The truth comes out: Microsoft needs Linux(techrepublic.com) |
The truth comes out: Microsoft needs Linux(techrepublic.com) |
How does every single one of their business decisions get linked to some nefarious goal? The author doesn't even know what it could be, BUT DON'T FORGET! This company tried to patent everything decades ago! Don't forget they're not bringing bash to Windows out of the goodness in their hearts!
So do tell me, how did Microsoft change?
From my perspective, "Bash on Windows" is a reaction to the wide adoption of OSX for development (In particularly web development seemed to have a mass migration).
For obligatory anecdote:
I'm a longtime and loyal Windows user. Windows has been my primary development platform even though parts or all of our stack ran on some flavor of -nix. I've always encouraged my team to do the same, primary motivated by the better UX on Windows.
But, like many in the past few years, I jumped the OSX bandwagon and moved the entire department over. This wasn't a fun transition, and came with many pains. But ultimately it was a necessary transition as the tools we needed just weren't supported on Windows.
Development became more complex, tooling became mandatory at every stage of development and only OSX offered us a reasonable balance between a -nix-like environment that ran the tools with decent UX.
Microsoft's move to bring Bash to Windows will likely motivate me to migrate back in due time.
While some may be spinning conspiracy theories, I'm personally just really glad Microsoft is moving in this direction.
Is spying on everyone and constantly sending telemetry even when disabled (to the extent people actually wrote a tool to go to every corner and forcefully disable it and even then it didn't work) not nefarious?
What are you even talking about here, they haven't changed a slightest bit.
Maybe I want to have updates that cannot be disabled? No, I want my machine to do what I want, not what MS wants.
Maybe I want to know that pic browsing app can't run without UAC (win8, looking at you)? I don't either, I just want to launch it.
They are still pounding that close-minded philosophy just like before. Their reputation is well-deserved.
I'm patiently awaiting another move in EEE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish) direction from them, this time with our last bastion - Linux.
In there Microsoft now is perfectly still the 90s Microsoft.
From my point of view, the Linux on Win10 is a strategic move to incentive people use Windows as their sole desktop (since with this move many people won't have any reason whatsoever to use Linux at all).
I tried to convince lots of people on the Linux community that they need to react... of course, not blocking Microsoft (that would be silly, and unfree), but by fixing stuff that people wants fixed for years: Audio, driver support in general, ease of use, not having to edit text config files, and so on...
But instead I got EXTREMELY negative reactions, some people even told me they are against AMDGPU driver efforts because it would make Linux more accessible to stupid people that will need help.
With companies, I have no need to weigh their positive behavior more heavily. No one's feelings are at risk of being hurt; no friendships are on the line. If a company burns me with bad practices, it's safe and prudent to hold their mistakes against them. It should take a very long time for companies to build back goodwill, once lost.
I suspect some patent hijinks happened there, and you and I just don't know the details.
You want to talk about secret, ask Google for a copy of the secret contracts every Android OEM is bound to.
In addition, Microsoft was under US Federal oversight until 2011, but then had it extended another two years for failure to comply with the original court order. So let's not forget that.
It was also characteristic of anti-trust suits in general. They are much less about whether you committed a crime, and more about whether what you did can be redefined as a crime many years later.
The DoJ supervision was extended over the readability of Microsoft's enforced documentation of communications protocols, which it was ordered to rewrite.
In her ruling, Kollar-Kotelly blamed Microsoft. "Although the technical documentation project is complex and novel, it is clear, at least to the Court, that Microsoft is culpable for this inexcusable delay," she wrote.
But she also wrote that the company had been "overwhelmingly cooperative" in the years after the antitrust settlement, and that this latest extension should not be viewed as a sanction. http://www.pcworld.com/article/142004/article.html
They are a public traded company. They are beholden to shareholders not consumers, their customers or myself.
It is profitable to entice users into your ecosystem and trap them there. Apple, Google and Microsoft all do it.
I do have to ask, though: After being slighted for years, why should they be given an immediate pass because of very recent events that make nerds happy?
I'm waiting for the proprietary extensions to the bash shell that requires you to license your software because it was created with windows bash. MSVCRT.dll ftw
(SQL Server is the BEST! Outlook is the BEST! Everything can be done in Excel! Visual Source Safe is the BEST! Oh wait, TFS with a SQL Server back end is the BEST! )
Those people should have a look at research.microsoft.com, and compare their (public) research output to that of companies like Apple or even Google.
> The native availability of a full Ubuntu environment on Windows, without virtualization or emulation, is a milestone that defies convention and a gateway to fascinatingly unfamiliar territory.
"Ubuntu environment" is the key there. Microsoft doesn't need "Linux" unless they're planning on replacing their own kernel with it. Microsoft here is depending on the software running atop of the kernel: in this case, the GNU operating system---which is more than just a set of GNU programs[0]---which brings all of this software together.
Granted, all the talk has been primarily about GNU Bash and other GNU software.[1]
Yes, they're running software compiled for the kernel Linux by providing translating system calls; they could also do that for any other kernel that hackers want to compile their software for, should it become immensely popular. But the rest of the Unix stuff is separate.
Count me as being trapped in the 90s.
This just seems like a seriously tardy "me-too" piece.
If you're an enterprise running SQL Server now on Windows. You're not going to ditch your cluster to have it re-installed on Linux just to save a couple dollars on an OS license. But if you're a newbie developer fresh out of college and been doing development in a Unix-style environment (because they bought a Macbook instead of a Win8 laptop four years ago), you've probably never been exposed to a Microsoft development environment. These efforts are to capture the next generation of developers who haven't ever touched a Windows desktop and feel comfortable with writing Python on Linux and using MySQL or Oracle. Want proof? Quick, name one unicorn startup who has a Microsoft technology stack. Heck, just name anybody that's using a Microsoft development stack in Silicon Valley...
Now those developers can be targeted with .NET, SQL Server, and Ubuntu on Windows. Now instead of buying the same version of that Macbook, those folks can go buy a Surface Tablet clone with the pen and touch screen (and a Windows 10 license!), and still do all of their development on a Unix-style environment. Better yet some will transition to C#, and some will even take advantage of the free-license-for-Oracle-users to switch to SQL Server.
Microsoft providing more free tools in their suite is nothing but nice. It certainly won't do any harm to OSS.
If you can't tell, I am being sarcastic. I love Microsoft. People just believe what they want to believe. I'm sure they will never change.
Microsoft has acted unethically from it's inception until just recently when they've been backed into a corner. For decades they've repeated shown that they're willing to damage the entire industry if it means that they end up with more control over it.
Why would you trust that this recent change of heart is permanent given that their hand was forced? When they start acting ethically when they don't have to - that's when I'll reconsider my position.
I love Windows Phones. No so many apps, which is good as I don't have that much time to tweak stuff. Sensitive defaults like a black theme (!!!), a click to enable reading aloud SMS (!!), crazy battery features.
They are liquidating the current WP8 line, so it's like $30 if you want to get a Lumia 640 LTE to play with for a weekend (and free unlock code if you want to keep it but don't want AT&T). It's just sad to see something that had so many good things for it go the way of the Dodo.
Perhaps enough shareholders complained about a market segment simply being given to OSX (development environment for work intended for a POSIX server) that they simply had to act. No more, no less. Not benevolent or malevolent, just picking up some loose cash :-)
The UI on the last few Windows versions has really confused me as to WTH they think they are doing.
But at some point, you and I will retire (etc), and the next generation might have other preferences, or discover something insanely great that we simply aren't used to.
More importantly, Ballmer was not wrong in saying that Microsoft's focus as a company has been and should always be "Developers, Developers, Developers" and everything about this Ubuntu on Windows effort is for Developers.
[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-ballmer-linux-id...
What they bring by default as a user-land is Ubuntu, which is actually a complete OS that happens to include both GNU and Linux and many many other things, including essential components that are not part of either project. I say actually a complete OS because, in spite of RMS' protestations to the contrary in the famous "It's GNU/Linux, stupid!" editorial, the GNU system was not "almost finished" when the Linux kernel came along and is still not "almost finished" even today.
And the reason it's not almost finished is because the GNU project considers the kernel unimportant, which they prove wrong every year HURD remains a mess that moves forward with the pace of a snail.
This is a legitimate question, since I am not a Windows user: has it really? Or are you referring to GNU software[0], which is not what we are referring to when we say GNU is a fully free Unix replacement; GNU software is only a part of that.[1]
[0]: https://gnu.org/software/
[1]: https://gnu.org/gnu/gnu.html
> For another, by bringing a compatibility layer for the Linux kernel they have opened the door to much more than just GNU, and it remains incredibly reductivist to claim that that's all the Linux kernel does. You can use the Linux kernel (or this linux-compatible layer) to use a GNU system or a completely non-GNU system if you so choose.
Sure they have. But that's not what the conversation is focused on: it's focused on being able to use GNU Bash and all the other Unix (mostly GNU) utilities that hackers are used to using.
> And the reason it's not almost finished is because the GNU project considers the kernel unimportant
Linux completed a major missing piece of GNU, which we refer to as GNU/Linux.[2]
[2]: https://gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html
Specifically:
"Once Torvalds freed Linux in 1992, it fit into the last major gap in the GNU system. People could then combine Linux with the GNU system to make a complete free system — a version of the GNU system which also contained Linux. The GNU/Linux system, in other words."[2]
Second, the GNU project will never get the Oscar because the FSF is incredibly inept at spreading it's message.
GNU is a fully free Unix replacement---an operating system; it is more than a bunch of GNU software:
If people and companies are forgiven the instant they stop being abusive, then what's the disincentive to being abusive again? Microsoft did what they did because they had a monopoly position; they've changed now that they've lost it. There's absolutely nothing to say that they won't go right back to the way they were if they get a monopoly again.
If someone has been hitting you with a stick for years, and then all the sudden shows up with a big smile because they've lost their stick and they think you could help them get it back, what kind of fool would help them?
note: (behavior not unique to $msft, same is true of $aapl, $goog, $fb and those who want to emulate such…)
Very few people who made decisions you may be holding over them today, actually work at Microsoft today. You can legitimately hold a decision against a person for a long time... they're still the same person, more than likely. But a company is an amalgamation of it's employees. And employees come and go.
and my second point is - Steve Ballmer left in 2014.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/chinese-govt-reve...
Hardly secret anymore. Meanwhile, the last copy of one of Google's secret contracts we have is five years old.
As far as I can tell this subsystem does nothing that cygwin hasn't done in terms of 'bringing gnu to windows' since 1995, except that it does it technically better and allows for you to use software that does not depend on already ported components without recompilation. This means, for example, that you can use a libc other than glibc without porting that libc to windows first (ie. you could use musl, which is absolutely not part of the gnu system and even implements its own dynamic linker). You couldn't do that with cygwin. At least not trivially.
> Sure they have. But that's not what the conversation is focused on: it's focused on being able to use GNU Bash and all the other Unix (mostly GNU) utilities that hackers are used to using.
Even if I concede that GNU constitutes a 'system' in the way that RMS insists (which I don't, at all. His claims are political, not technical, imo), I would not agree that using this layer constitutes using that system for precisely this reason. Using bash or even gcc is not sufficient to consider a system 'gnu', even by RMS' own statements, else OSX and the other BSD systems would be gnu systems as well. For the most part, use of "bash on windows" is literally just that. You run bash and it exists in a space that is like but not exactly the same as linux, but that part is largely artifice. You don't even get a complete /proc filesystem.
[Note: Considering I am literally referring to those RMS screeds in my posts, I'd appreciate it if you at least pretended to believe I've read them.]
Remember: back in the day, there was no way to run a free Unix-like operating system. GNU provided a way, and nothing else existed at the time, though BSD also emerged as free.
The distros that followed are derivatives of GNU. Ubuntu is a derivative of Debian GNU/Linux, which actually recognizes this fact.
> sing bash or even gcc is not sufficient to consider a system 'gnu', even by RMS' own statements
The article mentioned Shuttleworth describing an "Ubuntu environment"; this seems to imply more far-reaching goals.
I can't say what the result will be. I hope that others will explain it to me, or that there are many useful articles on the topic, because I can only watch and listen to what others are doing.
> [Note: I have read those links many times, you can stop linking to them in every level of this conversation you engage in now, I think]
I link to them in many threads because they will not otherwise be seen by the person I'm responding to.
If we're going to start naming systems based on the tools, then I use a ZSH/MS/VIM/PSF/Linux distro. There are other providers than GNU.
GNU/Linux has a kernel---Linux. It forms a fully free operating system.
No free replacement for Unix existed until GNU provided one---that involves much more than just writing utilities. I encourage you to read about the history of the project to understand why:
Summary: https://gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html
More detailed: https://gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html
Linux isn't really much of a threat to Windows because Linux hasn't even really tried to successfully reach consumer product quality. Linux developers need to focus on this.
IMO they're doing it as a means of keeping their options open against the day when Microsoft decides not to allow a third-party app store on Windows and cuts off their air supply.
But the likelihood that Microsoft would ever fully disallow third party install on Windows is nonexistent.
Unless you can predict the future for as long as Microsoft exists, you can't say that.
I'm pretty sure that before the iPhone there were people saying Nokia was too big to fail, same for IBM before Windows probably.
I'm still on the fence about car companies. I sure have heard people very convincingly say that oil is a risk-free investment, that there never will be a time when oil isn't needed anymore. I have good reasons to disagree with that today.
Then again, Nokia still exists today, so I suppose a pedant could get technical about oil still filling a much diminished market in the future.
Are you suggesting that MS has no legitimate claims to IP used in android? It seems to me that companies wouldn't do thee deals if there was no case to answer. It's not as though (for example) Samsung was a stranger to court action, and it's a much bigger company than Microsoft.
It's also a fact that Microsoft pioneered Unix on PCs in the early 1980s, and that Xenix was the most popular Unix of its day....
"Long before Linus Torvalds was able to write anything useful in C, there was a version of Unix from Microsoft called XENIX that was based on the seventh edition and BSD 4.1 with some interesting enhancements (multiple virtual consoles accessible via Alt-F1, Alt-F2,... Alt-F10 -- later inherited by Linux, record-locking facilities for database programming, etc) and an amazing level of PC friendliness that Linus will try emulate much later by essentially replicating all major design decisions that Microsoft put into XENIX for PC but using an independent codebase." http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Torvalds/Finland_period/x...
That is not the way the system works. For many companies it i s better to pay up for bogus IP claims rather than risk fighting it out in the courts and paying millions in legal fees.
That's not fun for a lot of people.
Really? Maybe I travel in the wrong circles, but most of the time this comes up most people just roll their eyes.
Also, that blog post is terrible, and highlights why the FSF fails so miserably at it's mission. Referring to Windows as "freedom-denying, user-controlling, surveillance system" ignores the fact that most people don't care because it works.
These users do not value freedom. And that's their right, however much we disagree with it.
It doesn't make those statements false, and doesn't change the situation. I wrote that article to focus on software freedom, its purpose, and GNU.
We don't ignore the fact that "most people don't care because it works"; that doesn't make sense, because that works against our ideals.
The other issue is the concept of "free software". No matter the claims, when the term free is applied to a product (or product class) like software, the immediate implication that the price is free. The "free as in free speech" doesn't work too well because speech is not a product. Also, Windows doesn't exactly stop me from doing questionable activities, like authoring documents that would be considered subversive.
Telling people that Windows takes away their right to view and modify the source code will at best give lukewarm response, because most people have other concerns.
It wasn't particularly about the UX on Linux desktops, but rather they don't fit in our company culture when it comes to how assets and IT are managed.
Which is why I wrote it from my own perspective as an anecdote.
As usual, YMMV
Well, almost everywhere. And CTRL+F is still a little wonky depending on the app you're in.
In Linux there's a clear separation of CTRL for sending messages to the app --ALT for commands-- and SUPER for messaging the OS.
I found OSX very confusing trying to mix everything into a single key.
Also most terminal emulators will forward all Ctrl combinations directly over the TTY rather than capturing them in the windowing system, so in practice Ctrl-V rarely works in a terminal either. Likewise for Ctrl-W, which is typically bound to backwards-kill-word, etc.
The way it ends up in practice, shortcuts involving the Command key on OSX end up being clearly defined and consistent, because apps typically can't override them.
On most editors it moves me one word, on the command line it inserts the control characters.
Same story for ctrl+backspace and ctrl+a.
("Paste" is on the right-click menu though.)
It's probably pretty unlikely even most of the 310 claims would be seen as "bogus". Under current law.
I meant software freedom in this context; I should have been more clear.
> The FSF would do well to focus less on the ideology, and more on providing a better user experience for non technical people.
There are plenty of organizations that do that. The FSF exists for very specific reasons---ideology is essential.
> The "free as in free speech" doesn't work too well because speech is not a product
I don't follow.
By "free as in free speech" we mean the same thing as when we say "free as in freedom".
> Also, Windows doesn't exactly stop me from doing questionable activities, like authoring documents that would be considered subversive.
You're not setting a very high bar there ;)
If it's freedom, why does the GPL need copyright law?
I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're trying to say.
The free software definition specifies four specific freedoms:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
https://www.gnu.org/copyleft/
Anarchy is the lack of laws, to be under no other restraint but the law of nature.
Freedom need laws, because the alternative is the law of nature.
The public domain and licenses that approximate it (3-BSD) do not suffer from this problem. Eliminate copyright law, and everything still functions like a permissive license.
I want to abolish copyright because I think it gets in the way of creativity. Generally speaking I also want less dependence on men with guns. Since I want to abolish copyright, I do not like the GPL. The best way to abolish copyright in practice is to use a permissive license.
Do you not need men with guns to enforce your other freedoms, like the freedom of speech under the First Amendment? (I don't know if you're a US citizen.)
We're focusing on a very specific set of freedoms---a subset of all freedoms that individuals should have.
> I want to abolish copyright
We have to work within the system we have, and abolishing copyright is unlikely to happen any time soon. There's things that work now.
In the case of the GPL, we still need copyright to ensure that we can enforce the right for the users' to have their freedoms; otherwise, public domain works can be used in proprietary software.
I have yet to find a person or company who would prefer those terms over the GPL. As such, I find people to be a bit dishonest when they proclaim a desire to abolish copyright but still prefer permissive licenses.
Because otherwise, agreeing to it would not be in any way a step towards abolishment of copyright. It would, in fact, be something more akin to creating a free labour pool you are not willing to opt into yourself. You create a situation where you can profit from their work and they cannot. There's a word for this arrangement.
The only reason to prefer 3-BSD is because public domain isn't recognized worldwide. I'll agree that there should probably be something about software patents in there, those are stupid.
If you never intend to sue over IP, then the contract should be an no-issue. All it does is to write down that specific aspect into an enforceable contract. Contract don't need to use men with guns if everyone choose to honor it, which was the historically method used back when people lived in tribes and villages made out of a handful houses. No one would dare to break their word, risking that others would start to do the same.
The best option would of course be that the law was changed and IP abolished by political change. Copyleft and permissive licenses would go away, artist could stand on the shoulders of giants without fear, and compensation would be addressed before the art was made rather than afterward. A fitting end to the flame wars.