Other organizations have tried and failed to do this sort of thing, simply because they are superimposing their own stuff on top of the stuff that really does the work. So you either have the code complexity of code managing the tooling that is really doing the work, or the code managing the work, doing the work, and some middleware that doesn't add meaningful value, but does add complexity. Having translation layers rarely does nice things for maintenance and stability, regardless of who is doing it and what the platform is.
I don't think you are going to reach an accord on Powershell syntax. I personally find it tedious, and frankly the Verb-Noun thing is backwards (Noun-Verb would have worked better, I don't need to know all the things I can 'Get', I need to know the things I can do to a Disk). That said, there is a convention, which is something that cannot be said for the more diverse set of shell commands.
In general the two camps need to recognize the situation for what it is. Empowering Microsoft shops to manage Linux workloads. It isn't going to win over a Linux shop to start using Windows if they don't already.
Powershell works that way because MS controlled the development of the vast majority of components that normal people interact with. It delivers a framework to let third parties do it 'the right way', but there's a lot of missing stuff and when you interact with the few CLI friendly executables that existed, you are right back there.
Basically, you could use 'python' as a shell and have the same benefits, complete with the awkwardness of interacting with non-python executables. In MS world, this is less disastrous because non-python executables were pretty rare anyway and they did a good job of chaining instead to.Net stuff.
This is pretty misleading. OMI is Microsoft's pet 'standard'. They know the politics of DMTF to get things the 'standard' rubber stamp, but it has no bearing on actual applicability to the general environment. Basically going OMI means a pretty crappy set of flaky abstraction/instrumentation has to be put on the target that doesn't actually provide any more value than the open source competitors. CIM/WBEM has long languished for lack of anyone wanting to do it, and MS is trying to force the issue by doing OMI.
The 'article' is an editorial presented as something to be taken as representative of the community at large. My impression is that Canonical is losing mindshare quickly to Mint on the desktop, that Canonical really doesn't care that much about desktop anyway as they pin their business hopes and dreams on servers and embedded (where it also is failing to get much traction business wise).
Note that none of this has to do with the parents referenced points: Gnome 3 (which is largely defined by Gnome Shell, which Ubuntu doesn't even use by default) and systemd (I'm sympathetic, but not sure it's making much of a difference either way in the desktop distribution selection right now).
I suspect that the situation is more complicated than that. Multiple recording labels, multiple interests. All the licensing of the music would revert to square one, with all the current copies having to be disposed of.
The world of intellectual property is too complicated for this sort of thing to be easy, sadly. I also never used Grooveshark. I'm still mostly a broadcast radio kind of person when it comes to music.
Yes, in that scenario, you aren't restricted by firefox's proposed BS. Disabling https would break mozilla browser access, but not such software.
I still think it's an inadequately thought out concept (I also question the wisdom of 'the only network protocol is http' mentality in the world), but out-of-browser development shouldn't be hurt too badly.
Now I won't go that far. 'everywhere' is a pretty gigantic scope. There are many scenarios where there are no viable debug capabilities on either end of the connection (either because no such capability is implemented *or* you are dealing with some 'clever' appliance that blocks you from access.
Besides, wireshark's dissectors are incredibly useful, and usually beyond other things ability to decode. In the case of *browsers* specifically it's not true these days, but plenty of networking things aren't at that level.
While TLS *could* be secure, I've been in too many discussions where it is assumed to be the only way to be secure and that it is secure in spite of the current state of CAs and the practical behavior of internal servers with respect to certificates.
There really needs to be more critical discussion along this front, as I see quite reasonable security strategies that fare well in the *real* world torn up and replaced with TLS because of an idealized view of how it could be implemented.
Wireshark is a useful debugging tool. The ability to snap off encryption to analyze things at the wire is a lifesaver.
That said, if I'm debugging something a browser is doing, the developer console is usually better anyway. There remains the case where you are trying to debug a tester's experience without access to their browser, but the scenarios where that is true *and* it would be a good idea to disable TLS are limited. Being able to disable encryption is more important for clients that aren't so developer-enabled.
I agree that the more intelligent thing would have been for the site branding to be used for legitimate service rather than trying to shame the users while pointing out other services and hoping for the best.
However, the likelihood that they could have modified it 'slightly' while 'not pissing off the listeners' is pretty slim. The music selection would have had to be torched and started over from scratch (too many content owners without an agreement between them) and something would have had to give to actually extract revenue.
They didn't quite get to 'just walk away'. They were given a choice, an impossibly high fine to pay or hand over all their patents, copyrights, infrastructure, software, basically everything while very publicly scraping the ground about how wrong what they did was.
Essentially, they had something of value that was interesting to the plaintiffs that was bigger than their realistic chances at getting actual money out of them.
I would go further and say that while before some projects would feel some pressure to do cleaner packaging and deploy better alongside other applications and into 'OSes', many are starting to say 'here, just take a container' and never fix packaging issues because... container! What is a good workaround for some fundamental limitations has become a crutch to be extraordinarily lazy in packaging.
If you get a *better* offer while working at one place, sure an H-1B has at least that ability.
However if they get laid off/fired, things can get very rough fast. So an H-1B holder has a lot more to lose if they can't survive a layoff or get fired. Sure there is a grace period, but depending on the circumstances, that grace period isn't nearly enough to be confident you can go from surprise termination to accepting another job.
The playing field is distorted by the current H1-B system.
For a citizen, the employer has not much more leverage over the employee than they should have (I think health insurance managed by the employer is something that should be changed, but that's beside the point).
For an H1-B, an employer can pretty much deport the employee. That is not a level playing field. That is an entirely different power dynamic that favors the employer unreasonably so.
I don't know about his cut off point (might be on the low side), but there is an inflection point where the providers economies of scale aren't adding value for your organization and instead you just are paying for their costs and their profit.
If you are effectively tying up more than a rack of real equipment in two availability zones or more, you may well be in the territory of being able to save money by coming *off* the cloud.
It's like owning a box truck versus going to U-Haul. If you move something once in a blue moon, you go to U-Haul because owning a truck is too much for occasional use. If however you are a moving company, owning one or more big box trucks will be cheaper than renting.
It's nowhere near as clunky as Google Drive (Do you really want to have to trust them with your data?)
If you don't trust Google, then why trust Microsoft? The degree of trust in the solution should be skeptical. This is of course likely to be fine by a lot of people, but we shouldn't pretend MS is a more or less trustworthy entity than any of their competitors at this junction. Ideally the protection of the data and the storage of the data are provided by two distinct entities (and the protection code audited for security and to be sure it is doing what it promises).
Do you want Apple taking over and forcing everyone to use the same hardware and lock down everything you develop?
Nope, but MS would gladly do that in a heartbeat if they got enough clout. Same goes for Google or really any sufficiently 'successful' commercial entity. This is why mono
In general I think I understand your point, but anything getting a monopolistic hold on a market generally does not go nice places for the consumers.
You have a small enough team to just gather their feedback rather than posters on a forum. You have an opportunity for more tailored measures to make a good environment, though a challenge that some ideal changes are likely to be impractical to achieve for such a small team. For example if you don't have offices and they want offices, construction isn't going to happen for a team of 6. The types of things you can do are likely to be highly subjective.
For example, some people do best with morale boost by having their manager focus on the bright side without going much into the bad aspects of the current larger situation. I personally prefer the manager to be straight with me about precisely how we are doing, how we are falling short, and maybe I can think about how perhaps something can be fixed (or suggest when I think it's time to throw in the tile and focus on more productive things.
If you are in a larger company that does stack ranking, then review time is going to suck for at least 1 or 2 of your team no matter how awesome things are going.
Well for one, it's true that mobile devices play an increasing role in computing for the masses. Microsoft also has nearly zero mindshare for that market. I'm personally skeptical of any of their endeavors reversing that, but even in theory I don't see how any thing they do in desktops and laptops helps or detracts from their relevance to mobile at this point. Given they already give away their platform for the sake of boosting Bing and friends in those markets, nothing really changes.
I also want to express that contrary to a widespread belief, mobile form factor isn't going to completely replace laptops, due to simple human factors issues. So one of the worst things for MS to do would be to piss away their relevance to laptops chasing mobile. That said Windows 8 showed exactly how hard MS could work to do precisely that and still not get particularly penalized in the market.
Finally the 'tendency toward web apps' does not automatically make something particularly useful for both mobile and laptop. Even for those that are adaptive, the mobile sites frequently suck because there simply isn't enough real estate on mobile devices to provide an adequate experience. I do however appreciate how IOS and Apple re-popularized the concept of providing dedicated purpose-driven apps, though disappointed so many of them are just the Mobile web site 'app'-ified. Browsers make for far better run time environments than they used to be, but still significantly lag traditional applications given roughly equivalently naive developers.
I guess it comes down to 'it would be a good idea to release their OS like everyone else does'. The question is in what sense and for whom? It could be good for consumers (maybe, though it would diminish even further the chances they would try out an alternative platform that would be better for them than Windows), maybe good from 'the way the world *should* work'. It could be good for companies like Lenovo, Dell, HP, etc as their costs go down and therefore they can price lower. It's not a good idea for Microsoft as a business though. It doesn't have much potential financial upside for them and represents sacrificing a boatload of their revenue. They already are doing precisely what you prescribe in mobile/tablets because they felt they had to, but taking it further in a general just wouldn't make a lot of financial sense. The exceptional case may be upgrades, I suspect MS suffers pretty high costs supporting older editions to try to get people to spend money on upgrades. That said, 8->8.1 was a free upgrade and 8 was considered horrible, and even so about 30% of the 8 users never bothered to do the 8.1 update, so there may be no good answer for how they could mitigate their costs without a risk of decreasing likelihood of upgrade-by-buying-new-device as an unintended consequence..
The point about share is that it continues to be the case in *SPITE* of being the more expensive option (though admittedly most of their users don't get direct control over giving them money). I don't say the secret to their share is charging, it's just that they manage to get away with charging even when free alternatives exist. It only becomes a 'good' idea from a business perspective if they are under some competitive threat that would force their hand to do what everyone else has been forced to do. That threat just doesn't exist, so they'd be trading current revenue stream for a relatively meaningless small bump in mindshare. I'm not going to enjoy this crappy OS more just because it's free, I'm still going to prefer Linux (not much chance of them making inroads into *THAT* 3.4% of the market no matter what). For consumers the cost of their OS license is already hidden in the system purchase, so they don't even give a single thought to all of this.
The business side is interesting and highly dependent on circumstances. While it makes little sense for MS to go free-as-in-beer for Windows, it makes a ton of sense for RedHat to more prominently promote free-as-in-beer use of their platform as they rapidly lost hearts and minds to Canonical. While they are being better about it (they used to go out of their way to make life tough for projects like CentOS) they are still being peculiar about it (CentOS v. RHEL instead of just 'RHEL for free'), but they are under pretty serious threat to their credibility as people selecting Ubuntu dilutes their image as 'the' authoritative Linux company. Here RH gives up the fantasy that they'll extract revenue from large chunks of the market, but protects their image. MS just doesn't have this problem. On the desktop, they have a lock. On the server their fortunes aren't so nice, but their platform is *SO* different it's unlikely to convince people to change one way or another.
I'm not saying MS is best or knows best or makes the best products. I'm just ignoring the technology and focusing on the chances MS would go along with such a plan based on current business realities and assessing how 'foolish' or not they are being by charging for their offering.
'arbitrary' in my view includes 'free for non-commercial use' and even less kosher licensing terms for use without paying. I was thinking that way as he referenced 'dirty look from auditing', which I took to mean an assumption that software is being used against copyright/licensing allowances.
I was perhaps too guarded in trying to explain that blind firing of people for using Linux is almost certainly not a good practice but accepting that companies do have to worry about employees doing 'arbitrary' things without appreciating the nuance of the terms of the 'free' (as in beer) software they are using.
In terms of IO and CPU scheduling, there exist configurations of the linux kernel with *HARD* real time guarantees. That has approximately zero relevance to desktops, so MS didn't bother developing that and most linux distros ship with those disabled anyway. WinCE might have had that, but I have heard their current Windows 8.1 kernel does not.
There are flat out crazy things you can do with networking in linux kernel space. Linux kernels drive some pretty hard core networking equipment. MS doesn't play in the market, and frankly could only break in in *theory* by giving away their work, so it's not in their best interest to bother. Virtualization has caused MS to implement *some* of those capabilities that they formerly ignored, but no where near everything.
I didn't say that functionality was necessarily relevant to what MS cares or should care about, just that the Linux kernel is a solid piece of technology that carries some fascinating features. The stuff Google puts on top of that stack, on the other hand... There's a good amount of room for improvement there.
My point is that while the present isn't indicative of the future, neither can we extrapolate relatively small percentage shifts into inevitable conclusions of the market reality. I'm not exactly enthusiastic about Microsoft, but I'm fatigued in general how technology reporting sees *anything* go from 0.1% to 0.2% and then starts going crazy proclaiming the eventual domination of the market by that thing because it *GREW 200% Year to YEAR!!!*. Also playing it the other way when something goes from 90% of a billion person market to 89.9% share and declaring that 'it's doomed because over a MIILION users have moved away from it'.
I really like some of those niche players, but it's just tiresome pretending they'll be something they are not. Frankly, if Mint had MS market share, I'd suspect it wouldn't be nearly as well suited a platform for it's current users as it is now, so people shouldn't get too excited about 'winning' users away from MS.
I know you said that you don't care, this rant was less directed toward you specifically. Just the statement that oh once upon a time MS made money at OS sales, but that's sooo 90s just seemed a sample of making a pretty dire assessment of a business that's overwhelmingly on top still.
I wouldn't be *too* surprised if *someone* used a BSD to try to break into the ecosystem. However I don't see how a BSD kernel is a necessary or even particular relevant step to get away from Google's stranglehold, which is more in the upper end of the stack rather than bound to things like the kernel.
I do not believe Microsoft would be the ones to try such a thing. If they are going to get anything non-linux based going in the handset market, it'll be built on their own kernel (which can do the job in theory). If that continues to fail, I wouldn't be surprised by a 'Android with Bing' effort, but I would bet it would keep the base common and just mess with app store/search/maps/etc defaults. I don't see a big motivator for something in the middle given their existing in-house tech and the reality of the mobile device market.
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Other organizations have tried and failed to do this sort of thing, simply because they are superimposing their own stuff on top of the stuff that really does the work. So you either have the code complexity of code managing the tooling that is really doing the work, or the code managing the work, doing the work, and some middleware that doesn't add meaningful value, but does add complexity. Having translation layers rarely does nice things for maintenance and stability, regardless of who is doing it and what the platform is.
I don't think you are going to reach an accord on Powershell syntax. I personally find it tedious, and frankly the Verb-Noun thing is backwards (Noun-Verb would have worked better, I don't need to know all the things I can 'Get', I need to know the things I can do to a Disk). That said, there is a convention, which is something that cannot be said for the more diverse set of shell commands.
In general the two camps need to recognize the situation for what it is. Empowering Microsoft shops to manage Linux workloads. It isn't going to win over a Linux shop to start using Windows if they don't already.
Powershell works that way because MS controlled the development of the vast majority of components that normal people interact with. It delivers a framework to let third parties do it 'the right way', but there's a lot of missing stuff and when you interact with the few CLI friendly executables that existed, you are right back there.
Basically, you could use 'python' as a shell and have the same benefits, complete with the awkwardness of interacting with non-python executables. In MS world, this is less disastrous because non-python executables were pretty rare anyway and they did a good job of chaining instead to .Net stuff.
This is pretty misleading. OMI is Microsoft's pet 'standard'. They know the politics of DMTF to get things the 'standard' rubber stamp, but it has no bearing on actual applicability to the general environment. Basically going OMI means a pretty crappy set of flaky abstraction/instrumentation has to be put on the target that doesn't actually provide any more value than the open source competitors. CIM/WBEM has long languished for lack of anyone wanting to do it, and MS is trying to force the issue by doing OMI.
The 'article' is an editorial presented as something to be taken as representative of the community at large. My impression is that Canonical is losing mindshare quickly to Mint on the desktop, that Canonical really doesn't care that much about desktop anyway as they pin their business hopes and dreams on servers and embedded (where it also is failing to get much traction business wise).
Note that none of this has to do with the parents referenced points: Gnome 3 (which is largely defined by Gnome Shell, which Ubuntu doesn't even use by default) and systemd (I'm sympathetic, but not sure it's making much of a difference either way in the desktop distribution selection right now).
I suspect that the situation is more complicated than that. Multiple recording labels, multiple interests. All the licensing of the music would revert to square one, with all the current copies having to be disposed of.
The world of intellectual property is too complicated for this sort of thing to be easy, sadly. I also never used Grooveshark. I'm still mostly a broadcast radio kind of person when it comes to music.
Yes, in that scenario, you aren't restricted by firefox's proposed BS. Disabling https would break mozilla browser access, but not such software.
I still think it's an inadequately thought out concept (I also question the wisdom of 'the only network protocol is http' mentality in the world), but out-of-browser development shouldn't be hurt too badly.
the same holds everywhere.
Now I won't go that far. 'everywhere' is a pretty gigantic scope. There are many scenarios where there are no viable debug capabilities on either end of the connection (either because no such capability is implemented *or* you are dealing with some 'clever' appliance that blocks you from access.
Besides, wireshark's dissectors are incredibly useful, and usually beyond other things ability to decode. In the case of *browsers* specifically it's not true these days, but plenty of networking things aren't at that level.
While TLS *could* be secure, I've been in too many discussions where it is assumed to be the only way to be secure and that it is secure in spite of the current state of CAs and the practical behavior of internal servers with respect to certificates.
There really needs to be more critical discussion along this front, as I see quite reasonable security strategies that fare well in the *real* world torn up and replaced with TLS because of an idealized view of how it could be implemented.
Wireshark is a useful debugging tool. The ability to snap off encryption to analyze things at the wire is a lifesaver.
That said, if I'm debugging something a browser is doing, the developer console is usually better anyway. There remains the case where you are trying to debug a tester's experience without access to their browser, but the scenarios where that is true *and* it would be a good idea to disable TLS are limited. Being able to disable encryption is more important for clients that aren't so developer-enabled.
I agree that the more intelligent thing would have been for the site branding to be used for legitimate service rather than trying to shame the users while pointing out other services and hoping for the best.
However, the likelihood that they could have modified it 'slightly' while 'not pissing off the listeners' is pretty slim. The music selection would have had to be torched and started over from scratch (too many content owners without an agreement between them) and something would have had to give to actually extract revenue.
They didn't quite get to 'just walk away'. They were given a choice, an impossibly high fine to pay or hand over all their patents, copyrights, infrastructure, software, basically everything while very publicly scraping the ground about how wrong what they did was.
Essentially, they had something of value that was interesting to the plaintiffs that was bigger than their realistic chances at getting actual money out of them.
Owncloud is not a cloud *service*, but a platform for creating your own (I actually prefer Seafile incidentally).
Ditto for K-9 mail, not a service, but an app.
I would go further and say that while before some projects would feel some pressure to do cleaner packaging and deploy better alongside other applications and into 'OSes', many are starting to say 'here, just take a container' and never fix packaging issues because... container! What is a good workaround for some fundamental limitations has become a crutch to be extraordinarily lazy in packaging.
If you get a *better* offer while working at one place, sure an H-1B has at least that ability.
However if they get laid off/fired, things can get very rough fast. So an H-1B holder has a lot more to lose if they can't survive a layoff or get fired. Sure there is a grace period, but depending on the circumstances, that grace period isn't nearly enough to be confident you can go from surprise termination to accepting another job.
The playing field is distorted by the current H1-B system.
For a citizen, the employer has not much more leverage over the employee than they should have (I think health insurance managed by the employer is something that should be changed, but that's beside the point).
For an H1-B, an employer can pretty much deport the employee. That is not a level playing field. That is an entirely different power dynamic that favors the employer unreasonably so.
I don't know about his cut off point (might be on the low side), but there is an inflection point where the providers economies of scale aren't adding value for your organization and instead you just are paying for their costs and their profit.
If you are effectively tying up more than a rack of real equipment in two availability zones or more, you may well be in the territory of being able to save money by coming *off* the cloud.
It's like owning a box truck versus going to U-Haul. If you move something once in a blue moon, you go to U-Haul because owning a truck is too much for occasional use. If however you are a moving company, owning one or more big box trucks will be cheaper than renting.
It's nowhere near as clunky as Google Drive (Do you really want to have to trust them with your data?)
If you don't trust Google, then why trust Microsoft? The degree of trust in the solution should be skeptical. This is of course likely to be fine by a lot of people, but we shouldn't pretend MS is a more or less trustworthy entity than any of their competitors at this junction. Ideally the protection of the data and the storage of the data are provided by two distinct entities (and the protection code audited for security and to be sure it is doing what it promises).
Do you want Apple taking over and forcing everyone to use the same hardware and lock down everything you develop?
Nope, but MS would gladly do that in a heartbeat if they got enough clout. Same goes for Google or really any sufficiently 'successful' commercial entity. This is why mono
In general I think I understand your point, but anything getting a monopolistic hold on a market generally does not go nice places for the consumers.
You have a small enough team to just gather their feedback rather than posters on a forum. You have an opportunity for more tailored measures to make a good environment, though a challenge that some ideal changes are likely to be impractical to achieve for such a small team. For example if you don't have offices and they want offices, construction isn't going to happen for a team of 6. The types of things you can do are likely to be highly subjective.
For example, some people do best with morale boost by having their manager focus on the bright side without going much into the bad aspects of the current larger situation. I personally prefer the manager to be straight with me about precisely how we are doing, how we are falling short, and maybe I can think about how perhaps something can be fixed (or suggest when I think it's time to throw in the tile and focus on more productive things.
If you are in a larger company that does stack ranking, then review time is going to suck for at least 1 or 2 of your team no matter how awesome things are going.
Well for one, it's true that mobile devices play an increasing role in computing for the masses. Microsoft also has nearly zero mindshare for that market. I'm personally skeptical of any of their endeavors reversing that, but even in theory I don't see how any thing they do in desktops and laptops helps or detracts from their relevance to mobile at this point. Given they already give away their platform for the sake of boosting Bing and friends in those markets, nothing really changes.
I also want to express that contrary to a widespread belief, mobile form factor isn't going to completely replace laptops, due to simple human factors issues. So one of the worst things for MS to do would be to piss away their relevance to laptops chasing mobile. That said Windows 8 showed exactly how hard MS could work to do precisely that and still not get particularly penalized in the market.
Finally the 'tendency toward web apps' does not automatically make something particularly useful for both mobile and laptop. Even for those that are adaptive, the mobile sites frequently suck because there simply isn't enough real estate on mobile devices to provide an adequate experience. I do however appreciate how IOS and Apple re-popularized the concept of providing dedicated purpose-driven apps, though disappointed so many of them are just the Mobile web site 'app'-ified. Browsers make for far better run time environments than they used to be, but still significantly lag traditional applications given roughly equivalently naive developers.
I guess it comes down to 'it would be a good idea to release their OS like everyone else does'. The question is in what sense and for whom? It could be good for consumers (maybe, though it would diminish even further the chances they would try out an alternative platform that would be better for them than Windows), maybe good from 'the way the world *should* work'. It could be good for companies like Lenovo, Dell, HP, etc as their costs go down and therefore they can price lower. It's not a good idea for Microsoft as a business though. It doesn't have much potential financial upside for them and represents sacrificing a boatload of their revenue. They already are doing precisely what you prescribe in mobile/tablets because they felt they had to, but taking it further in a general just wouldn't make a lot of financial sense. The exceptional case may be upgrades, I suspect MS suffers pretty high costs supporting older editions to try to get people to spend money on upgrades. That said, 8->8.1 was a free upgrade and 8 was considered horrible, and even so about 30% of the 8 users never bothered to do the 8.1 update, so there may be no good answer for how they could mitigate their costs without a risk of decreasing likelihood of upgrade-by-buying-new-device as an unintended consequence..
The point about share is that it continues to be the case in *SPITE* of being the more expensive option (though admittedly most of their users don't get direct control over giving them money). I don't say the secret to their share is charging, it's just that they manage to get away with charging even when free alternatives exist. It only becomes a 'good' idea from a business perspective if they are under some competitive threat that would force their hand to do what everyone else has been forced to do. That threat just doesn't exist, so they'd be trading current revenue stream for a relatively meaningless small bump in mindshare. I'm not going to enjoy this crappy OS more just because it's free, I'm still going to prefer Linux (not much chance of them making inroads into *THAT* 3.4% of the market no matter what). For consumers the cost of their OS license is already hidden in the system purchase, so they don't even give a single thought to all of this.
The business side is interesting and highly dependent on circumstances. While it makes little sense for MS to go free-as-in-beer for Windows, it makes a ton of sense for RedHat to more prominently promote free-as-in-beer use of their platform as they rapidly lost hearts and minds to Canonical. While they are being better about it (they used to go out of their way to make life tough for projects like CentOS) they are still being peculiar about it (CentOS v. RHEL instead of just 'RHEL for free'), but they are under pretty serious threat to their credibility as people selecting Ubuntu dilutes their image as 'the' authoritative Linux company. Here RH gives up the fantasy that they'll extract revenue from large chunks of the market, but protects their image. MS just doesn't have this problem. On the desktop, they have a lock. On the server their fortunes aren't so nice, but their platform is *SO* different it's unlikely to convince people to change one way or another.
I'm not saying MS is best or knows best or makes the best products. I'm just ignoring the technology and focusing on the chances MS would go along with such a plan based on current business realities and assessing how 'foolish' or not they are being by charging for their offering.
'arbitrary' in my view includes 'free for non-commercial use' and even less kosher licensing terms for use without paying. I was thinking that way as he referenced 'dirty look from auditing', which I took to mean an assumption that software is being used against copyright/licensing allowances.
I was perhaps too guarded in trying to explain that blind firing of people for using Linux is almost certainly not a good practice but accepting that companies do have to worry about employees doing 'arbitrary' things without appreciating the nuance of the terms of the 'free' (as in beer) software they are using.
In terms of IO and CPU scheduling, there exist configurations of the linux kernel with *HARD* real time guarantees. That has approximately zero relevance to desktops, so MS didn't bother developing that and most linux distros ship with those disabled anyway. WinCE might have had that, but I have heard their current Windows 8.1 kernel does not.
There are flat out crazy things you can do with networking in linux kernel space. Linux kernels drive some pretty hard core networking equipment. MS doesn't play in the market, and frankly could only break in in *theory* by giving away their work, so it's not in their best interest to bother. Virtualization has caused MS to implement *some* of those capabilities that they formerly ignored, but no where near everything.
I didn't say that functionality was necessarily relevant to what MS cares or should care about, just that the Linux kernel is a solid piece of technology that carries some fascinating features. The stuff Google puts on top of that stack, on the other hand... There's a good amount of room for improvement there.
My point is that while the present isn't indicative of the future, neither can we extrapolate relatively small percentage shifts into inevitable conclusions of the market reality. I'm not exactly enthusiastic about Microsoft, but I'm fatigued in general how technology reporting sees *anything* go from 0.1% to 0.2% and then starts going crazy proclaiming the eventual domination of the market by that thing because it *GREW 200% Year to YEAR!!!*. Also playing it the other way when something goes from 90% of a billion person market to 89.9% share and declaring that 'it's doomed because over a MIILION users have moved away from it'.
I really like some of those niche players, but it's just tiresome pretending they'll be something they are not. Frankly, if Mint had MS market share, I'd suspect it wouldn't be nearly as well suited a platform for it's current users as it is now, so people shouldn't get too excited about 'winning' users away from MS.
I know you said that you don't care, this rant was less directed toward you specifically. Just the statement that oh once upon a time MS made money at OS sales, but that's sooo 90s just seemed a sample of making a pretty dire assessment of a business that's overwhelmingly on top still.
I wouldn't be *too* surprised if *someone* used a BSD to try to break into the ecosystem. However I don't see how a BSD kernel is a necessary or even particular relevant step to get away from Google's stranglehold, which is more in the upper end of the stack rather than bound to things like the kernel.
I do not believe Microsoft would be the ones to try such a thing. If they are going to get anything non-linux based going in the handset market, it'll be built on their own kernel (which can do the job in theory). If that continues to fail, I wouldn't be surprised by a 'Android with Bing' effort, but I would bet it would keep the base common and just mess with app store/search/maps/etc defaults. I don't see a big motivator for something in the middle given their existing in-house tech and the reality of the mobile device market.