Ask Slashdot: Should We Worry Microsoft Will 'Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish' Linux? (betanews.com)

BrianFagioli writes: While there is no proof that anything nefarious is afoot, it does feel like maybe the Windows-maker is hijacking the Linux movement a bit by serving distros in its store. I hope there is no "embrace, extend, and extinguish" shenanigans going on.

Just yesterday, we reported that Kali Linux was in the Microsoft Store for Windows 10. That was big news, but it was not particularly significant in the grand scheme, as Kali is not very well known. Today, there is some undeniably huge news -- Debian is joining SUSE, Ubuntu, and Kali in the Microsoft Store. Should the Linux community be worried?

My concern lately is that Microsoft could eventually try to make the concept of running a Linux distro natively a thing of the past. Whether or not that is the company's intention is unknown. The Windows maker gives no reason to suspect evil plans, other than past negative comments about Linux and open source. For instance, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer once called Linux "cancer" -- seriously.

Comments

extend? how?

[ooloorie]

Today, there is some undeniably huge news -- Debian is joining SUSE, Ubuntu, and Kali in the Microsoft Store. Should the Linux community be worried?

How is Microsoft "extending" Linux when a bunch of Linux vendors provide their own distributions in the Linux store? Furthermore, the Microsoft subsystem for Linux does little more than what Docker on Windows already provides.

Linux is the industry standard for software development, containers, server and compute applications; it has won. The Linux subsystem on Windows is Microsoft's acknowledgement of that fact. Microsoft Windows isn't going to infect Linux through the Linux subsystem, Linux is "embracing and extending" Windows, and this is just going to help make Windows-proprietary features more and more irrelevant.

They're not interested in Linux per se

[ErichTheRed]

Microsoft doesn't care what you run anymore...as long as you run it on their hardware and pay them every month for the rest of your life. Their strategy is to get everyone possible onto a monthly subscription, and Office 365 is the first step for most organizations. Once you have that, then you take over the company's identity management with Azure AD, first with cloud-only IDs, then synchronization and then with full-blown ADFS. This gives them a very solid foothold to move the company's computing resources into Azure, giving Microsoft the lock-in they want.

It's actually a good strategy...since they can't sell boxed products anymore, they're trying to control the entire market by controlling where you run stuff, not what you run on it. I'm guessing there might even be a day where they decide to drop Windows once the revenues from Azure and Office 365 get high enough.

MS is making big cash from Linux... why kill it?

[ctilsie242]

Microsoft is making money hand over fist from Android/Linux patents. Why would they want to kill Linux, because they get two billion dollars a year from the operating system at the minimum? Two billion may not be much compared to the 90 billion/year a year total revenue, but it is still something.

Of course, they would love to control the OS, but as it stands right now, they are better off making it interoperable than continuing to fight it, Halloween Memo style. Especially if they can start getting their management tools to work well on the platform, which brings another revenue stream.

Linux in a Microsoft future.

[murph]

I don't think that Microsoft wants to extinguish Linux. In my opinion, the new "Microsoft Loves Linux" future looks like this:

Linux VMs running under Azure (Microsoft gets paid)
Linux running under Windows (Microsoft gets paid)
Android (Microsoft gets paid under those questionable patent threats)

Linux won't be extinguished, it will live on under Microsoft's guidance, as they get paid handsomely for it.