I read enough tech forums as it is. Those two comments I cut/pasted above just stood out to me from a somewhat fast glance.

I think it's likely everybody gets the same gist, perhaps not in the same words. Some understand it more than others, etc. I'm not speaking for others. I will leave it to others closer to this market to understand it. Everybody gets to have their own perspectives, draw their own conclusions, etc.

What does also come to mind is that the PlayStation 4 runs on BSD and that the Playstation 4 is Microsoft X Box 1's primary competitor. The BSD community is also very touch-and-go with the Linux community. eg. The programmers and users often use the exact same source code, compiling methods, manual pages, etc. They are each part of the FOSS community, including many distros, forks, branches, etc.

This is sort of interesting from the bleachers. :) But hey, what do I know? Of course this could just be innocent gratitude or whatever on Microsoft's part.

That being said, I do wish more money went into BSD coders back in the days. This is a very kindhearted gesture indeed. :)

Do Windows users even read /. ??

http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7619413&cid=50015457
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7620131&cid=50022933
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7631357&cid=50029485
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7620819&cid=50030917
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7636237&cid=50036269
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7635923&cid=50036463
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7651477&cid=50059597
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7651117&cid=50059759
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7651497&cid=50060701

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[marcello_dl]

- The halloween emails represent typical corporate strategy;
- MS is still a corporation;

So the burden of proof is on those who say MS has changed.

Signs of changing would include:
- Support for old systems, instead of the endless unneeded costly and toxic upgrade cycle. You cannot have volunteers like debian to better support old stuff than a billion tier corporation.
- API stability and openness, instead of pushing and retiring flavours of the month. Ask people who invested in silverlight.

- Acknowledging the billion hours, and dollars, spent just because MS thought your computer was marketshare. I think many wars have costed less to society than MS, the other corporations, and the entire system of IT based on planned obsolescence, incompatibilities, NIH syndrome.

tldr: go on trusting MS it worked so well for those before you.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Demonoid-Penguin]

Dear coward

You should add a net on top of your head so you can catch all the things soaring over it.

When medicine and welfare advances you may be able to add a head to your neck so you can attach a net.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Demonoid-Penguin]

Show me someone from the open source community who has helped and donated more towards charities than Bill Gates. Uh huh, that's what I thought.

Bill - is that you? Don't forget to lodge your claims for charitable donations - we filed it under "the spit shield fund".

the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (foundation) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust. Both entities are tax-exempt private foundations that are structured as a charitable.

One good thing Bill Gates has done. Though not everyone agrees.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[vux984]

The majority of them were paid to do it though.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Demonoid-Penguin]

what a load of bullshit. take your tinfoil hat off. BSD as a group are far harder to control as they aren't off on zealotry crusades or out to dominate, they just get stuff done. Many commercial companies have had long term involvement with them including MS, this isn't new.

Agreed, and MS's money spends like any other money - if they do think they can control BSD they've got a surprise coming. Personally I don't think that's the plan. They do need to get into OpenStack, and they are desperate to get PowerShell ported to 'nix. Paying to have it supported, and contributing to the development of the pieces of BSD they use is just good business sense. MS may be all sorts of things - but generally they are not dumb when it comes to money.

It's not like they don't have their own Unix (SCO wasn't just a Linux attack venture) which may (possibly) be resurrected sometime in the future.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice strawmen, but that is of course not why Microsoft's money is tainted. Sure, they have made very crappy software and played a neat little trick on IBM. That may be questionable, but it's all legal and it's not outright evil. However, they also abused their near-monopoly on operating systems to force other software packages onto the market and to force other operating systems off the market. That is outright anti-competetive behaviour that is both illegal and morally wrong without a doubt.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

Has Netcraft confirmed it?

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

Contributions can only be measured by their absolute material value, nothing more. 50$ may be worth more to you than 5000000$ are worth to Bill Gates, but the cold hard fact is that you get a lot more done with the 5 millions than with fifty bucks. Simple as that. I know it hurts your precious snowflake feelings but that's the harsh truth. Accept it. Small people with small money are nothing and count for nothing.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting, when did this happen?

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[unapersson]

And there was me thinking it was satirising all those people who throw around the term SJW as though they're the new reds under the bed.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Feral Nerd]

what does SJW mean?

Software Justice Warriors. The SJW are people who are mad because they were born too late to fight the actual software injustices of the past, such as the Netscape debacle or the decision to call the unix command "umount" instead of "unmount", so they join digital lynch mobs at the slightest hint of possible software controversy, hoping to fill the void in their existence with strongly worded paragraphs of significantly misinformed opinions about problems that either don't exist or that are blown out of proportions.

Well, today they are all just sitting there with sparks flying out of their ears and their limbs spasming randomly going "Microsoft donates to open source.... does not compute.... dzzzt... does not compute...."

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Dog-Cow]

Can we get a "-1000, Mutilated The Joke" mod?

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

I can picture you showing up at a party then others making quick excuses to leave early.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Dog-Cow]

The vast majority of Linux kernel code is written by people working for for-profit corporations. Demonizing MS because they are a for-profit company is ridiculous and stupid beyond belief.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anne Thwacks]

You have omitted to mention that pretty much all software was open source till Gates came along: When you got an OS (or compiler), you got the source code - and had to patch it, possibly daily. If you invented the patches yourself, you normally shared them via the user group.

It was not (necessarily) "Free as in Beer" - you might pay very big bucks for the OS, but the code was open. (EG RSX11, BSD, Ultrix, George 2, 3, 4, OS9).

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[F.Ultra]

So their employers donated that money then.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anne Thwacks]

Indeed so, my good friend: this is the hard evidence that, when quality matters, an Open Source (BSD) version is infinitely preferable to a closed source version - even to Microsoft.

Yes sirree! The real message here is MS know damn well they cant deliver code of the same quality as BSD code.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[F.Ultra]

I wouldn't go so far as call it a killer feature but SSH support on Windows is a welcoming feature indeed. Hopefully they will also some day throw out their power shell and replace it with BASH, that would be the day!

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anne Thwacks]

Demonizing MS because they are a for-profit company is ridiculous and stupid beyond belief.

Only because there are so many/much more demonic activities they have indulged in.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure your Microsoft based brand x hardware has to be reboot 15 times an hour while osx is so good that it turns itself because it knows when I need to use it. Please just stop the fanboy posts.

My old novell netware servers on compaq proliant hardware would run for more than 500 days easily. See I can do it too on much big equipment than your air book.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Proprietarists will be gassed.

You mean gas-sed? Isn't that cruel (and unusual)?

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Or, without the Bill Gates tax, the people formerly deprived of that money could have decided themselves that they want to donate it towards charities.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I would have thought the buyers of PCs have driven most of the profits into the PC industry...

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Simplifying licensing by issuing site licenses to PC makers is not evil.

That's like saying that propelling small objects to high velocities is not a crime. True but completely irrelevant in certain contexts.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

NOTHING is illegal if you throw enough lobbying/campaign money at it.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft is adding OpenSSH to Powershell. This is well publicized. There is no hidden agenda here.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[K. S. Kyosuke]

But Microsoft has changed! They now want personal computers to feature Microsoft-controlled bootloaders! ;-)

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[squiggleslash]

In practice it means anyone's whose views on women is more progressive than Bill Cosby's.

Too soon?

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Stealthey]

Funny, Working in graphics company here, I've got few iMacs with Yosemite, and they need to be rebooted multiple times during the day. Whilst iMacs & PowerMacs on 10.8 are stable. I can't reliably downgrade a new iMac to older versions reliably enough, cause either they don't work or still have issues. Got lots windows machines too, they work just fine. Same goes with Windows and Linux servers. Can't say the same for OS X server(on xserve, remember those)...cause apple discontinued that. In my (emphasis *my*) 15 years of experience of working in IT, Workstations both PC & Apple are virtually identical. From support point of view, they are both un/reliable. Enpdoint protection, security policies have generally kept machines working reliably just as well. In the 90s while windows boxes were rebooted, running system 7,8 wasn't much better either. All the Mac's needed just as much rebooting if not more. Even upto system 9 things weren't as rosy as most people would make you believe, If I recall correctly it was 9.2 finally when things got stable, but then OS X hit. On that note, Our first Xserve with OS X server was an interesting beast. The OS would completely drop networking support if you changed the IP of the machine. Granted it was early and first few iterations of OS X, but a server that can't be networked reliably is not something that only MS is guilty of. Not trying to bash Apple or anything, but when you are working and supporting Apple, Windows & Linux camps, you realize that they all are the same, they each have their strong points and weak points...all the same.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[ClickOnThis]

It is the new slashdot. An AC makes a pretty good but old joke and stays at 0 moderation. Someone else ruins it by explaining the joke and gets +5 informative.

I did not ruin the joke. I merely provided a missing punchline. And I did not ask for or expect two informative mod-points for it. The other half of my up-mod points were funny -- points the AC would have received in the first place if he had added the punchline.

Next up, something about Natalie Portman and breakfast food gets moderated -1 for being a sign of the patriarchy systemic in STEM.

That doesn't sound like your complaint about ruining a joke by explaining it, but anyway...my post is the one that got modded down eventually. Whatever. I'm here for the banter with my fellow nerds, not mod-wars. I'd say I'm the old slashdot.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[coofercat]

I would say many things about him (some complimentary, even), but being 'in the open source community' isn't something I'd say about Bill gates.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean, time to realize that for-profits have started doing moves they would not think lead to more profit eventually? Sounds like Microsoft is a failure at doing business then; oddly enough, I always thought that's the only thing they are actually good at.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[geminidomino]

For fuck's sake... it's been how many decades and you people still can't get this right?

Godwin's Law states: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." That's it! None of this "losing the argument" bullshit.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

Revisionist poppycock. IBM were a closed-source shop before Gates was out of diapers. What is true is that a large amount of early software came out of academia, which naturally led to free sharing. However, you're ignoring, I don't know, almost all commercial software written in the 60s and 70s. The concept of open source as a strategy didn't even achieve relevance until the 80s, well after Gates' open letter of 1976.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

Internet is serious business.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[geminidomino]

As long as the obligations of the BSD license are followed; it is not a free-for-all.

That's not terribly burdensome.

"Copyright 2015 by Forkers, LLC. Based on code copyright 2014 by BSD Baddasses, Inc. This software isn't guaranteed to do a damn thing."

That sweet, sweet two-clause.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I can't see you showing up at a party at all.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

As soon as we can find the correct dollar value of haughty, superior statements, the value of the BSD community's contributions will far, FAR, exceed the value of Linux! (assuming a statement has a positive value).

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

So how many blue screens of death does it take to feed a begga for a day?

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you are a loser.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

"Monopoly" is the word that jealous people use to describe others' "success".

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[QuietLagoon]

...Simplifying licensing by issuing site licenses to PC makers is not evil....

Yes it was, and the per-processor licensing scheme that Microsoft foisted upon the PC industry was declared so.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[LWATCDR]

Wow talk about self righteousness.

Here it is in a nutshell.

1. A lot of the Internet and a lot of other services depend on OpenSSH for security. This includes Microsoft.
2. OpenBSD the developer of OpenSSH is short of funds to pay developers to work on OpenSSH.
3. Microsoft gives a big "to OpenBSD community but small to Microsoft" pile of cash to OpenBSD.
Result
OpenBSD can pay the developers to work on OpenSSH, Microsoft gets a better OpenSSH, everyone else gets a better OpenSSH, and Microsoft gets good PR.
This is great outcome and I see no need to quibble about who did more.
It is in fact a win win for everyone.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

What good is SSH, if you don't have a decent shell.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, Mr. Reputation Manager. Decades of Microsoft evil do not get wiped away because a thousand hired sock puppets tell us it's time to move on.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Talderas]

Quit being a Godwin Nazi, Hitler.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[ranton]

ok, you suck at definitions. There are multiple ways to measure things, and you've only thought of one.

True there are multiple ways of measuring the magnitude of a contribution, but all of them must be related to the impact of the contribution or else you are simply using the wrong word. An hour of labor is measured differently than a monetary donation, and sometimes even a simple reference (that takes almost no time or money) can have a large impact.

But the effort taken does not factor into a measurement of contribution. Another AC put it perfectly so I won't even try to paraphrase it: "'Tries hard' only goes on your report card when there is nothing better to say". Even the balance sheet of a charity doesn't list how hard their employees worked; it lists the output of their work. If one non-profit employee can get twice as much done in half the time, they will still have contributed more than the employee who worked harder but got less done.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, no. IBM led the way in unbundling starting back in 1969 because of an anti-trust suit. 86-DOS (later MS-DOS) was closed source before Bill Gates ever touched it.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[phantomfive]

"He made a contribution in proportion to his income."

Seriously, that's kind of the point of "The Widow's Mite"......quote: "Of a truth I say unto you, that this poor widow hath cast in more than they all"

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Somehow it's my fault you don't understand the topic. Right.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would the do that?

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[MobyDisk]

As a discussion grows longer, doesn't the probably of every topic increase?

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Ravaldy]

That's because most donations always have a hidden agenda (especially at a business level). Personal and business donations are always benefiting to the donor in one way or another.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still mad that they censored fsck.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Valdier]

You are doing something wrong.

My windows 7 box was up for 2 years straight, not even having to reboot for video card drivers. (I did reboot it one time because I added a new hard drive and video card on the same day).

I only recently rebooted it for the insider fast ring of windows 10.

The fanboi myth that windows needs to be rebooted daily, is just that... a myth. Or you suck at choosing hardware... one of the two.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[im_thatoneguy]

The linux developers have collectively donated the value of Linux, (roughly estimated at $10.8 billion), to the community.

The "Linux Developers" are mostly for-profit corporate employees. They aren't so much donating as collaborating on a shared asset.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[ClickOnThis]

Whoooosh!

Tell that to the moderators who scored me informative. They're the ones who were whooshed.

I was just providing a missing punchline.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[FaxeTheCat]

...but luckily, Windows has one. It just needed SSH (yes, a lot of users have asked for it).

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[ranton]

"He made a contribution in proportion to his income."
Seriously, that's kind of the point of "The Widow's Mite"......quote: "Of a truth I say unto you, that this poor widow hath cast in more than they all"

That quote is intentionally inaccurate to make a point. It is no different than if I tell someone "My new coworker is tall as a tree." or "my father is the nicest man in the world". They are all hyperbole.

There is a lot of hyperbole in the Bible. Jesus never meant the widow literally cast in more than they all. She obviously made a lesser contribution than the others, but Jesus is trying to point out her contribution was more meaningful (to God that is).

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[vux984]

Making it a corporate donations/cost of doing business rather than a personal sacrifice by the employee.

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

What an idiot... that would have been $2 million not spent on killing.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

And you certainly got behind a lot of windows security updates that actually needed a reboot (or even shutdown) to finish it's install proprely. Just saying.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess you haven't installed a windows update in 2 years then. We know you are lying, you know you are lying, so why lie?

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe people are just bored with that kind of garbage.
 
When all you bring to the table is stale jokes you're going to find yourself shown the door pretty fast by anyone who wants something that doesn't smell like it's from an old folks home.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[ClickOnThis]

No one has driven more profits into the PC industry either.

On balance, I think the PC industry prospered in spite of Microsoft, not because of it.

That's not to say they haven't done some good things. There's Surface, and ... still thinking ...

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

Definitely originated before GamerGate (I think I heard it about a year before), and was apparently used as a derogatory word in the original context I heard it. GamerGate certainly thrust the phrase into popularity.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

They are incorporating ssh into powershell, paying someone else to program for them

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[x0n]

I wouldn't go so far as call it a killer feature but SSH support on Windows is a welcoming feature indeed. Hopefully they will also some day throw out their power shell and replace it with BASH, that would be the day!

Why the hell would I want to try to manage Windows, with its configuration management based on APIs (WMI, CIM etc.) with a shell designed to manage Unix where configuration management is based around text files? Just because I love my tennis racket doesn't mean I'm going to start using to play soccer...

Re:Why do I get the funny feeling that

[strikethree]

In Server 2016 they will really hit taking out the GUI hard and have 100% of every task from the command line in Powershell.

WTF over? Why does it always have to be one way or the other in every situation in life?

I am a command line evangelist but if the GUI tools have been created, why shouldn't they be kept up to date and available? Seriously, they can only focus on one? Meh.

The lack of freedom is downright annoying. I don't like being corralled.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

SOCIAL justice warrior, the term can and is used much more broadly than the distinction you're using.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[Anonymous Coward]

The linux developers have collectively donated the value of Linux, (roughly estimated at $10.8 billion), to the community.

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/08/10/20/1515253/linux-ecosystem-is-worth-25-billion

How are there so many idiots on the planet these days? That was second search result from Google behind a linux man page for strfmon. You could have just said lions and tigers and bears oh my $3.14159 and been just as correct.

Is it clever to spew lies and count on the lazy to not look it up? People should just merely factor lies "that they saw on the internet" into their understandings of life?

There are obviously a bunch of Microsoft PR people sneaking around Linux forums, slashdot, etc. There is a monetary incentive to do so. Microsoft is pure monetary incentive. Bill has a chunk of cash he snuck from the pockets of many people on the planet. His charity does not outweigh the charity of all of those other people whatsoever. Get off Billy's nuts. He's a shyster. Anti-trust, all that.

Linux is a far superior operating system to any and every Windows version. It is better now than ALL OF THE WINDOWS VERSIONS combined.

Slashdot runs on CentOS (LINUX). Google? Linux. Every top500.org supercomputer? LINUX. Amazon? LINUX. Name it that's important? LINUX

Windows is death knell.. Don't believe any of these slimy lies running around (modded up too?!) about Microsoft was ever loved. People ever started buying Mac's because "ANYTHING BUT WINDOWS" and they felt safer than just running outright FreeBSD.

2015 is the year to be remembered as Windows is death knell.

Re: Why do I get the funny feeling that

[toadlife]

In the case of Cosby, I would say too late.

Heck just froze over...

[coffecup]

And I think I spotted some pigs flying up there too....

Re:Heck just froze over...

[ClaraBow]

I see them too -- them are pigs! Damn, there is a disturbance in the Force!

Embrace

[Anonymous Coward]

Extend

Extinguish

Question

[PNutts]

Can we start calling them M$ again?

Re:Question

[Sowelu]

As the evil empire of this decade, we really need a snarky nickname like that for Google.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

> Can we start calling them M$ again?

MICROS~1 surely ...

Re:Question

[just another AC]

Sorry but evil empire of this decade is definitely Apple, they just need to finish locking everyone in to their services on every industry (including financial), before they really turn the screws. They are like Google in the early 00's where they are only showing hints of their future evils.

Re:Question

[drunk_punk]

Scroogle?

Re:Question

[westlake]

Can we start calling them M$ again?

No.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we start calling them M$ again?

Only if you want to scream "I love Microsoft so much that I astroturf for them free of charge by making their critics look like quasi-literate troglodytes".

Because that's the only thing that "M$" has ever meant.

Re:Question

[Bing Tsher E]

Apple would never, ever, want to lock everyone in to their services. They seek to sell to the richest 20% of the people. Look at their product line: they never make anything at a price even close to the average for that classification of device type.

Their whole marketing scheme involves letting people feel elite for buying their products. That's how cult deals work.

Re: Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Developers developers developers!!! Now that the train wreck Ballmer is out, I like the latest changes from M$ including opening .Net, and Android products. That a smart move! Screw Nokia!

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

We do. Since Google is spying on us, we draw eyeballs.

G(.)(.)gle

It's just not as effective because:

1) Some people think that resembles women's breasts... depending on the font, maybe they're right.
2) It's notably longer, and therefore less convenient, to type.
3) Google's isn't half as evil as the Microsoft in the 90s. (Microsloth was worse...)

Re:Question

[Bing Tsher E]

Only if you insist on running your Linux on a FAT filesystem.

There used to be distros that were designed to do that.

Re:Question

[viperidaenz]

$pple

Re:Question

[FranTaylor]

Their whole marketing scheme involves letting people feel elite for buying their products. That's how cult deals work.

My 2008 macbook is still running great, let's amortize the cost and see how that works out compared to the three Dells I would have chewed through in that time.

Re:Question

[ToasterMonkey]

Apple would never, ever, want to lock everyone in to their services. They seek to sell to the richest 20% of the people. Look at their product line: they never make anything at a price even close to the average for that classification of device type.

Their whole marketing scheme involves letting people feel elite for buying their products. That's how cult deals work.

So it's not that Apple's stuff is easier to use and the top 20% can afford more, it's about feelings...

Re:Question

[aliquis]

My Macbook Pro was used for 1.5 year and performed poorly after 1,

What's your point really? Nothing magical about Apple gear. The specs in your Macbook are weak and I know lots of Apple users has complained about how the latest OS is slow on their devices.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple does have a lot of cash, but they seem to be less cohesive right now than before the changing of the guard at the helm. The Apple Watch isn't doing that well (although it is a v1.0 product, and it took the iPod a rev or two before it seized the entire MP3 player market), and even though Apple will get its revenue when the iPhone 6S (or whatever this year's rev gets called) hits the market, they will eventually wind up with a saturated market there as well.

I would say that the "evil" thing has gone up though. The latest MBPs are 1/10 for iFixit's repairability, and even though they did a teardown, it might be something that can't be put back together and be reliable, especially with all the connectors with very low insertion cycles. Browsing on iOS is a pain in the ass since most websites kick you to the app store to download yet another lame F2P/P2W game, not to mention the fact that you can't stop apps and websites from being able to fingerprint your device forever (if that were not the case, Yik Yak would not be possible.)

Maybe Apple should try to make a run for an enterprise level customer base. Heck of a lot easier to sell 10,000 desktops to one company than to 10,000 consumers. Because PC hardware materials suck as a whole (barring custom CNC machined cases), if Apple made an easily repairable/upgradable desktop that could handle OS X as well as Windows, they would have the hardware market in enterprises... and businesses would pay the Apple Tax, provided they could order Macs sans camera/mics, or with other items.

Re:Question

[dunkelfalke]

My mother's Dell Vostro (2009) is still like new and my Thinkpad X200 (also 2009) is also doing fine, the only parts I have replaced were the HDD (still worked but I wanted a SSD) and the battery.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

That doesn't really work does it hmm? The company is not called Spple

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Googl€

Re:Question

[jabuzz]

That's called the Dell Optiplex line. The cases are all pretty much tool free, the models are available for over a year (18 months rings a bell) really cutting down on the number of images you need.

Even simple things like grabbing all the service tags and feeding them into the Dell website to see which ones are coming up on warranty expiry this month so you can go round and check nothing needs replacing is nailed to the ground.

You really have to separate the Dell consumer and business lines, they are like chalk and cheese.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

As soon as $ is again based on gold standard.

I had to put rocket boosters on the joke so that it flies so high above, making it so cold and dry, that nobody can hear any laughter.

Re:Question

[F.Ultra]

I know it's the answer to "should I run WIndows on my servers?" but how in hell do you find that as an acronym for Microsoft?

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

They just laid off over 8000 people. Still have enough money to buy a free operating system, though.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Again?! Never stopped lol...

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

$napple.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL evil. I know you MS-hired sock puppets have been trying hard but you have to at least be a little bit credible. Even lately, the SNowden docs showed how far up the NSA's ass Microsoft was, and without being compelled by force of law.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Sigh....

Courtesy of the Edward Snowden archives.

https://search.edwardsnowden.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Microsoft

July 31, 2012
Microsoft (MS) began encrypting web-based chat with the introduction of the new outlook.com service. This new Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption effectively cut off collection of the new service for FAA 702 and likely 12333 (to some degree) for the Intelligence Community (IC). MS, working with the FBI, developed a surveillance capability to deal with the new SSL. These solutions were successfully tested and went live 12 Dec 2012.

March 15, 2013
SSO's PRISM program began tasking all Microsoft PRISM selectors to Skype because Skype allows users to log in using account identifiers in addition to Skype usernames. Until now, PRISM would not collect any Skype data when a user logged in using anything other than the Skype username which resulted in missing collection; this action will mitigate that. In fact, a user can create a Skype account using any e-mail address with any domain in the world. UTT does not currently allow analysts to task these non-Microsoft e-mail addresses to PRISM, however,

March 7, 2014
PRISM now collects Microsoft Skydrive data as part of PRISM'S standard Stored Communications collection package for a tasked FISA Amendments Act Section 702 (FAA702) selector. This means that analysts will no longer have to make a special request to SSO for this - a process step that many analysts may not have known about. This new capability will result in a much more complete and timely collection response from SSO for our Enterprise customers. This success is the result of the FBI working for many months with Microsoft to get this tasking and collection solution established. "SkyDrive is a cloud service that allows users to store and access their files on a variety of devices

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife's five-year-old XPS is sill going strong. Upgraded the primary HDD to SSD, bumped the RAM a bit, replaced the screen after she dropped it, and the battery is down a couple of cells but still works okay... and she games on the damned thing.

Re:Question

[605dave]

That is not a typical experience. When I visited my parents I realized that they were on 10.5 on the old MacBooks they had. Never had a problem, and they are at least 5 years old.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

My 2008 macbook is still running great, let's amortize the cost and see how that works out compared to the three Dells I would have chewed through in that time.

Nice anecdote you've got there. Meanwhile, my wife's Dell Latitude D510 still meets her needs fine; I'll wait while you look up how ridiculously old that laptop is. It still has the original HDD and battery, though the battery doesn't retain a charge the way it used to. I've replaced two of the rubber feet, maxed out the memory, and migrated her to Mint/Cinnamon after XP went EOL, but no other changes or upgrades (plus occasional full backups of HDD though due to its age). I've still got a Dell Precision 360 in occasional use whenever I need to work on some client's outdated versions of Delphi/C++Builder/MSVC++/MSVB/VBA code. That one's not connected to anything, and it's got much larger HDDs than the original, but otherwise it's the same system it was when I first removed it from the Dell box.

Dell makes some crap/disposable lines, but they also make durable lines. As with anything, look before you buy. If you bought cheap Dell Craptiplex systems and mistakenly expected them to last through the next Windows upgrade, that's your own fault.

- T

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

That's been the ascii representation of boobs since forever.

Re:Question

[aliquis]

There may be a difference in how much we use our computers (Mine was the 2.13 GHz Core 2 Duo with 8600m GT one.)

Re:Question

[beastofburdon]

And you go on to prove their point, bravo!

Re:Well isn't that nice.

[McGruber]

I guess Theo doesn't object to Microsoft so badly that he isn't willing to pocket their bribes.

The OpenBSD Foundation lists its directors on its website.

Theo is not one of them.

the real reason

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft found out that a group of their developers used a bunch of BSD code in Windows 10. It was described in meetings as 'a lot of open source software' so they immediately allocated a few million to bury the issue. Then someone said it wasn't GPL code it as BSD code but the money move was already on the books, or off the books so the best move was a donation and when it was realized how much BSD code really was in Windows it was decided it should go to BSD.

Nadella almost threw his coffee across the room, not strong enough to throw his chair, but Bill reminded him how those kinds of things find their way out in the open.

or not.

Re:the real reason

[Holi]

well they did use some for their TCP/IP stack, at least back in the days of NT which would make me think some is still hanging around, even today. Nothing wrong with that, I mean the BSD license is truly free.

Re:the real reason

[FranTaylor]

Under Steve Ballmer, Microsoft developed and sold many many copies of Office on OSX, which is BSD. In fact, Microsoft is the #1 (in dollar volume) vendor of BSD applications in the whole world. It's been going on for years. Can you just imagine how many BSD developers there are at Microsoft? How many BSD systems they have for testing? Where have you been?

Re:the real reason

[IRWolfie-]

If rules to maintain freedom makes something non-free, then I guess that means Somalia is more free than the western world.

Re:the real reason

[Anonymous Coward]

You are very wrong. OS X is not BSD. It uses BSD code for some part of the system, and it does not mean OS X is BSD. Educate yourself before placing a comment like this.

MS and BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft has a hidden agenda behind this donation?

Microsoft wants to see BSD succeed, that is hardly a hidden agenda. They have leveraged BSD assets greatly over the years (as well as contributed back to them).

Maybe some day they'll migrate Hotmail back to BSD. It will probably only take one try too.

OpenSSH on Windows

[TheCount22]

It would be nice to see OpenSSH on Windows (included the in default distribution).

Microsoft opensource is your friend. Don't be afraid to use more of it!

Re: OpenSSH on Windows

[afidel]

They've already announced they want to add SSH/SCP to Windows Server 10/2016.

Re:OpenSSH on Windows

[Holi]

Already being done.

Re: OpenSSH on Windows

[whoever57]

They've already announced they want to add SSH/SCP to Windows Server 10/2016.

Without a BASH shell, GNU utilities, etc., not likely to have much impact.

Re:OpenSSH on Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

so, microsft tried to buy them but couldn't, microsft tried to join them but was rejected, so they used their last resort, donate massive amounts of money to gain influence, and its Already being done

Re: OpenSSH on Windows

[FranTaylor]

that's funny, ssh works just great on VMS and it doesn't have bash or GNU utilities or anything like that.

Re:OpenSSH on Windows

[viperidaenz]

How is $50,000 significant for Microsoft?
Gross profit last year: $67,820,000,000

In some quarters, they're making more money than Apple.

Re:OpenSSH on Windows

[FranTaylor]

donate massive amounts of money to gain influence

$50K is massive amounts of money? Maybe you could throw an excellent party or pay for getting the parking lot snowplowed but you are not going to get any sort of "influence" for chicken feed like that.

Re: OpenSSH on Windows

[tepples]

That's easy to remedy. MSYS from MinGW.org gives you Bash, GNU Coreutils, and more, with less fat than Cygwin.

Re:OpenSSH on Windows

[FranTaylor]

In some quarters, they're making more money than Apple.

yeah, but those are the fake quarters that only work in the coin-op pool tables

Re: OpenSSH on Windows

[FranTaylor]

I think perhaps Microsoft's SSH server is gonna give you a powershell prompt

Re: OpenSSH on Windows

[rastos1]

They've already announced they want to add SSH/SCP to Windows Server 10/2016.

Did they? All I saw was that PowerShell team will support and contribute to the OpenSSH community. They also said The team is in the early planning phase, and there're not exact days yet..

That is a lot of wiggle room there.

Re: OpenSSH on Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Without a BASH shell, GNU utilities, etc., not likely to have much impact on people who don't know anything about Windows but know lots about UNIX.

FTFY.

SSH is a teletype protocol, it doesn't describe the command set or capabilities of the host. SSHing into a Windows box will require you to use Windows tools, unsurprisingly.

Re: OpenSSH on Windows

[Verdatum]

Windows Powershell really isn't too shabby if you look at it objectively.

Re: OpenSSH on Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

The system OpenSSH is developed and built on doesn't come with bash or GNU utilities either (although ports are available).

Does the "57" in "whoever57" refer to your IQ?

Re: OpenSSH on Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

So you'll be wanting the GNU tools, then.

Re: OpenSSH on Windows

[x0n]

Why the hell would I want to try to manage Windows - with its configuration management based on APIs (WMI, CIM etc.) - with a shell and tools designed to manage Unix, where configuration management is based around text files? SSH is a protocol for remoting a terminal. PowerShell is a terminal (console text mode) application. PowerShell is designed to manage Windows. Bash is a terrible shell for managing Windows. Just because I love my tennis racket doesn't mean I'm going to start using it to play soccer...

Re: OpenSSH on Windows

[whoever57]

Why the hell would I want to try to manage Windows - with its configuration management based on APIs (WMI, CIM etc.) - with a shell and tools designed to manage Unix, where configuration management is based around text files?

This needs to appeal to Unix users -- Why would experienced Windows users want SSH when Powershell can be used to manage remote computers?

Firstly, I would imagine that a combination of Powershell utilities and coreutils would be very effective. Secondly, not everything is about configuration management. I use cygwin extensively in my job, running a BASH shell and using many of the coreutils to start, run and analyze processes.

Please stop Patent Lawsuites

[martiniturbide]

....why don't also stop trolling with their patents the companies that uses Android. http://www.zdnet.com/article/m...

Re:Please stop Patent Lawsuites

[FranTaylor]

maybe we could avoid all evil corporations by cowering in the closet

have you done ethical investigations of your grocer? his supplier? how about the kid who mows your lawn? what about the people you buy gasoline from? do they pass your ethical test?

Re:Please stop Patent Lawsuites

[IRWolfie-]

So we should just ignore patent abuse by large corporations because we haven't investigated our grocers. That's the gist of your comment?

Re:Please stop Patent Lawsuites

[squiggleslash]

I wouldn't call it trolling if it's up front, non-discriminatory, charged only to businesses that are getting revenue from Android, and based on what are sadly legitimate-in-the-legal-sense patents.

Yes, there's a good case that the patents they're using shouldn't be legal, but they are.

Re:Well isn't that nice.

[Anonymous Coward]

The OpenBSD Foundation is a seperate fund raising entity for OpenBSD

And?

[nyet]

Not a dime to the FSF or EFF

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenBSD made code that is good for the world.
That includes Microsoft.

The FSF/EFF favor the GPL which causes code to only be good for people who are willing to take their side.

Funny, what Microsoft is doing: giving a token amount of money as a thank you for people who did some good that Microsoft is going to be able to benefit from.

How many dimes have you given to your arch-rival/enemies today?

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

The enemy of your enemy is your friend.

OpenSSH is awesome anyway. I've donated to their project in the past too. Everyone should. Consider how many of us have actually used it.

I'm sick of the FSF and Linux and Firefox whining about their donations and fanboys complaining. They have TONS OF MONEY. OpenBSD does not. Most of the BSDs do not (FreeBSD gets a pretty good yearly donation pool)

I run a small project and over the lifetime of the project, I've made about $600 with hardware and monetary donations as well as ad revenue. That's it. I pay $130 a month just to run the servers, donated countless hours of development time and thousands into computer hardware. I'm not expecting a fat check, but I sure don't want to see open source groups who actually get a lot of money bitching either.

Re:And?

[Trepidity]

Microsoft's a member of the Entertainment Software Association, which doesn't get along with the EFF very well, making it pretty unlikely they'd donate to the EFF.

Re:And?

[viperidaenz]

Perhaps your small project isn't worth that much.

Re:And?

[petermgreen]

MS is a buisness built on propietary software. The FSF belives propietary software is unethical. MS donating to the FSF would be like an abortion clinic donating to a "pro life" organisation.

Re:And?

[FranTaylor]

Microsoft is making billions and billions of dollars every year selling licenses for linux/android, they should be sending big checks to the FSF. Without the FSF and their license, Microsoft would not be making that money, because linux would not have happened.

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

I help BSD regularly too but be fucked if I would ever give a cent to the cunts in FSF or EFF.

Re:Well isn't that nice.

[the_B0fh]

You are just one of those fucking assholes who like to shit all over people. If Theo was willing to give up the $2million DoD grant because he wanted to speak up about the Iraqi war, he sure as hell isn't going to be influenced by $50k.

Assholes like you are what give ACs a bad name.

They so poor

[Anonymous Coward]

It's sad that $50K is a "Gold" contribution.

As Microsoft also announced this week that it wrote off $7.2billion and is laying off 7K+ employees (~$1billion of savings per year). $50K is, in that context, not nothing, but also not even rounding error.

To be honest, I'm not sure which of them is poor. I do know I'd sleep better at night running OpenBSD servers than Windows ones, even though I imagine there are more eyeballs on windows code than on OpenBSD.

Re:They so poor

[FranTaylor]

Microsoft is the number one vendor of BSD applications, for sure they want a healthy BSD infrastructure. They make quite a bit of money selling Office products on OSX.

Re:They so poor

[TheRaven64]

It's sad that $50K is a "Gold" contribution

It sounds like they're expecting lots of large donors. For the FreeBSD Foundation, it would count as Platinum. Gold is $25,000-$49,999. The rates were set when the Foundation was new and getting anyone to donate more than a few hundred dollars was hard. They've had to add Platinum, Iridium and Uranium on top of that (a few years ago, a company - NetApp, I think, but I could be wrong - donated on the condition that they were able to say that they were the only donor in the top category, so had a category made specially for them, with the threshold set at double the largest donation from the previous year. They've since had to share the top spot, so it's been good for the Foundation).

The Linux Foundation gets much bigger donations by effectively selling access to senior developers. If you want someone in your company to have face-to-face time with Linus, then you have to add a lot of zeros to the end of your donation (and good luck getting your code into mainline Linux if you haven't done this). The BSDs run their developer summits as a meritocracy, so any contributors can attend, even if they haven't paid anything.

Re:They so poor

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a bit of a stretch...

Re:They so poor

[Anonymous Coward]

Please fix your misconceptions.

About friggin time

[Anonymous Coward]

I did not hear about the original post that Microsoft was finally including SSH into the platform. This is a huge win for security conscious corporate IT folks who have to fend off the mess that is PuTTy and in particular the completely insecure and undependable way of downloading its binaries. Too many times have I seen people downloading a virus laden version of PuTTy because they thought they were getting the official PuTTy.

I don't see tunneling in their APIs yet though. Hopefully that is there or is coming soon.

Bravo Microsoft. And Keep up the good work OpenBSD dudes.

Microsoft loves Unix

[FranTaylor]

Microsoft at one point was the #1 vendor of Unix software. They wrote the Unix for a Radio Shack system that was the #1 selling Unix system in the whole world at the time.

Microsoft inherited a huge BSD infrastructure when they bought Skype, they maintained it for years.

Microsoft is the #1 vendor of software for the #1 selling Unix system in the whole world, OSX.

Re:Microsoft loves Unix

[AJWM]

"They ported the Unix for a Radio Shack system"

FTFY

Xenix was based on a source license from AT&T (the original, not the renamed Southern Bell) of Bell Labs' Version 7 Unix. Microsoft also made Xenix ports available for a number of other systems.

Plenty of other companies also made licensed ports of V7, which they couldn't call Unix (or UNIX) because AT&T wouldn't license the trademark. For example, Amdahl made UTS which ran on their IBM 370 clones (as well as on IBM hardware).

Re:Microsoft loves Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft inherited a huge BSD infrastructure when they bought Skype, they maintained it for years.

You must be confusing Skype with Hotmail. Skype's back end has always been and continues to be Linux. Hotmail was FreeBSD before being converted to Windows Server.

Re:Microsoft loves Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft inherited a huge BSD infrastructure when they bought Skype, they maintained it for years.

/quote>

But it doesn't run on BSD anymore which you even admit so. That is not a company what a company that LOVES BSD does.

Re:Microsoft loves Unix

[TheRaven64]

It was Hotmail, not Skype, and it ran on FreeBSD for a few years after the acquisition. Microsoft was, apparently, fairly happy with it, but it coincided with their attempts to push Windows NT into the server space and their customers kept asking 'If Windows NT is so good, why do you use UNIX to serve Hotmail?' THey tried to migrate to NT4 and it was a complete disaster, which was what led to a lot of the features in Windows 2000 Server. They successfully migrated it to 2000.

Re:Microsoft loves Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft at one point was the #1 vendor of Unix software.

https://www.google.com/#q=bsd+release+date

1977

https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en#hl=en&q=windows+3+release+date

1992

So what your crafty ass and misleading first assertion actually was: a focus on vendor. VENDOR. vendor. Not Windows was designed so well it was #1.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution
Source model Historically closed source, gradual transition to free software from 1991 on.
Initial release 1977; 38 years ago

They wrote the Unix for a Radio Shack system that was the #1 selling Unix system in the whole world at the time.

#1 OF THOSE THAT WERE FOR SALE. Only if you intentionally clarify it was #1 are you being honest.

Microsoft inherited a huge BSD infrastructure when they bought Skype, they maintained it for years.

This was not out of steadfast dedication to the BSD infrastructure. It was simply, look at the attraction of buying the #1 cam software and having the sucker-customer-supplied-funds to buy it.

Microsoft is the #1 vendor of software for the #1 selling Unix system in the whole world, OSX.

Here you make it irrefutable that your "#1 vendor of software", as you put it, is written intentionally to give a false impression that Windows is great and #1.

To mod it insightful, when your subject is "Microsoft loves Unix" just means you have some PR fatsos with slashdot accounts for reputation management.

G. T. F. O. with some lies. captcha: distort

10 LET M$ = "Microsoft"

[tepples]

Slashdot comment subjects are limited to 50 characters. Microsoft sells Visual Basic, which is the descendant of a language in which string variable names ended with a dollar sign: A$ or B$ or M$. Until these facts change, I'll keep referring to Microsoft as M$ in comment subjects. Think of it as variable interpolation analogous to "thank $DEITY".

Xenix and SCO

[tepples]

Microsoft at one point was the #1 vendor of Unix software. They wrote the Unix for a Radio Shack system that was the #1 selling Unix system in the whole world at the time.

Apparently that was Xenix for the TRS-80 Model 16. I seem to remember Microsoft selling Xenix to SCO, with a lot of the code filtering into what became SCO OpenServer.

Re:Xenix and SCO

[FranTaylor]

I seem to remember Microsoft selling Xenix to SCO, with a lot of the code filtering into what became SCO OpenServer.

The copious Microsoft copyright notices that are printed out when you log into a SCO system should be your clue. Or maybe the Microsoft copyright notice that is printed when you run the SCO C compiler? If you've ever actually used SCO, you know where it came from.

It's all an evil plot to cross-breed

[Ukab the Great]

Theo's masturbating monkeys with Bill Gates winged monkeys to produce monkeys who can both simultaneously fly and masturbate. No alternative operating system or newly washed car will be safe.

Re:It's all an evil plot to cross-breed

[styrotech]

It's all an evil plot to cross-breed Theo's masturbating monkeys with Bill Gates winged monkeys to produce monkeys who can both simultaneously fly and masturbate.

The last time they tried cross-breeding anything with Bill's winged monkeys they ended up with gargoyles that looked a lot like Steve Ballmer.

Of course Steve Ballmer himself was an earlier result of cross-breeding Mr Blobby and Uncle Fester.

Ouch & what _is_ "gold level?"

[Anonymous Coward]

This hurts.

I have been funding OpenBSD since 2000 and have had a recurring donation going monthly to them for a few years (though not continuously since 2000).

My fist instinct is, "oh, fuck you," and I'm going to match the donation.

Then I rationally think about my limitations and whose purse I'm measuring my meager dick against. That's pathetic and humbling.

And then those emotions give way to anger. If only I had victimized more people and worked harder to hold back the state of the art and retard the progress of software in the 1990s, I could have made more money and put it to good use today. What the fuck was I thinking by not being more evil? Think of the good I could do!

(All you have to do is shred ten puppies while they're still living and yelping in pain, and you can save a puppy. Poor puppy! Save the cute little loving doggy!)

But that's beside the point, almost an excuse, and I have .. a .. negative attitude about excuses. Anyway, though, I did look, and didn't immediately find the answer I sought: how much is "gold level?" I don't see a number. And I think I need to see a number.

How many dollars are we talking about? My dick can't compete with Microsoft, but when it comes to OpenBSD funding and who cares more .. maybe? Fuck. Give me a fucking number.

Re:Ouch & what _is_ "gold level?"

[shking]

You didn't look very hard for that number. It took me less than a minute. Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum and Iridium amounts (and donors) are found here http://www.openbsdfoundation.o...

Significant donation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is $50,000 all that significant? That'll pay one person's wage for a year and it's tax-deductable for MS.

Gold: $25,000 to $50,000

[Anonymous Coward]

Check the values: even an intern at Microsoft makes more than this donation..

http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html

This is pocket change for them, considering their 86 billion revenue...

Note to editor: get the numbers before posting tabloid-like stories...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Yeah, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

The linux developers have collectively donated the value of Linux, (roughly estimated at $10.8 billion), to the community.

Sure, but when you factor in the negative value of systemd, that leaves the Linux community seriously in arrears ... a negative balance on the order of the United States debt. Good luck clearing that tab.

Enemy of my enemy...

[funkymonkjay]

This is probably a case of MS trying desperately to subvert the rise of linux by promoting fragmentation and confusion in the market.
I hope I am wrong. I hope this is just another milestone in their valiant pivoting efforts and not something nefarious.
If I am really hopeful, I would love to see a future OpenBSD version with a solid windows like GUI and vast driver support.

Thank you!

[Anonymous Coward]

A simple "thank you" will do.

I'm not exactly an MSFT lover - stopped using their OS in 2007 and haven't touched anything from Apple since before that time.

They want to use openssh and they see a need to donate to help that happen. Be it $10 or $5M - "thank you" is all we own them.

It won't change the BSD license and it will help make network connections to Windows more secure. Sounds like a win-win to me.

Microsoft Still Evil

[simpz]

I hate how a lot of posters on here these days criticise people for still saying MS is evil. They assume this is all ancient history.

In the last few years they have threatened to sue Android phone sellers unless they sign a licensing agreement with MS. Based on unspecified patents being infringed in the Linux kernel. The ones that have leaked out look very dubious.

Not very long ago they corrupted the ooxml standards process. We could all have been using open document formats by now.

Still can't buy from a large vendor a non-server PC without an OS.

What would it cost Bill Gates?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the time it takes to pour ten "bums" soup in a kitchen, BG makes a million. So who made the biggest CONTRIBUTION? Bill who merely passed along a piece of paper that gave other people's money to the kitchen or someone who spend a day of their limited life helping others?