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Red Hat and Microsoft Partner On Azure (redhat.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Satya Nadella has made some interesting reforms to Microsoft. Today, Red Hat and Microsoft announced that they will partner to deliver Red Hat's product suite in Azure. Red Hat will also support .NET core in RHEL. Additionally, Red Hat's CloudForms product will now work with Hyper-V/Azure, RHEV, VMware, and AWS. Microsoft has certainly come a long way from the Halloween Memos. Here are Red Hat's blog post and Microsoft's blog post about the announcement
Hell just froze over.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
I'm not surprised. After all, the architecture and philosophy of Red Hat's systemd appears to be very much inspired by the architecture and philosophy of Windows. Systemd is all about one-thing-doing-everything-poorly, which has typically been the Windows approach, rather than the traditional UNIX approach of many-things-each-doing-one-thing-very-well. Systemd represents the Windowsification of Linux distributions, which have traditionally taken a much more UNIX-like approach. Bringing Windows and systemd/Linux together like this makes perfect sense, because they do complement one another due to their similarities.
Microsoft software DOES tend to be Swiss Army Knife. MS Word has THOUSANDS of menu and option items. I just right-clicked a random place on my screen and saw that Excel sorts on FONT COLOR.
Unix/Linux on the other hand, uses the "sort" program. It sorts. That's all. It doesn't do calculations, it doesn't know about fonts. It sorts, period.
Because "sort" only sorts, and "cut" only cuts, they are each good at what they do. Excel and other Microsoft software, on the other hand, has thousands of functions, they don't specialize in one thing. Much like a Swiss Army knife, which includes a dozen tools - tiny scissors, a two-inch saw, etc.
Neither is necessarily right or wrong, but of course a saw is better at sawing than a Swiss Army knife is, and a standard pair of scissors is better at scissoring than the tiny scissors included in a Swiss Army Knife. On the other hand, a Swiss Army knife is also very useful.
Systemd is a Swiss Army knife - it tries to pack everything and the kitchen sink into one multi-purpose thing. That's not inherently good or bad, it -is- Microsoft-like, not Unix-like.
At this point Lennart points out that systemd contains multiple binaries. Yeah, and a Swiss Army knife contains multiple blades.
(1) do everything poorly, but ship soon, and if you can't ship, bullshit and ship later
(2) get contracts with everyone, do whatever it takes but get the contracts, let some pirate your stuff if they want to just as long as they're running it so maybe they can buy something later
(3) stay in business. profit where you can, funnel the cash into places where you can't profit yet
whereas Apple is
(1) sell luxury products
(2) people who buy Apples do it to supplement their image, and defend the Apple brand in all forums in order to make themselves look good
(3) profit. lots and lots of profit.
and Linux is
(1) make cool stuff
(2) people use it and extend it. Developer users, professional and hobbyist, rave about how nice it is, because they feel a sense of shared ownership of the code
(3) The best extensions are added to the base, in small pieces that each do one thing really well
Cue the comments about angry people switching from RedHat to another Linux distro.
I switched years ago. I'm not angry, but redhat just fell behind in being good for what I wanted.
From what I remember, of digging through the init scripts, it's not surprising that systemd came out of Redhat. A good part of it is meant to speed up booting. Certainly back then, the people at RedHat coldn't write shell scripts for crap. The boot scripts were terrible convoluted messes. No wonder it booted slowly.
I actually cleaned up the X11 start script hugely, because one of the features I wanted was actually completely unreachable after they'd essentially rewritten it 3 times from 5 to 5.2 to 6, and then concatenated all 3 versions. I submitted a bug report and patch which went into a black hole.
I don't see any pressing reason to switch back to redhat any time soon.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
And after three decades of Microsoft earning zero trust I think I'll continue to take a pass. ...And remain skeptical.
I would add Red Hat has come a long way too. Away from the free software community on which they were built. Forcing systemd down our throats. They are no better than Micro$oft. There was a time when such a collaboration would have been unthinkable.
A single binary blob, accessible of course by APIs, mostly APIs written for desktop operating systems, for all of your system config needs!
Oh, come on, I am all for blowing the whistle and all, but do you really have to come out and reveal all their plans? You are not fun.
And you forgot one very important point: systemd-nsakey, for all your law enforcement needs!!
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
We're in the middle of the planning for the Windows 7 to 10 transition, and 2008 R2 to 2016, so we're getting plenty of face time with the premier support guys. The message is abundantly clear -- Microsoft is done selling one-off licensed software. Everything is going to be Azure based in their mind, and on-premises installations of software are the exception now. Server 2016 has so many Azure hooks that it might as well not have been released as a standalone product. Windows 10's updating model relegates stable releases to a much more minority position than they were in the past...it requires an Enterprise Agreement/Software Assurance to deploy Windows 10 LTSB and avoid constant cumulative upgrades.
In an environment like this, where they're moving back to mainframe style custodial IT service models, why wouldn't they partner with Red Hat or any other OS vendor for that matter? They want companies to move everything into Azure, not leave some bits hanging out on-premises or with another cloud provider. The Windows vs. Linux wars are cooling off because vendors sense the juicy returns in the cloud. Why sell software once when you can force businesses to pay over and over again for decades to use your resources/products? I've said before that both Amazon and Microsoft are building their clouds on the backs of Bubble 2.0, so funding is plentiful and therefore prices are incredibly cheap. The thing to watch will be when the bubble bursts, and a duopoly exists...will those low prices continue?