Microsoft Brings ChakraCore to Linux and OS X (cio.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a columnist at CIO: A few days ago I wrote about Microsoft's revival of Skype for Linux. I called it "a big deal" -- less because of Skype itself and more because it signified Microsoft's recognition that Linux is a platform worth supporting... Now the company has done it again. At Node Summit this week, Microsoft announced the availability of ChakraCore for Linux. ChakraCore is the core part of the Chakra JavaScript engine that powers Microsoft Edge and Universal Windows Platform. With this move, Microsoft is putting one of its core technologies on a competing platform. This, more than any other Linux-friendly move the company has made, is a clear departure from the Microsoft of Gates and Ballmer that used its technologies to lock users into Windows...

While Ubuntu is the primary Linux distribution that Microsoft is using to showcase its ChakraCore technologies, the company said that the support should easily translate to other modern Linux distributions.
Microsoft's blog post says the experimental implementation runs not only on x64 Linux but also on OS X.

Comments

ChakraCore is open source (MIT License)

[Cyphase]

For those who don't know, ChakraCore is open source; the code is on GitHub, under the MIT license.

https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore

Be Very Suspicous

[ytene]

Before Microsoft got their hands on Skype, the service was configured to use a central server to determine if your desired counter-party was on line, then the two end-points went through a handshake and all remaining communications were point-to-point.

After Microsoft got their hands on Skype, the initial call setup used a central server - and then the entire remainder of the conversation remains similarly routed through that central server, thereby allowing Microsoft to record the entire conversation.

Skype doesn't generate revenue, which means that the initial purchase was a loss-leader. Microsoft weren't trying to bring their own competition to market. There is nothing in the technology that they needed or wanted for their own business strategy. In other words, it's worth being very sceptical of Skype.

So why would they want to turn their attention back to the Linux client? Is it because the "bad guys" are using Linux and Microsoft want to remain in the middle of point-to-point conversations?

I'm sure that Skype is a very handy piece of software when you want to keep in touch with relatives who are miles away, but there are just too many inexplicable decisions being taken with it... What's that old saying: when something looks too good to be true, it probably is.

So their products suck and their OS is useless for

[RightwingNutjob]

real work. But for some reason, I should want to use their libraries on a system that actually is already useful for real work?

Really must be something in the water. Gnome3, Wayland, systemd, Trump, and Microsoft on Linux?