Microsoft Joins the Linux Foundation (techcrunch.com)

Microsoft today said it is joining the Linux Foundation as a high-paying Platinum member. Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin said, "This may come as a surprise to you, but they were not big fans," describing the two's previous relationship. From a report on TechCrunch: The new Microsoft under CEO Satya Nadella, however, is singing a very different tune. Today's Microsoft is one of the biggest open source contributors around. Over the course of just the last few years, it has essentially built Canonical's Ubuntu distribution into Windows 10, brought SQL Server to Linux, open-sourced core parts of its .NET platform and partnered with Red Hat, SUSE and others. As Zemlin noted, Microsoft has also contributed to a number of Linux Foundation-managed projects like Node.js, OpenDaylight, the Open Container Initiative, the R Consortium and the Open API Initiative.ArsTechnica has more details.

Comments

WINE

[Anonymous Coward]

Could they maybe see their way to helping out the WINE project?

Until that happens, I'm not really going to congratulate them.

AC

Re:WINE

[Tough Love]

Do you even think Microsoft is even able to help? By example, the current situation with SMB is, when Microsoft needs to know something particularly subtle about SMB, they go ask the Samba guys. See, Microsoft never cares much about clean and transparent design, or keeping accurate historical records. Whatever they happen to cobble together by RC date is the definition of the "standard". If undocumented or partially documented APIs shifted a little, so what? You can see how this design culture might create issues with trying to run random Windows binaries from any point in that 20 year reign of chaos. To sort all that out requires real dedication to the art of fecal archaeology. Not something you're going to find a lot of in Microsoft's backbiting engineering culture, and if it does exist, it will be managed out soon.

Re:WINE

[TheRaven64]

It's a group that controls access to people who are able to push code into the mainline kernel. If you don't pay your dues, then your patches probably won't be reviewed / upstreamed, and no one will take any care to avoid making KPI / KBI changes that completely break your work.

Re:WINE

[myrdos2]

is there ANY other company you can think of that gives up market share to help a competitor?

And I suppose you have some other explanation for Windows 8 and 10?

This makes sense

[FictionPimp]

I keep saying it, MS wants out of the OS business. They want to build 'cloud' and charge you by the minute. Developing server/desktop OS is not the business they want to be in.

Re:This makes sense

[speedplane]

They want to build 'cloud' and charge you by the minute.

I have several friends at Microsoft who say the motto of the company is cloud cloud cloud. I've also spoken to people in the finance industry (e.g., big banks) who are much more receptive to putting their products on Microsoft rather than Google or AWS. Microsoft has a good shot here to take the market. They'll need a solid handle on linux servers to do that.

Caution, but optimism

[sg_oneill]

Theres good reason to be cautious, Microsoft doesnt exactly have a spotless record of playing nice with FOSS, but recent behavior , that is microsoft realising it can still make silly money selling Azure and various microsoft software packages to the linux world means that so far its been a pretty good citizen.

Now, I wonder if they'll eventually give us Office for linux. That'd make a LOT of suits happy.

Step 1

[fahrbot-bot]

Embrace

perspective

[Danathar]

This year: - Trump became president elect - The cubs win the world series...playing the INDIANS no less! - Apple stops having growth - Microsoft joins the Linux foundation If we have too many more things happen my head will explode and melt away. What's next? The discovery of real Unicorns?

Re:This does not look like a good thing.

[LVSlushdat]

Call me paranoid, but I'd NEVER allow ANY MS software on any Linux machine *I* control. Just like using Windows 10, you can't audit who/what the OS is talking to, and what its sending to the "mothership".. In the case of MS porting Office to Linux, I would have the same concerns. For all we know, they'd put the "spyware" aspects of Windows 10 into Office for Linux so they could collect everything from Linux users also. To put it bluntly, I trust MS as far as I can throw them, which, being 66 years old, isn't *very* far.. I used/supported MS products for close to 20 years as a sysadmin, but decided I was done when I retired in 2010. Now its 100% Linux on my personal systems..

Re:LF charter should ban maker of competing OSs

[kenh]

If Ubuntu were really competent they would have done the reverse which is to have Windows apps run on Linux which would have been an advantage for Ubuntu.

You understand Ubuntu GIVES AWAY their operating system, and by Microsoft including Ubuntu inside Windows desktop environments, it allows hundreds of millions of users try Ubuntu without having to wipe their disk, re-partition it, install a hypervisor (parallels, VM Ware, VirtualBox, etc.) - an obvious good thing for the Ubuntu ecosystem. It also, in the eyes of millions of users validates Linux as a usable operating system.

Running Windows applications under Linux has been done, it's called WINE, and it's kludgy and not very intuitive for casual computer users.

The Linux foundation charter should be amended to ban companies like MS who sell competing OSs.

So let's see, aside from Microsoft, that would also prevent Oracle (they sell Solaris, a Linux competitor), IBM (they sell AIX, a competitor to Linux), and many other large corporations from donating to the Linux Foundation - how exactly does preventing large donors from donating "help" the Linux Foundation?

Makes perfect sense - it's their next phase

[ErichTheRed]

Microsoft is completely done selling operating systems and software the way they were previously. Everything they're doing is 100% dedicated to getting people over to Azure, spending money by the hour forever rather than getting a one-time license payment. The company I work for is building a huge new project in Azure and it's amazing how much money Microsoft makes just by keeping data centers running on their services from failing...the bills are thousands per month and we're a tiny customer.

If they can make that much money just keeping the power and Internet flowing, why not outsource the development of operating systems to Linux? In that case joining the Linux Foundation makes sense. Windows Server 2016 is probably going to be the last "boxed" release of server software from them -- the push is to move workloads to Azure Service Fabric and rebuild everything as microservices anyway. All of their products are moving to the "Azure first" development model -- release everything to Azure first, then box it up as of a certain date and ship it to customers who want to pay for on-site licenses.

In about 10 or 15 years, Microsoft will be where IBM is now -- they will have an assured stream of perpetual revenue coming from customers who aren't locked into a particular OS, but are locked into them as a service provider. (True, you can switch cloud providers, but did I mention they're making it insanely easy for Microsoft customers to migrate in from the on-premises world?)

FUCK YOU 2016

[Thud457]

YASOTET - Yet Another Sign Of the End Times
Note that rapture index - record high 189 - 10 Oct 2016

Satan says "damn Russian hackers hacked my Nest thermostat"

And that's how Linux died

[frovingslosh]

Step 1: Join

Step 2: Destroy from within

Seriously, does no one in the Linux organization see any problem with this? Microsoft pays money (peanuts to them) and can now influence Linux? Microsoft is capable of every dirty trick in the book. They have a habit of betraying "business partners", even I.B.M. They are the people who, through a Windows "security update" modified the eeprom on my notebook's NIC so that it wouldn't work in Linux and put code in Windows so that they could reinitialize it properly. When you make a deal with the devil you're not bringing him closer to your point of view, you can only expect to sink to his level.