Microsoft Has Created Its Own FreeBSD (microsoft.com)

Simon Sharwood, writing for The Register: Microsoft has published its own distribution of FreeBSD 10.3 in order to make the OS available and supported in Azure. Jason Anderson, principal PM manager at Microsoft's Open Source Technology Center says Redmond "took on the work of building, testing, releasing and maintaining the image" so it could "ensure our customers have an enterprise SLA for their FreeBSD VMs running in Azure". Microsoft did so "to remove that burden" from the FreeBSD Foundation, which relies on community contributions. Redmond is not keeping its work on FreeBSD to itself: Anderson says "the majority of the investments we make at the kernel level to enable network and storage performance were up-streamed into the FreeBSD 10.3 release, so anyone who downloads a FreeBSD 10.3 image from the FreeBSD Foundation will get those investments from Microsoft built in to the OS."

Comments

Smart

[ErichTheRed]

The interesting thing is that you would never see this happen under previous leadership. Forget the Windows 10 mess, even forget Microsoft selling one-off software at all. They are absolutely committed to using Azure to become the next IBM. The reason why IBM is still alive is because they draw massive monthly revenue from the mainframe business. You don't just buy a mainframe and a z/OS license as a one-time thing. You buy the hardware, the licenses, plus a huge monthly maintenance charge, _plus_ a pay-by-the-MIPS charge to use the hardware. IBM maintains the system for you, sends minions to replace parts, gives you access to upgrades, etc. for this fee. In an environment like this, it makes perfect sense to allow customers to run whatever they want as long as they run it on Azure. Microsoft will be the toll collector for anything their customers choose to migrate there. I'm working on a big Azure migration/rebuild project, and it's so obvious that Microsoft is done pushing their own software...as long as you rent their infrastructure.

Re:Smart

[Darinbob]

The history of computing has been a fight between centralized control versus user control.
Mainframes with a priesthood (mortals are not allowed to touch the big blue iron box).
Mortal users start buying minicomputers for their own department use. A local priesthood is set up to manage access to them.
Company says that multiple department priesthoods is clumsy, so central priesthood is put in charge of all departmental minis.
Mortal users start buying microcomputers for their own office or lab use. Interns are hired to maintain and dust them.
Central priesthood sets up a standardized software licensing group, to verify that no one is using unapproved software.
PCs become more ubiquitous, even in the offices of computer illiterates.
Central priesthood demands that no one can connect to the internet unless the priesthood managers their computers.
Users start getting email on their mobile phones
Priesthood demands that monitoring services be put onto all of the phones.
The big blue iron box is no longer present but the priesthood remains.

Re:Linux users should be getting worried.

[SumDog]

Don't know why you're getting the downvotes.

I agree with you on systemd. Linux did need full process management. I do like how systemd standardized the init system and it'd be nice if there could be a simple drop-in replacement for it. Uselessd development has stopped and no one has the time to contribute anymore. The big projects are all funded by the big for-profit companies.

I use Gentoo and still love it. I don't use systemd, but it is an optional choice (like it should be). I haven't touched FreeBSD in years, but I can understand people moving that route. I might load it up at some point. I just don't have the time to invest these days and Gentoo still works great for me at work and at home.

Re:This bothers me

[crtreece]

I'm no Microsoft fan, but, they did submit their changes back upstream to FBSD. The BSD license doesn't require them to do that, but they did.

Hyperbole

[Ster]

Hi folks,

Disclaimer: I'm a FreeBSD committer.

MS has been committing various Hyper-V drivers for months. Just like VMWare does for its hypervisor.

This is less

OMG a new fork! Embrace, Extend, Extinguish!!!

and more

Here's a pre-built VM image with 10.3 + a few Hyper-V drivers that weren't backported in time for the 10.3 freeze + a few scripts to automate configuration in the Azure environment

You know, like every other cloud vendor's VM images. Nothing to see here, move along.

So, stop Hyper-Ventilating! ;-)