Obviously it was never meant for my department, but given the breadth of fixes, I'm wondering what kind of hell IT will catch if the Sales or Admin departments get updated and find applications broken.
As much as they deserve for putting their users in a position where they _can_ install the patches.
I've thought for some time that Microsoft should have some type of open update scheme that other vendors could participate in. As you mention so that Adobe could submit their updates to MS and that you get all your updates through Windows update.
I can't think of any reason why Windows Update couldn't do this for applications today (or even yesterday). It certainly does so for drivers.
In all likelihood the problem, as usual, lies with the application vendors.
They were the only ones with the power to forbid OEMs from installing third party software or risk losing OEM pricing for Windows.
Certainly true, but irrelevant to both my argument (that IE surpassed Navigator before Windows 98 was a factor) and your comment:
If I am selling widgets for $40 and my competition is giving away feature comparable widgets for free [...]
Where you are only comparing free vs non-free "widgets".
Of all the browsers on windows at the time of the big three IE, Netscape, and Opera two of the three charged for their browser.
And what of browsers on other platforms ?
Opera chose not to try and go toe to toe with IE and focused on non-US markets (sensible since they are located in Australia) and Netscape was simply arrogant and refused to team up with any partners (AOL tried to work with them but Netscape turned them down). Opera also managed to offer a free version but only because they worked out ad deals injecting ads in the browser itself so it wasn't really free like IE. Without Microsoft's vast capitol and other profitable properties there is no way IE would have been free given how much they spent licensing Mosaic from Spyglass [wikipedia.org] and subsequently pouring resources into it.
On the other hand, because they did, a web browser today is now ubiquitous and free like a GUI, network stack or media player. Overall, clearly, a better situation.
Netscape were in the buggy whip business. They're out of it because everyone started driving cars. No-one today is going to pay for a browser (unless they have very specific requirements) any more than they are for a text editor or a file manager.
If I am selling widgets for $40 and my competition is giving away feature comparable widgets for free who are customers going to go to for their widgets?
Not you, obviously. Much like when I want a drink of water I grab it from the drinking fountain, not the guy hawking water bottles at a few bucks a pop.
That is why Microsoft was convicted of abusing its monopoly power.
Microsoft weren't the only company giving away widgets.
Netscape, by trying to charge for a web browser, were very much out of the ordinary. They gambled that they'd be able to tie their web browser to their web server in a compelling package and therefore be able to charge big $$$ for both. They lost.
Now, many intra nets are probably already tied to Microsoft Windows in a large number of other ways so they don't see anything wrong with that - but changing the OS to a true commodity is something that people should be keeping an eye towards, even if it doesn't happen immediately.
The OS is not a "commodity" in any non-trivial environment. Once you have established knowledge, tools and processes for dealing with one OS, changing to another is a massive undertaking, regardless of whether it's Red Hat Linux to Debian, or Windows to MacOS X.
Heck, changing hardware vendors is a snap compared to changing OSes, but even that is something you'd need a damn good reason to do.
IE won over Netscape 4 because IE was the default option and Microsoft abused their desktop monopoly to bundle IE and Microsoft prevented OEMs from offering a different default browser.
IE's greatest marketshare explosion happened with IE4, before Windows 98 was released (and certainly before it had large market penetration).
At the time Netscape 4 and IE were about the same (read: full of bugs).
They were not. IE4 was (dramatically) faster and (less dramatically) more reliable. Navigator 4.x was a steaming pile for several versions after its initial release.
Weird shit, but please don't act like market forces, default browsers, and OEM constraints weren't the major factor in IE winning for a few years.
If Netscape was the better browser, then it wouldn't have been the manually installable version of IE4 that dethroned it.
I offer evidence which you slam as a straw man but offer none yourself.
OS X's performance on G4 systems is fairly well known.
The link you do provide only says the class action status was slapped down not the lawsuit itself. The "judge ruled that each PC buyer has to bring his or her own legal action in order to seek damages from Microsoft."
And have any of them been successful ?
I stand by what I said. Now if you can provide a link saying Apple was also slapped with a lawsuit, I'll evaluate it in which case I may change my mind, unlike some I do change when I am convinced I was wrong. Do you?
First I need to be convinced. Saying that OS X doesn't perform badly on slow machines because no-one has filed a lawsuit, is not a convincing argument.
Another Apple tradition gone by the wayside: Apple has long supported their older hardware better than most PC makers.
No, they don't. Even the "Pro" machines only come with a 12 month warranty, and they are notorious for suffen hardware changes without transition periods (eg: ADB to USB, no writable media on the first iMac). To say nothing of the piddling few years worth of patches and updates you get for an OS X release.
Better than PC makers ? No chance. They're not even in the same ballpark.
While the ExpressCard was dropped from the 15" and there's not one in the new 13" MacBook Pro, the 17" model still has the slot. That new 13 MBP only costs $1200 too.
That's because they just took a MacBook and slapped a "Pro" sticker on it. It "only" costs $1200 because that's about how much it cost previously.
When it came out Vista also required the latest beefed up hardware.
And by "latest beefed up hardware", you mean a somewhat above-average PC that cost less than Apple's cheapest iMac (and would have run Vista better than the iMac could have run OS X), right ?
Leopard ran fine on old Macs though, it will run on a PowerPC G4.
With a definition of "run" like that, you have no authority whatsoever to be crticising Vista's performance.
Cisco is a big VMware partner and they are not trying to compete with VMware, they are trying to become the preferred hardware platform for VMware environments.
Exactly. Also highlighted by the Nexus 1000v Virtual Switch and the awesome looking "Virtual Interface Cards" for the UCS systems.
This is what I'm wondering too. What differentiates their offering from the ton of high end rackmount vendors (Dell, IBM, HP, Sun, SGI), other than the fact that it has the Cisco logo on it?
Onboard 10Gb CNAs are probably the biggest differentiator. I don't think anyone else has the same memory capacity either.
10.3 and above run reasonably fast on G3 Macs (unless you're really short on RAM) and quite well on G4 machines.
I have an old 1Ghz G4 iBook with 1.25GB RAM in one of my desk drawers, and on that I would describe OS X as "tolerable", so long as you don't put it under anything more than a trivial load (Mail + Safari with a few tabs, Word, maybe iTunes in the background).
The idea of OS X running "well" on a G3 is, I have to say, utterly laughable. While I'll admit to having not tried it for several years, I do remember frustrating delays just opening a drop-down menu in Finder with nothing else running, and resizing a window being like watching a slide show. Fire up a few applications and the nostalgic feeling of using an early floppy-drive-only Mac was quite eerie.
I've used just about every Mac released since the mid-90s, at one time or another (it's handy to be friends with someone who sells them). The first ones that even came close to running OS X to the standard *I* would call "well" were the G5s. Even those - like my mother's 1.9Ghz/2.5GB iMac - are sluggish at times.
You may be happy with OS X's performance on a G4 (but if you are, I certainly hope you don't criticise Vista, since it will be dramatically better on any time-and-price-equivalent PC, and no worse on basically anything you can successfully install it to). Personally, I think it's irritatingly sluggish at best (dual 1Ghz+ G4s), borderline unusable at worst (anything <867Mhz).
Using a more current comparison, if I load up my wife's 2.4Ghz/2GB MBP with the same sort of workload I have on my (significantly slower - Opteron 165, 2GB RAM, triple-head) Vista PC every day, it's damn near unusable.
IMO, the measure of new softwares speed is best measured on older (6-12mo old) hardware since the older version was not written with the newer hardware in mind and the newer software was written with the old and new hardware in mind (or at least should have been).BUt I have to disagree as to your claim that the improvements in OS X were related primarily to increased Hardware performance. My 800MHZ PBG4 shipped with OS 9 and X (10.1 IIRC). It got faster with every OS update it was capable of using (Leopard requires 867MHZ or better). The Hardware didn't change at all, only the OS.
Yes, but OS X on an 800Mhz G4 is still sluggish and unresponsive. My point was that it took substantial hardware performance improvements *in addition to software improvements* before OS X was fast and responsive. The same was not true of Vista, which could run quite well on only slightly above average _contemporary_ hardware when it was released.
Or, to put it another way, Vista has less need to improve in performance, because it's just not so damn slow to start with.
That's why I brought up Vista. It's an example of newer software running slower on the same hardware thus supporting this "Page's Law"
I think you missed the (somewhat tongue in cheek) point of my first post, which was that OS X could only have gotten faster with further development, because it was so slow to start with.
Incidentally, I'm fairly sure Vista SP1 and Windows 7 are benchmarking faster than Vista did.
Of course, this whole "Page's Law" thing is a crock. Software doesn't get slower every 18 months, and certainly not by a factor of two. Software runs as fast 18 months later as the day it was released. *More functional* software may require more hardware resources but, again, that's hardly unreasonable or unexpected.
*Google's* software might get faster as times goes by, but maybe that's because they, like Apple, have initial software releases that are just incredibly poor performers they simply have no option other than to get better.
Funny you should say that, because it's an example that drives the point home so well. For all the flack Vista got about performance, on the day it was released, you could buy a PC - for less than the price of the cheapest iMac (a machine that would barely run OS X at all) - that would run it *well* (dual-core, 2GB RAM, 256MB GPU).
In contrast, it took Apple *years* after OS X 10.0 - and due at least as much to dramatically faster hardware as improved software - before it could even be described as "not slow". You quite literally could not buy hardware that OS X ran well on for _years_ after its release. It wasn't until the G5 Macs (and a few $129 OS updates) that anyone could even begin to call it "fast" with a straight face.
However, the increases from 10.2 to 10.3, and 10.3 to 10.4 were impressive in their own right because 10.2 was where the new OS X reached speed parity with OS 9, IMO.
Well, I have to disagree. OS 9 was quite quick even on paltry ~200Mhz G3s. To my standards, OS X doesn't run "fast" on anything less than a G5 (not, not even dual G4s). Even then, my Mum's 1.9Ghz/2.5GB G5 iMac can be sluggish without reason.
I'm hoping that 10.6 will be the speed boost I was expecting since they are claiming to have focused on 'under the hood' improvements (whatever that really means).
It means they're modifying it to make better use of the 4+ cores/CPU future, just like Microsoft did with Vista and Windows 7. As a result, on "low-end" single-core machines it will probably be slower, and "mid-range" dual-core machines it won't improve much.
agreed. Apple always manages to break it too with OS X. from 10.1 to 10.4 the OS notably improved in speed on even older equipment each time it upgraded, even on older PPC G3 and G4 machines.
Of course, when you're starting from a point of such incredibly bad performance, there's not really anywhere to go but up.
It would have been more impressive if they'd somehow managed to make it slower with each release.
The Free Open Source Software community, that builds free, open source software, is complaining that they are not, in one way or another, being another compensated for their free software?
Let's also not forget these are the same people who tout OSS's zero purchase cost as one of its biggest advantages over Windows.
Mod this guy up, if only for the "Free as in Speech" vs "Free as in Beer" aspect. Its still one of the hardest things for people to grasp, which is sad since a lot of the fools having problems with it are from the US which is nicknamed "Land of the Free" for crying out loud.
Probably because "free as in speech" is such an atrociously poor and loaded analogy.
And my point is that when they put platform validation into the OS, it becomes designed to work solely with Apple's hardware lineup.
No, it doesn't. Unless you think a little piece of code that goes "are you really a Mac" somehow affects the *design* (kernel architecture, memory management algorithms, security model, etc) of the OS.
And if you did think that, you're wrong.
It's not really Mac OS X anymore, is it?
Er, yes, yes it is.
I suppose that it would do all of the things Mac OS X does, but the trust that normally would extend to the developers will be broken and only go back to the hacker. The code would then effectively be the hacker's design, or his "interpretation" of Mac OS X, and the support would devolve to him.
No, no it wouldn't. You certainly won't get any support from Apple, but that's for the same reason you won't get support from Red Hat or Microsoft without paying them.
You appear to have a very, very, very strange idea of what is involved in "designing" an OS. In fact, what you're arguing is the equivalent of saying installing an unsigned driver in Windows (or a binary driver into Linux) changes it to some fundamentally different OS.
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Ext3 is fully documented with viewable code, yet MS don't implement it.
What's in it for them ?
Obviously it was never meant for my department, but given the breadth of fixes, I'm wondering what kind of hell IT will catch if the Sales or Admin departments get updated and find applications broken.
As much as they deserve for putting their users in a position where they _can_ install the patches.
I've thought for some time that Microsoft should have some type of open update scheme that other vendors could participate in. As you mention so that Adobe could submit their updates to MS and that you get all your updates through Windows update.
I can't think of any reason why Windows Update couldn't do this for applications today (or even yesterday). It certainly does so for drivers.
In all likelihood the problem, as usual, lies with the application vendors.
They were the only ones with the power to forbid OEMs from installing third party software or risk losing OEM pricing for Windows.
Certainly true, but irrelevant to both my argument (that IE surpassed Navigator before Windows 98 was a factor) and your comment:
If I am selling widgets for $40 and my competition is giving away feature comparable widgets for free [...]
Where you are only comparing free vs non-free "widgets".
Of all the browsers on windows at the time of the big three IE, Netscape, and Opera two of the three charged for their browser.
And what of browsers on other platforms ?
Opera chose not to try and go toe to toe with IE and focused on non-US markets (sensible since they are located in Australia) and Netscape was simply arrogant and refused to team up with any partners (AOL tried to work with them but Netscape turned them down). Opera also managed to offer a free version but only because they worked out ad deals injecting ads in the browser itself so it wasn't really free like IE. Without Microsoft's vast capitol and other profitable properties there is no way IE would have been free given how much they spent licensing Mosaic from Spyglass [wikipedia.org] and subsequently pouring resources into it.
On the other hand, because they did, a web browser today is now ubiquitous and free like a GUI, network stack or media player. Overall, clearly, a better situation.
Netscape were in the buggy whip business. They're out of it because everyone started driving cars. No-one today is going to pay for a browser (unless they have very specific requirements) any more than they are for a text editor or a file manager.
If I am selling widgets for $40 and my competition is giving away feature comparable widgets for free who are customers going to go to for their widgets?
Not you, obviously. Much like when I want a drink of water I grab it from the drinking fountain, not the guy hawking water bottles at a few bucks a pop.
That is why Microsoft was convicted of abusing its monopoly power.
Microsoft weren't the only company giving away widgets.
Netscape, by trying to charge for a web browser, were very much out of the ordinary. They gambled that they'd be able to tie their web browser to their web server in a compelling package and therefore be able to charge big $$$ for both. They lost.
Now, many intra nets are probably already tied to Microsoft Windows in a large number of other ways so they don't see anything wrong with that - but changing the OS to a true commodity is something that people should be keeping an eye towards, even if it doesn't happen immediately.
The OS is not a "commodity" in any non-trivial environment. Once you have established knowledge, tools and processes for dealing with one OS, changing to another is a massive undertaking, regardless of whether it's Red Hat Linux to Debian, or Windows to MacOS X.
Heck, changing hardware vendors is a snap compared to changing OSes, but even that is something you'd need a damn good reason to do.
IE won over Netscape 4 because IE was the default option and Microsoft abused their desktop monopoly to bundle IE and Microsoft prevented OEMs from offering a different default browser.
IE's greatest marketshare explosion happened with IE4, before Windows 98 was released (and certainly before it had large market penetration).
At the time Netscape 4 and IE were about the same (read: full of bugs).
They were not. IE4 was (dramatically) faster and (less dramatically) more reliable. Navigator 4.x was a steaming pile for several versions after its initial release.
Weird shit, but please don't act like market forces, default browsers, and OEM constraints weren't the major factor in IE winning for a few years.
If Netscape was the better browser, then it wouldn't have been the manually installable version of IE4 that dethroned it.
I offer evidence which you slam as a straw man but offer none yourself.
OS X's performance on G4 systems is fairly well known.
The link you do provide only says the class action status was slapped down not the lawsuit itself. The "judge ruled that each PC buyer has to bring his or her own legal action in order to seek damages from Microsoft."
And have any of them been successful ?
I stand by what I said. Now if you can provide a link saying Apple was also slapped with a lawsuit, I'll evaluate it in which case I may change my mind, unlike some I do change when I am convinced I was wrong. Do you?
First I need to be convinced. Saying that OS X doesn't perform badly on slow machines because no-one has filed a lawsuit, is not a convincing argument.
A number of lawsuits were filed over that and at least one gained class action status [seattlepi.com].
And was smacked down, as it should have been.
Apple was not slapped with a class action lawsuit, so who has the authority to be criticizing, I certainly wouldn't say it's you.
Straw man. If you think OS X runs fine on a G4 _anything_ you're in no position to be criticising Vista's performance.
Another Apple tradition gone by the wayside: Apple has long supported their older hardware better than most PC makers.
No, they don't. Even the "Pro" machines only come with a 12 month warranty, and they are notorious for suffen hardware changes without transition periods (eg: ADB to USB, no writable media on the first iMac). To say nothing of the piddling few years worth of patches and updates you get for an OS X release.
Better than PC makers ? No chance. They're not even in the same ballpark.
While the ExpressCard was dropped from the 15" and there's not one in the new 13" MacBook Pro, the 17" model still has the slot. That new 13 MBP only costs $1200 too.
That's because they just took a MacBook and slapped a "Pro" sticker on it. It "only" costs $1200 because that's about how much it cost previously.
When it came out Vista also required the latest beefed up hardware.
And by "latest beefed up hardware", you mean a somewhat above-average PC that cost less than Apple's cheapest iMac (and would have run Vista better than the iMac could have run OS X), right ?
Leopard ran fine on old Macs though, it will run on a PowerPC G4.
With a definition of "run" like that, you have no authority whatsoever to be crticising Vista's performance.
Cisco is a big VMware partner and they are not trying to compete with VMware, they are trying to become the preferred hardware platform for VMware environments.
Exactly. Also highlighted by the Nexus 1000v Virtual Switch and the awesome looking "Virtual Interface Cards" for the UCS systems.
This is what I'm wondering too. What differentiates their offering from the ton of high end rackmount vendors (Dell, IBM, HP, Sun, SGI), other than the fact that it has the Cisco logo on it?
Onboard 10Gb CNAs are probably the biggest differentiator. I don't think anyone else has the same memory capacity either.
The UCS management stuff is pretty slick as well.
10.3 and above run reasonably fast on G3 Macs (unless you're really short on RAM) and quite well on G4 machines.
I have an old 1Ghz G4 iBook with 1.25GB RAM in one of my desk drawers, and on that I would describe OS X as "tolerable", so long as you don't put it under anything more than a trivial load (Mail + Safari with a few tabs, Word, maybe iTunes in the background).
The idea of OS X running "well" on a G3 is, I have to say, utterly laughable. While I'll admit to having not tried it for several years, I do remember frustrating delays just opening a drop-down menu in Finder with nothing else running, and resizing a window being like watching a slide show. Fire up a few applications and the nostalgic feeling of using an early floppy-drive-only Mac was quite eerie.
I've used just about every Mac released since the mid-90s, at one time or another (it's handy to be friends with someone who sells them). The first ones that even came close to running OS X to the standard *I* would call "well" were the G5s. Even those - like my mother's 1.9Ghz/2.5GB iMac - are sluggish at times.
You may be happy with OS X's performance on a G4 (but if you are, I certainly hope you don't criticise Vista, since it will be dramatically better on any time-and-price-equivalent PC, and no worse on basically anything you can successfully install it to). Personally, I think it's irritatingly sluggish at best (dual 1Ghz+ G4s), borderline unusable at worst (anything <867Mhz).
Using a more current comparison, if I load up my wife's 2.4Ghz/2GB MBP with the same sort of workload I have on my (significantly slower - Opteron 165, 2GB RAM, triple-head) Vista PC every day, it's damn near unusable.
(Disclaimer: This is written by a Windows server admin who wished he was a Unix server admin instead.)
The situation is not much different. We're virtualising everything for the same reasons.
IMO, the measure of new softwares speed is best measured on older (6-12mo old) hardware since the older version was not written with the newer hardware in mind and the newer software was written with the old and new hardware in mind (or at least should have been).BUt I have to disagree as to your claim that the improvements in OS X were related primarily to increased Hardware performance. My 800MHZ PBG4 shipped with OS 9 and X (10.1 IIRC). It got faster with every OS update it was capable of using (Leopard requires 867MHZ or better). The Hardware didn't change at all, only the OS.
Yes, but OS X on an 800Mhz G4 is still sluggish and unresponsive. My point was that it took substantial hardware performance improvements *in addition to software improvements* before OS X was fast and responsive. The same was not true of Vista, which could run quite well on only slightly above average _contemporary_ hardware when it was released.
Or, to put it another way, Vista has less need to improve in performance, because it's just not so damn slow to start with.
That's why I brought up Vista. It's an example of newer software running slower on the same hardware thus supporting this "Page's Law"
I think you missed the (somewhat tongue in cheek) point of my first post, which was that OS X could only have gotten faster with further development, because it was so slow to start with.
Incidentally, I'm fairly sure Vista SP1 and Windows 7 are benchmarking faster than Vista did.
Of course, this whole "Page's Law" thing is a crock. Software doesn't get slower every 18 months, and certainly not by a factor of two. Software runs as fast 18 months later as the day it was released. *More functional* software may require more hardware resources but, again, that's hardly unreasonable or unexpected.
*Google's* software might get faster as times goes by, but maybe that's because they, like Apple, have initial software releases that are just incredibly poor performers they simply have no option other than to get better.
Then MS and Vista must have knocked your sox off!
Funny you should say that, because it's an example that drives the point home so well. For all the flack Vista got about performance, on the day it was released, you could buy a PC - for less than the price of the cheapest iMac (a machine that would barely run OS X at all) - that would run it *well* (dual-core, 2GB RAM, 256MB GPU).
In contrast, it took Apple *years* after OS X 10.0 - and due at least as much to dramatically faster hardware as improved software - before it could even be described as "not slow". You quite literally could not buy hardware that OS X ran well on for _years_ after its release. It wasn't until the G5 Macs (and a few $129 OS updates) that anyone could even begin to call it "fast" with a straight face.
However, the increases from 10.2 to 10.3, and 10.3 to 10.4 were impressive in their own right because 10.2 was where the new OS X reached speed parity with OS 9, IMO.
Well, I have to disagree. OS 9 was quite quick even on paltry ~200Mhz G3s. To my standards, OS X doesn't run "fast" on anything less than a G5 (not, not even dual G4s). Even then, my Mum's 1.9Ghz/2.5GB G5 iMac can be sluggish without reason.
I'm hoping that 10.6 will be the speed boost I was expecting since they are claiming to have focused on 'under the hood' improvements (whatever that really means).
It means they're modifying it to make better use of the 4+ cores/CPU future, just like Microsoft did with Vista and Windows 7. As a result, on "low-end" single-core machines it will probably be slower, and "mid-range" dual-core machines it won't improve much.
Make developers target a slow and memory constrained platform. Then you get stellar performance when it runs on the big machines.
Non-sequitur.
agreed. Apple always manages to break it too with OS X. from 10.1 to 10.4 the OS notably improved in speed on even older equipment each time it upgraded, even on older PPC G3 and G4 machines.
Of course, when you're starting from a point of such incredibly bad performance, there's not really anywhere to go but up.
It would have been more impressive if they'd somehow managed to make it slower with each release.
The Free Open Source Software community, that builds free, open source software, is complaining that they are not, in one way or another, being another compensated for their free software?
Let's also not forget these are the same people who tout OSS's zero purchase cost as one of its biggest advantages over Windows.
Mod this guy up, if only for the "Free as in Speech" vs "Free as in Beer" aspect. Its still one of the hardest things for people to grasp, which is sad since a lot of the fools having problems with it are from the US which is nicknamed "Land of the Free" for crying out loud.
Probably because "free as in speech" is such an atrociously poor and loaded analogy.
Powering them is a solved problem. There are many engines that can deliver the necessary power-to-weight performance they'd need.
Without using petrol ?
What will make flying cars feasible is making them fully robotic, so that they can be safely used by a drunk or a child.
I think you're forgetting the rather more significant problem of how you're going to power them.
And my point is that when they put platform validation into the OS, it becomes designed to work solely with Apple's hardware lineup.
No, it doesn't. Unless you think a little piece of code that goes "are you really a Mac" somehow affects the *design* (kernel architecture, memory management algorithms, security model, etc) of the OS.
And if you did think that, you're wrong.
It's not really Mac OS X anymore, is it?
Er, yes, yes it is.
I suppose that it would do all of the things Mac OS X does, but the trust that normally would extend to the developers will be broken and only go back to the hacker. The code would then effectively be the hacker's design, or his "interpretation" of Mac OS X, and the support would devolve to him.
No, no it wouldn't. You certainly won't get any support from Apple, but that's for the same reason you won't get support from Red Hat or Microsoft without paying them.
You appear to have a very, very, very strange idea of what is involved in "designing" an OS. In fact, what you're arguing is the equivalent of saying installing an unsigned driver in Windows (or a binary driver into Linux) changes it to some fundamentally different OS.
If I use MS source code, I am required to release my code to Microsoft under their control and copyright, and am almost certainly an employee.
The problem is that the people behind the GPL like to define "use" as "link against". Microsoft, does not.