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Microsoft: Confirmed purchase of Interix
Alain M. Gaudrault writes "My colleagues at Softway Systems (makers of Interix, a UNIX subsystem for NT) have dropped a major bomb on me. They're moving to Seattle (I'll miss you guys!) as part of Microsoft's buyout of the technology. See Interix for more details.For those unfamiliar with Interix, it is a UNIX95-certified platform, hence, a "real UNIX environment". Much GNU s/w has already been ported to the platform, and more is certainly to come. Microsoft wants the technology becuause it acts as an intermediate step to fully porting one's apps to Win32.
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I read a long time ago that Microsoft had signed an agreement with Xerox (or was it AT&T?) that they would not compete in the unix market. Would this be considered compitition, as they could potentially offer a unix compatible (laugh) system. If anyone has any more info about the agreement I'd love to hear it, or was it just a passing rumor?
if microsoft is trying to port unix programs to NT that could mean that they are taking the right step towards making a more stable operating system (when it comes to an NT and Unix envrionment). I remember a few years ago microsoft wouldn't touch anything that had to do with *nix. I perfect example of this is the Microsoft TCP/IP printing to *nix LPR daemons protocool(sp) was so full of trash and bugs, I had to use third party software to do anything reliably (if you can call anything reliable in NT) between my NT Server and my IRIX box when it came to printing. It wasn't until SP3 that they code was finnaly patched up. We either might see a more stable NT when it comes to and NT and *nix environment, or they are going to go all out like apple did and use a *nix/BSD core for a new operating system (probably Windows 2010). The latter possiblilty is very far fetched, but hell apple did it, and even open sourced the important parts. I know one thing is for sure. Microsoft will never open source anything... not even notepead.
The Ottawa Unix Users Group had a presentation last year by Stephen Walli, the chief architect of OpenNT (the original name of Interix product). He indicated that it worked by basically replacing the WIN32 subsystems of NT by separate code that was built on the NT HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) not Win32. This allowed Interix to bypass the inefficiencies of standard NT but run Unix software on same machine at same time as Win32 code.
If Microsoft is buying this technology, it indicates either they want to bury it or that they need the Interix efficiency to gain in the server market.
Since one of the chief complaints about NT as a server is its Win32 based complexity and lack of efficiency, I would bet on the latter. Trying to bury it would just open the market up for someone else to make software that runs Unix or Linux under NT. It is much easier to port *NIX to NT than the reverse because Unices are better defined and better partitioned. As the WINE project shows, they are lots of hidden parts of the Win32 API, and even MS probably doesn't know all the gotchas.
[humor]Well for their sake I hope they don't opensource notepad. Its their only quality non-buggy product.[/humor]
Yes, it "runs X" in the sense that you can build X applications to run in the Interix environment (although it appears its X11 environment is X11R5, not X11R6); "Interix Workstation", as opposed to "Interix Workstation Lite", comes with an X server and mwm, although the Interix FAQ says that Interix X applications should also work with other X servers on NT.
The guy who ported the GIMP to Win32 apparently wanted to do so....
I downloaded a demo of it quite some time ago, and it was quite impressive. It was called OpenNT then, though.
It essentially chucks MS's broken POSIX layer out and replaces it with a less broken one. It seemed to work OK, though it was kinda bare-bones. No decent shells. It felt sorta like being thrown back to SVR3 days. No symlink support either.
It represents quite a threat to MS though. After all, I have a choice of writing a Win32 app and only being able to deploy it on MS platforms, or I can write a UNIX/X app and deploy it using a porting layer like this product.
I think MS are out to kill the product then, and thereby reduce the number of cross-platform porting options by.
Theoretically, if Unix systems can be adapted to emulate Windows (WINE, Wabi, etc), then Windows can be extended to run Unix subprocesses (whether in a shell or subkernel), especially if the source code is widely available. Given Moore's Law and assuming a factor of 100% overhead, then you should be able to execute today's programs with comparable performance on cutting-edge processors in 2 years time (which should please certain chip-makers). An ascetic might disprove of the bloat but then storage is reducing in price even faster than CPUs. Given the shortage of human talent and that software development is the time consuming component, then it makes financial sense, even if you have to fork out thousands for a faster CPU.
... ummm (yeah) .... zealous and dedicated marketeers. The question to the wider IT community should be does Linux or Microsoft offer the best value solution in the long-term assuming it is possible to cross-port between the two?
Given two equivalent OS markets, if it is easier to port from one to the other than vice-versa, then over time the asymetric flow will benefit the lower cost solution (think game theory, think thermodynamics and the flow of heat from high to low regions). As this is a structural shift (ignoring any short-term pricing tactics), it will only become obvious in the long-term.
As others have noted, Microsoft is composed of some very smart people, savvy managers and
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