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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.
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.
Linux is way too fucking big and popular to be squashed. It isn't just used by the unwashed IT professional, but too many corporations depend on it for Microsoft to be able to hurt the project.
If Microsoft makes applications and file formats that only work on windows, everyone screams "monopoly" and "antitrust"
If Microsoft does the complete opposite, makes applications for linux and even makes linux applications work on windows, people scream "Embrace, Extend and Extinguish".
Seriously, is there something that Microsoft can do that won't be perceived as evil?
On the server side, we have systemd happily destroying the usability of server management with binary logs, opaque configuration and horrible documentation.
No, no worries: Microsoft can happily do whatever it wants. With the state of Linux, it will get no where.
If this continues, I just give up and go back to Windows, as horrible as I think Windows 10 is.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Provide a native Linux version of Visual Studio 2017. It doesn't have to be free.
Well, I mean, they have a track record of doing both of those things. So no, they can't really escape distrust and cynicism no matter what they do. Their only out is to slowly regain trust - which I think they are doing. But they dug their hole - don't feel bad that they need to work hard to scratch back out.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Microsoft once (and from their perspective quite accurately) described Linux as a cancer, eating their business. Now as a last resort, they may try to embrace the cancer. Don't think that works as a long term strategy.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
In order for the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish to happen, Microsoft would have to release a version of Linux that then gets used by most existing Linux users, enough that other distributions then give up, then Microsoft does as well.
In contrast, adding Linux to windows as an "app" is not going to do anything to the existing Linux user base.
So to answer the question...No, we do not need to worry about Microsoft damaging the future of Linux.
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.
Any moment now Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon might switch all their servers to "Windows Enterprise" edition.
I can't even read my own stuff without giggling.
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.
I can't imagine a lot of Linux users migrating to Windows just because of the Windows Subsystem for Linux. The main reason Microsoft is interested in supporting Linux is because of Azure and they quickly realized that Docker was going to leave them in the dust if they didn't provide something caparable. Since it would've taken way too long for them to create their own solution, they developed compatibility with Docker to facilitate running Linux processes on Windows. I would be more concerned about Microsoft making changes to Docker containers or the image format that only worked on Windows than any tricks they might use to co-opt Linux itself.
Overall, I just don't see Linux users migrating to Windows anytime soon, especially developers, because they already have a superior experience using Linux. I constantly have coworkers convincing me that I should migrate to Windows because then I could have the "best of both worlds" but I think they have that backwards. Linux is a superior host environment for me because of the following reasons:
- It doesn't install updates without my permission
- Updates don't change my configuration values out from under me
- Updates almost never break my system
- It doesn't install or remove apps without my permission
- It has superior window management
- It doesn't constantly need to be rebooted anytime the OS or even an app is updated
- Many development tools and runtime environments run much faster in Linux
- Many distributions don't require spying on me
There are many more reasons that I don't have time to elaborate but I just don't see this providing a good opportunity for Microsoft to ensnare Linux users, developers, or APIs. If anything, I see this as an opportunity for people to learn the value of Linux and eventually migrate away from Windows.
Microsoft has "embraced" Linux more lately but in reality it's more that they understand Linux has a place and they want to control it. What better way than have Linux running on top of a Microsoft product. Microsoft still makes some cash and allows those who want Linux to bring it in while still claiming to be a Microsoft shop. Microsoft then just sits back and determines what Linux does for those environments and then develop a replacement application for that need. Or they could in some instances simply do the old way of how Microsoft did things, acquire the product and rebrand it as Microsoft. Keep it on Linux, since they can "manage" it, and they don't have to do any major work, just let that application continue to exist rebranded...
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.
> I don't see how any one group or company could even have any significant influence on Linux
You don't? Really? Maybe you should move out of your cave.
Redhat took control of Linux years ago. In the enterprise space it's all Potteringware. That is entirely because of Redhat and their partner Microsoft.
Sure there are a few distros that the enterprise will not go near: like Slackware and Gentoo. But in government, and industry, all Linux marches to Redhat's beat.
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.
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The major performance issues that remain are with I/O.
Because even if there's no translation happenning, you're still bound to the sucky NT Kernel filesystem drivers.
Otherwise it's actually pretty good, in some cases equal to or even slightly better than bare-metal Ubuntu performance.
Keep in mind that this has mostly to do with the way multi-processing is handled :
- Windows suck at multiple processes, because creating a new context ( fork() ) is a horribly inefficient process. (Whereas on Linux, it's almost a free action thanks to CoW facilities in the virtual-memory subsystem).
- As such when running a unix software using a software translation layer (like Cygwin), multi processing will suck.
- That's why multi-threading is popular in Windows world : there's no context separation, everything is done in the came context.
- The NT kernel introduced a new concept called pico-thread which are much more light-weight than regular Windows process to setup. These aren't available in Windows, but gives a way to the NT kernel to provide extremely light-weight multi-processing to Linux ELFs.
- Multi-processing works decently well on WSL (unlike Windows native apps, or Unix apps via Cygwin).
- But if you read the technical blogs at microsoft, you'll release that the managed to achieve pico-threads by throwing away some of the context isolation of actual multiple process.
(There's a reason while picothreads aren't available for production Windows software)
- So basically in purely multiprocessing/multithreading benchmarks (e.g.: thinks running on OpenMP) WSL can even slightly beat actual real linux, because Microsoft threw a lot of safety and security out of the window. (It's great for testing software, but do not ever contemplate using WSL in production. It's only to test software before deploying on real Linux).
- When benchmarks are mostly CPU oriented (e.g.: most of the media compression tests) - most of the CPU cycles are spent running the instruction to process the data, and they are the same no matter what OS they run on (i.e.: a cygwin compiled software would run just as fast, provided it was compiled with a similar version of GCC the optimize code the same way).
- Whenever a benchmark hits any other part of the NT kernel (example: file IO) the performance just completely collapses. It doesn't matter that there's no translation going on and that the NT kernel is directly service IO request it self, when that IO code just plain sucks. A deep overhaul of the NTFS code would be the only hope for WSL to suck a tiny bit less.
(3D API in theory could be an area where performance degradation won't be as significant : some manufacturer like Intel produce better Windows drivers than Linux, and other like Nvidia re-use basically the same drivers.
But OpenGL is among the long list of Linux APIs that WSL is not supporting in its (very limited) subset).
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