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Will Linux Innovation Be Driven By Microsoft? (infoworld.com)
Adobe's VP of Mobile (and a former intellectual property lawyer) sees "a very possible future where Microsoft doesn't merely accept a peaceful coexistence with Linux, but instead enthusiastically embraces it as a key to its future," noting Microsoft's many Linux kernel developers and arguing it's already innovating around Linux -- especially in the cloud. An anonymous reader quotes InfoWorld:
Even seemingly pedestrian work -- like making Docker containers work for Windows, not merely Linux -- is a big deal for enterprises that don't want open source politics infesting their IT. Or how about Hyper-V containers, which marry the high density of containers to the isolation of traditional VMs? That's a really big deal...
Microsoft has started hiring Linux kernel developers like Matthew Wilcox, Paul Shilovsky, and (in mid-2016) Stephen Hemminger... Microsoft now employs 12 Linux kernel contributors. As for what these engineers are doing, Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman says, "Microsoft now has developers contributing to various core areas of the kernel (memory management, core data structures, networking infrastructure), the CIFS filesystem, and of course many contributions to make Linux work better on its Hyper-V systems." In sum, the Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin declares, "It is accurate to say they are a core contributor," with the likelihood that Hemminger's and others' contributions will move Microsoft out of the kernel contribution basement into the upper echelons.
The article concludes that "Pigs, in other words, do fly. Microsoft, while maintaining its commitment to Windows, has made the necessary steps to not merely run on Linux but to help shape the future of Linux."
Microsoft has started hiring Linux kernel developers like Matthew Wilcox, Paul Shilovsky, and (in mid-2016) Stephen Hemminger... Microsoft now employs 12 Linux kernel contributors. As for what these engineers are doing, Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman says, "Microsoft now has developers contributing to various core areas of the kernel (memory management, core data structures, networking infrastructure), the CIFS filesystem, and of course many contributions to make Linux work better on its Hyper-V systems." In sum, the Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin declares, "It is accurate to say they are a core contributor," with the likelihood that Hemminger's and others' contributions will move Microsoft out of the kernel contribution basement into the upper echelons.
The article concludes that "Pigs, in other words, do fly. Microsoft, while maintaining its commitment to Windows, has made the necessary steps to not merely run on Linux but to help shape the future of Linux."
You know the drill.
MS has backed up it's words with c#, .net core, Microsoft code editor, SQL server, and Git VFS all ported to Linux. Also Ubuntu for Windows 10 is coming along nicely as well.
Competition is good and since it's now the 2010s I hope most slashdoters realize as Microsoft's new CEO realized. That the 1990s are over.
I feel MS is really worried about losing web developers which explains Ubuntu for Windows as well as Android emulators and Python into VS 2017 (no folks you did not misread that.)
Time will tell
http://saveie6.com/
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
We now have a huge rush of people conditioned in a Windows world transferring the ideas they learned there to the userspace. Ideas like complex service management, binary log files or the ability for a normal userspace program to disable system shutdown.
The result are monstrosities like ConsoleKit, Pulseaudio and SystemD.
Well, Office for Mac works.....sort of. I'm sure they'll get the bugs and interoperability worked out Real Soon Now.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Think of a peloton in the Tour de France. Think of the bizarre cathedral on magic wheels we now have rolling along. If Microsoft want to take a turn pulling the magic penguin train along, we should embrace them, welcome them in, be friends and comrades in the game of MakeTheBloodyMachineWork. We have nothing to fear from them, the can embrace us, and extend us all they like. They will never extinguish the flame of our inner penguin.
John_Chalisque
Defend them with actual arguments, I dare you.
There is no need to provide actual arguments when the original claim didn't make any arguments either. Surely the onus is on the original accuser to prove their EEE meme. The only link that your provided in your post is to an irrelevant gif about racism.
You say that Microsoft has a track record of this, but what has it actually successfully embraced, extended and extinguished? When they are contributing to an open source project (that can be forked at any time by anyone), how can they possibly extinguish the Linux kernel? We all have the access to the code.
If they extend the kernel as part of the main project those extensions are available to all, so it's not like they can only work for Microsoft customers. What evidence is there that any of the existing Linux contributions by Microsoft have any backdoors or patent traps in them, and how would it ever stand up in court if they did try to sue for patents citing the code that they submitted?
It is hard to imagine a time where MS is offering Office for Linux.
I have no problem opening up Office 365 on Linux. Before you say it's not "Office" remember that if you search Microsoft Office on any search engine or go to Office.com or go to the Microsoft store the first thing you will be greeted with is Office 365.
To say they aren't pushing a desktop version would be disingenuous, they are actively hiding it. So their "premier" Office product most definitely runs on Linux.
The result are monstrosities like ConsoleKit, Pulseaudio and SystemD.
Which developers behind those projects have come from the Windows world?
They embraced the idea ... web browsers were new then
Gave it away free
Which essentially killed Netscape, who was charging at the time
hence, Extinguish
Well "better" is not an objective thing. For Lennart, for example, "better" usually means "more complex" or "able to solve non-existent problems".
This is a certain mindset that is shaped by what you have experienced in your life. If you have used Windows before, you have never experienced the advantages of a unixoid system. For example you became accustomed to a program doing lots of things, instead of doing one thing properly and using simple interfaces to interface with other programs. Interprocess communication does exist on Windows, but it's highly complex so few programs actually implement it, making it fairly useless. You cannot just combine 2 programs without the creators having foreseen that option on Windows... while in an unixoid world you can do that easily.
They embraced the idea ... web browsers were new then
Gave it away free
You must hate Linux then. And OpenOffice. And Pages, Numbers and Keynote for the Mac. And... well, you get the idea.
It is not evil to make your own program and include it in your operating system. This sort of thing happens all the time. I remember shareware authors complaining when AmigaDOS added functionality that their little programs offered in an operating system update. Windows didn't originally have TCP networking stack, so a company called Trumpet sold a version. Later, this was added into Windows. Was that unreasonable? Should the operating system not have had built-in access to the Internet?
Is it unreasonable for an operating system to not have a web browser too? You would be hard-pressed to find an OS these days that doesn't have that functionality. You want to blame Microsoft for that, but perhaps you should be thanking them.
And in the case of Netscape, that was even less of an issue considering that the first browser ever written was public domain - so other browsers were free too! Also, Netscape Navigator was free for personal use. Is it that much of a stretch for make a competing browser that extends this free use to all?
Finally, this is all irrelevant because it is absolutely NOT an example of Extend, Embrace and Extinguish. You should have ignored the Extend part of the phrase, assumed that Embrace can mean just making your own version of a product (which it doesn't), and that any Extinguish is still part of it when this even when Netscape has to share the blame for making a bloated mess of a browser that required a lengthy rewrite.
Microsoft doesn't innovate, they copy.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Essentially you are saying that someone who has 14 years of experience somehow knows better than people who have 20 and more years of experience?
If you look at it, all the "greybeards" are against SystemD.
Besides, and I know this is a very weak argument, Redhat is more an "Open Source" company not really interrested in Free (as in speech) software.
What killed Netscape wasn't so much the price, but the fact that IE was included -- in fact, they claimed it was an inseparable part of Windows back then (it wasn't, someone removed the browser from Windows and it kept working). It's like every desktop/notebook being sold with Windows so that nobody really needs to think about installing a new OS (e.g., Linux).
No. What killed Netscape was that it was a bloated mess. As I said before, browsers like Chrome are having great success even though Windows comes with two browsers these days. As you said later in your post, Microsoft don't ask which browser you want to use initially, and yet it hasn't stopped the decline of their browsers' usage. What more proof do you need? If the alternatives are superior then users will find a way to download and use the software.
As for Internet Explorer being a part of Windows, it was true - despite the fact that you could remove the DLLs. You could also remove the DLLs that handle printing and the OS would still work; at least until the applications tried to print and then it would fail. Developers can rely on the print system being there. Similarly, they could also rely on Internet Explorer being there too, and call its API. When Microsoft made the version of Windows without IE for the European market, some people complained when some software stopped working.
Sorry, no, I don't get the idea. I don't know about the Mac, but on Linux, Openoffice never prevented the installation of other suites
And Microsoft never prevented the installation of any other web browser. But my point was that all those programs mentioned were free offerings that could be said to undermine commercial software's revenue. If you complain that IE was released for free, then why not also that OpenOffice performed the same functions as Microsoft Office? Should we cry for Microsoft? No,because it's simply competition.
Heck, now you are even pushed to open pdfs with Edge -- not what Firefox do, when you're browsing, but for local PDFs, too. Talk about EEE...
It defaults to Edge, but you can change this to whatever software you want. I use Sumatra. What operating system doesn't come with a default PDF reader these days? And if you think that this is EEE, tell me what software has been extended or extinguished? Once again, having competing software is not EEE.
Dude, if you were there, stop trolling as you know darn well what they did. And if you're young and wasn't there, do your homework and learn what a cutthroat Microsoft was.
I was there, and I'm not trolling. I remember installing Internet Explorer before it was ever included with Windows and found it to be a breath of fresh air compared to the bloated Netscape Navigator. Fast forward to Mozilla releasing Firefox and once again it was breath of fresh air from the stagnated IE. So just because I don't agree with your viewpoint doesn't mean that I am trolling. However quotes like this:
if you cannot kill them, join them. And kill them from inside...
...are definitely trolling because you don't provide any evidence that they are doing this nor do you say even how they could kill an open source project.
While GPL protects the kernel form a code perspective, the practical reality and ecosystem is another matter.
If they *just* did the kernels and people by and large still sourced from distributions, then in practice a move that is bad for the community *might* result in fork and Microsoft's fork dying on the vine due to distribution disinterest.
Of course they have cozied up to RedHat, and recent history has shown that RedHat gets to call the shots in practice for every distro. So in a theoretical fork of kernel for MS versus 'traditional' Linux, there is a chance that RedHat now could throw in with a hypothetical MS fork for true technical belief or profit, though as you say GPL would mitigate the risk, though the value of a legal fork is reduced if none of the popular distributions would take them up on it because no one except RedHat will confidently step up and say "we can support a kernel".
Of course, lets consider the bigger picture. Having big influence in the kernel could hypothetically be part of a bigger strategy. Let's say that MS made a pure linux distro, and that was to start a fully compatible platform with RedHat (a la CentOS), which is free but with very credible path to full support (evidence of credible support being visibly employing core kernel developers). They also release same day with RedHat, because they have technical resources to do so, more than CentOS has. For a great deal of the business world, this could easily become *the* dominant distribution, with objections being more political and future looking than techincal ("it's the same stuff, can do the same thing, and they have developers and so they can deliver the support we need, stop saying that 'EEE' FUD crap, you're paranoid and even if it were true, we are businesses and we don't care").
After being established, they can do things that most businesses would roll with. They could replace Samba with a MS originated project (some BSD-style license, for example), which would quickly take over, because who knows SMB and AD better than Microsoft right? Samba is another troublesome GPL portion, but one they could easily replace given their position in the market.
Of course this replacement along the way could highlight their own LDAP or use OpenLDAP (BSD style license) as a base rather than 389 and whatever Kerberos they see fit. Suddenly MS 'owns' identity management for enterprise use of Linux.
If they felt particularly about GUI side, they could very likely forge a desktop offering alternative to KDE and Gnome, and successfully hide away the vast majority of user facing GPL licensed software.
Once their popular and now technically distinct product is well established, they can start skipped providing source for much of the distro (after all, the ecosystem consists of a *lot* of BSD style licensed software), providing source only for the GPL portions. Ultimately, they could even replace the kernel if they felt like it (WSL is a closed source implementation of kernel interfaces, which could double as a test run of a path to make a Linux distro with a closed source kernel).
I don't particularly think their chances in embedded are high, but I could easily believe a future where they have become *the* professional Unix-like vendor though shenanigans.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
This is Microsoft we're talking about. The company that engages in behind-the-scenes extortion of Android device brands and manufacturers using their (seriously aging) VFAT patents. I'm sure they're able to say "b-but, we're the good guys now!", but in dealing with people like these one must always understand there's nothing stopping "the bad guy" from saying that as well.
On a practical level, collaboration with Microsoft causes companies to die. Look at Nokia: it never had a chance. I only hope that Red Hat lets Microsoft in balls-deep.
What part of .NET do you have to pay for?
Keeps removing all my non-Outlook.com email accounts fromthe built in email application also.