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Richard Stallman vs. Canonical's CEO: 'Will Microsoft Love Linux to Death?' (techrepublic.com)
TechRepublic got different answers about Microsoft's new enthusiasm for Linux from Canonical's founder and CEO Mark Shuttleworth, and from Richard Stallman. Stallman "believes that Microsoft's decision to build a Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) amounts to an attempt to extinguish software that users are free to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve."
"It certainly looks that way. But it won't be so easy to extinguish us, because our reasons for using and advancing free software are not limited to practical convenience," he said. "We want freedom. As a way to use computers in freedom, Windows is a non-starter..." Stallman remains adamant that the WSL can only help entrench the dominance of proprietary software like Windows, and undermine the use of free software. "That doesn't advance the cause of free software, not one bit," he says... "The aim of the free software movement is to free users from freedom-denying proprietary programs and systems, such as Windows. Making a non-free system, such as Windows or MacOS or iOS or ChromeOS or Android, more convenient is a step backward in the campaign for freedom..."
For Shuttleworth, Windows' embrace of GNU/Linux is a net positive for open-source software as a whole. "It's not like Microsoft is stealing our toys, it's more that we're sharing them with Microsoft in order to give everyone the best possible experience," he says. "WSL provides users who are well versed in the Windows environment with greater choice and flexibility, while also opening up a whole new potential user base for the open source platform..." Today Shuttleworth takes Microsoft's newfound enthusiasm for GNU/Linux at face value, and says the company has a different ethos to that of the 1990s, a fresh perspective that benefits Microsoft as much as it does open-source software. "Microsoft is a different company now, with a much more balanced view of open and competitive platforms on multiple fronts," he says. "They do a tremendous amount of engineering specifically to accommodate open platforms like Ubuntu on Azure and Hyper-V, and this work is being done in that spirit."
The article also points out that Microsoft "does seem to be laying the groundwork for WSL to extend what's possible using a single GNU/Linux distro today, for instance, letting the user chain together commands from different GNU/Linux distros with those from Windows."
For Shuttleworth, Windows' embrace of GNU/Linux is a net positive for open-source software as a whole. "It's not like Microsoft is stealing our toys, it's more that we're sharing them with Microsoft in order to give everyone the best possible experience," he says. "WSL provides users who are well versed in the Windows environment with greater choice and flexibility, while also opening up a whole new potential user base for the open source platform..." Today Shuttleworth takes Microsoft's newfound enthusiasm for GNU/Linux at face value, and says the company has a different ethos to that of the 1990s, a fresh perspective that benefits Microsoft as much as it does open-source software. "Microsoft is a different company now, with a much more balanced view of open and competitive platforms on multiple fronts," he says. "They do a tremendous amount of engineering specifically to accommodate open platforms like Ubuntu on Azure and Hyper-V, and this work is being done in that spirit."
The article also points out that Microsoft "does seem to be laying the groundwork for WSL to extend what's possible using a single GNU/Linux distro today, for instance, letting the user chain together commands from different GNU/Linux distros with those from Windows."
Microsoft used in Windows 8/10, I do not trust ANYTHING they say. I must view anything and everything they do now as EVIL.
Shuttleworth's optimism seems naive. "Embrace and Extend" has been Microsoft's mantra for how many years?
MS whats linux user to stop dual booting and just use Linux within windows 10 so they can data mine. Microsoft cannot be trusted..ever
Jack of all trades,master of none
MS is probably trying to do as Stallman says but I think they will fail. They may "love" Canonical and Ubuntu to death but Linux will continue.
Right now I'm burning in a new laptop for about a month with Win 10 before putting Linux on it and it is very frustrating as so many of the things I do on Linux have less convenient ways to do them on Windows even with the Windows version of the same program I use on Linux.
By persuading people to run free software under MS Windows, Microsoft gets the ability to subject it to its spyware (sorry, I meant to say: telemetry) and upload the results of key-logging & other snooping that it could not do on a native Linux system.
Has anyone actually verified what MS claims is uploaded ? Do we know who MS shares this information with ?
FTFA :-
Shuttleworth takes Microsoft's newfound enthusiasm for GNU/Linux at face value
Then Shuttleworth is a fool.
[Shuttleworth] says the company has a different ethos to that of the 1990s, a fresh perspective
Indeed : tech has moved on and they have found new ways of screwing the user and new ways of spinning it. This is the company that rammed Win10 spyware down users' throats.
The parent commenter apparently meant to say, starting at the title: "Thanks to the Spyware and tactics... Microsoft used in Windows 8/10, I do not trust ANYTHING they say."
Others agree. Here is a Network World article: Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made. Quote from that story: "Buried in the service agreement is permission to poke through everything on your PC."
If Microsoft had paid ad agencies a billion dollars to convince the public that Microsoft cannot be trusted, the ads would not have been as effective as the abuse of including spyware. My opinion, shared by many others.
From what I've seen over the years, Stallman is usually right about everything and Shuttleworth is usually wrong.
Look, M$ has root. They can add/remove whatever they want whenever they want. Through good faith you trust updates to deliver exactly what they say they do, and I've heard about future or present updates without descriptions in them for what they do? Have they dropped those change-logs yet or not?
And if your system can be connected to you somehow (google about what info M$ collects on your HW) then, as RMS once said, paraphrasing, they could deliver customized software just for you!
If you don't think your precious *nix on another partition can't be rooted by M$, think again. Also think about other programs you've installed. Most are black boxes and cannot be trusted, just like the OS.
I hope your Linux partition(s) are encrypted, at least.
Then I suspect that you paid little attention to the "OOXML" fiasco at IEEE. An API was published to allow Microsoft to claim compliance to a published API, an API which is defined to be inconsistent with itself and which evne Microsoft does not follow. The political reason was to allow Microsoft to claim compatibility with open standards for government software contracts.
The situation was handled in political, not technological fashion, to approve a standard over the direct objections of numerous technologically astute IEEE members. The result is that Microsoft continues _not_ to follow standards in its consistently re-proprietized software with every Microsoft Office release.
My Linux system can do line breaks though!
And I can use boldface rather than yelling, too! (Yes, you are an idiot)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I'm not sure who he is referring to when he says "we", when I use Linux it is because it does a particular task better than Windows does, for example controlling the machine remotely. And when I use Windows or macOS it is because it runs the programs I need to run to do a particular task. I'm a Linux user and Windows user and a macOS user, I'm not choosing a tool for a job based on the professed ideology of some of its contributors.
There is some merit to the idea that you shouldn't carry a smartphone, you shouldn't communicate over unencrypted channels, you shouldnt use hardware or software that you don't understand or haven't had vetted by somebody you trust that does understand it, you shouldn't use traceable electronic payment mechanisms, etc but it really isn't practical to take a religious absolutist approach to it so along the way people make compromises, some more than others, but in the general sense if you compromise one you compromise all. For example if you use any reasonably modern Intel or AMD processor it has a remote access backdoor which can theoretically compromise your whole system.
So I do understand Stallman's point that you could be compromised by a malicious actor with sufficient enough resources but is there really any practical scenario where you can be confident that can't happen? I would say probably not, so where is the sweet spot of compromise between privacy/security and practicality?
Well, I agree with RMS, I will only believe Microsoft actions are genuine if Microsoft forces all proprietary blobs, drivers and firmware to be opened up under a FSF compatible license.
They're both not wrong. Microsoft's use of WSL won't further the cause of free software. But it will still benefit open source (just not Free software). Right now, the WSL arrangement makes Ubuntu the mitochondria, but one could argue it could happen the other way around. Even though it is technologically subsumed into Windows via WSL, it could be argued that it is Windows that is being co-opted by Ubuntu from a strategic standpoint.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
The only reason Linux and OSS has gotten any traction is because people ignore Stallman and do what is practical
Linux succeeded because Linus paid attention to RMS and put an appropriate license on linux.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.c...
Since its inception, Microsoft Windows NT was designed to allow environment subsystems like Win32 to present a programmatic interface to applications without being tied to implementation details inside the kernel. This allowed the NT kernel to support POSIX, OS/2 and Win32 subsystems at its initial release.
This is actually an NT subsystem, like the OS/2 subsystem. It's actually really cool engineering. Linux syscalls run through this subsystem and are translated into windows subsystems calls. This meant lots of interesting problems to figure out, like different behavior of fork. When there's no windows syscall to translate to, then the fake linux kernel has to implement the work itself
Pretty much M$ embracing Linux at this stage is a shear act of panic and desperation. They are loathsome scum, they thought of Windows anal probe 10 (because when doctors use, M$ follows you right into the proctologists surgery and now monitors that camera hooked to a Windows 10 PC right up your butt). Strictly speaking according to law, Windows 10 should be legally banned from doctors offices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... , yet it doesn't happen, why doesn't it happen, well, guess who M$ has guaranteed a back door to, yep, corrupt government agencies, hence no prosecution for a clear cut criminal act. You also have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., windows anal probe 10 again floating law by not ensuring the privacy of client lawyer discussion (both sides by law are require to be secure, guess who wants that back door), take M$ to court, when you and your lawyer have windows 10 installed, yep, uh huh, good luck with that.
It is not only evil, it is factually illegal and it is not being prosecuted, why the fuck not?!?
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Android is completely open source
Android, in a practical sense, is not Open Source. AOSP is but there is more to an Android system than that, in fact in the linked article RMS himself calls out Android as a non-free operating system:
"...Making a non-free system, such Windows or MacOS or iOS or ChromeOS or Android, more convenient is a step backward in the campaign for freedom.""
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/will-microsoft-love-linux-to-death-shuttleworth-and-stallman-on-whether-windows-10-is-free-softwares/
I've also just been reminded by some DNS work of the Microsoft extensions of SPF and their introduction of their proprietary "DKIM" records into the standard. SPF only requires DNS control and applies to a domain: DKIM requires signed keys from Microsoft.
I disagree; we should not judge the software by the person or organization that wrote or published it. We should reject the vast majority of Microsoft's software because that software is non-free (user-subjugating, proprietary) software. We can't trust any non-free software. This has nothing to do with its author. Microsoft's free software is like any other free software: we can evaluate its trustworthiness by inspecting the code, and if necessary improving the code. Then we can help ourselves by running that improved code (if it is helpful to us), and we can help our community by distributing copies of the improved code. These are the freedoms we get with free software and we should respect all computer users' software freedom regardless of the authors of that code.
Digital Citizen
On the AOSP Preparing to Build page under the heading Obtain proprietary binaries:
"AOSP cannot be used from pure source code only and requires additional hardware-related proprietary libraries to run, such as for hardware graphics acceleration."
https://source.android.com/source/building
Yes the code is there but you can't really use it in a practical sense without proprietary binaries and that's even before you get to real world uses cases of actually using Android applications that depend on the play services binary.
From a theoretical standpoint yes the Android source code in the form of AOSP is there and it is open source but in the real world nobody actually uses it that way.
Well yes but in the case of the actual system running on actual hardware it isn't open. Like I said, in a theoretical sense it could be but in a practical sense it isn't and if anything Android in general is getting less open as more and more Android applications depend on Play Services.
When you actually use an Android phone or tablet it's far from an open source system, there's some open source bits in between but really if what you want is confidence that you control the computer and it isn't spying on you then you aren't getting that with an Android device.
Exception that proves the rule..
Stallman: Mmm, this thing that I just picked off of my foot is delicious.
Shuttleworth. Eww, gross! I'm going to throw up...
Have you tried it?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"