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Microsoft Releases Skype As a Snap For Linux (betanews.com)
BrianFagioli writes: While Microsoft has long been viewed as an enemy of the Linux community -- and it still is by some -- the company has actually transformed into an open source champion. One of Microsoft's biggest Linux contributions, however, is Skype -- the wildly popular communication software. By offering that program to desktop Linux users, Microsoft enables them to easily communicate with friends and family that aren't on Linux, thanks to its cross-platform support. Today, Microsoft further embraces Linux by releasing Skype as a Snap. This comes after two other very popular apps became available in Snap form -- Spotify and Slack.
"Skype is used by millions of users globally to make free video and voice calls, send files, video and instant messages and to share both special occasions and everyday moments with the people who matter most. Skype has turned to snaps to ensure its users on Linux, are automatically delivered to its latest versionupon release. And with snaps' roll-back feature, whereby applications can revert back to the previous working version in the event of a bug, Skype's developers can ensure a seamless user experience," says Canonical.
"Skype is used by millions of users globally to make free video and voice calls, send files, video and instant messages and to share both special occasions and everyday moments with the people who matter most. Skype has turned to snaps to ensure its users on Linux, are automatically delivered to its latest versionupon release. And with snaps' roll-back feature, whereby applications can revert back to the previous working version in the event of a bug, Skype's developers can ensure a seamless user experience," says Canonical.
Skype is a "wildly popular communication software" in the same way that chlamydia is a "wildly popular" STI. Sometimes numbers alone don't tell the whole story ...
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"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." -- George Carlin
"While Microsoft has long been viewed as an enemy of the Linux community -- and it still is by some -- the company has actually transformed into an open source champion."
Wow! Is that straight from the MS marketing slime?
What makes them "safe to run"? Is the software that they run in the container open source and can be inspected? If not, how do you know it is "safe to run"?
Really? So shere is the source code for this "snap"? In fact:
In fact, to the extent Microsoft champions "open source", this open-source is about taking advantage of source code released by others without Microsoft releasing any of its own. When I see Microsoft releasing source code under a free license (say BSD) for a significant program originally created by Microsoft (Skype, their web browser) I will believe them.
In fact, this is Microsoft trying to support a dangerous undercurrent in the Linux world of walled gardens and insecure vendor-controlled installations.
If something is wrong in libc, libm, or libgtk Microsoft should get it fixed upstream, not ship their own incompatible version. Do you really trust them to backport every future bugfix after their fork?
Exacly what I'm feel about all those new package systems.
So workarounds, like the various Linux package managers, were created to try to handle the complex dependencies between applications and their shared libraries. This is effectively a complex form of static linking, done by keeping shared library versions consistent with the installed applications.
When that proved to be problematic, such as when there were different applications that depended on different versions of the same shared library, we started seeing a move toward this "containerization" nonsense. There are different approaches used, but again they all have one thing in common: they're a complex way of imitating static linking.
Here's the thing though... That wasn't problematic. We have perfectly good Linux distros that provide perfectly good platforms using dynamic linking. We have them at varying levels of stability and long term support: RHEL and its derivatives if you need Enterprise ABI guarantees so that you *don't* ever have a chance of shared library incompatibilities on the platform, and Fedora if you want more frequent updates, although with ABI stability mostly guaranteed within a given annual OS release.
These two OS's work fine. Yes, there were dependency problems initially, but yum and apt-get solved resolution issues DECADES ago. The only people who complain about dependency hell nowadays are those who don't understand that some things change and some things stay the same, and that you ideally will recompile for a new OS release.
In short, the people who don't understand this are Windows Developers and Java Developers.
They have no idea how shared libraries work on Linux, have little or no understanding of package management generally (Literally the only people who complain about 'dependency hell' are those trying to use RPM/dpkg to do YUM/apt-get's job.), or are trying to iterate with ABI breakage every 3 weeks like a generic Silicon Valley d-bag.
Statically compiling everything, adding three layers of virtualization nonsense, putting out 500MB .jar files, or live-including left-pad npm, because you don't know how packaging works is the epitome of the current industry approach. And it sucks for everyone else trying to keep some sanity in the mix.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,