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from the temperature-in-Hell-plummets dept.
NEW YORK—At its first Connect event in 2013, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2013. In 2014, it announced the open sourcing of .NET, and in 2015, the open sourcing of the Visual Studio Code editor. The big news this year? Microsoft, the company that has built an empire on proprietary, closed-source software, has joined the Linux Foundation as a platinum member.
Microsoft has been a big contributor to Linux over the past several years, primarily focusing on improving support for its Hyper-V hypervisor. Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, said that in becoming a member, "Microsoft is better able to collaborate with the open source community to deliver transformative mobile and cloud experiences to more people."
Microsoft's increasing commitment to open source has been met with some cynicism (and please, beloved commenters—try to refrain from "embrace, extend, extinguish" posts, as the very concept is preposterous when it comes to Linux), but with projects such as Visual Studio Code and .NET, is starting to win hearts and minds. The company does appear to be a reasonably good open source citizen, not merely publishing source code repositories that are occasionally updated from an internal development branch, but actually performing development in the open, accepting community contributions, and seeking community consensus when it comes to new features.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Subsentient on Thursday November 17 2016, @08:25AM
I'm forced to disagree. They might not be able to crush all of Linux, but if they use their money and resources to move adoption to technologies and code they write for Linux, then MS Linux (tm) isn't so far off. They could make other systems have as much trouble as non-systemd ones do today.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday November 17 2016, @08:44AM
I, also, am forced to disagree.
MS doesn't have to crush Linux, if they can only influence the navigation. As a platinum member, they have influence. Since they have very deep pockets, they have the means to extend their influence. There's no need to crush Linux, if they can sweet talk Linux into doing things that MS wants Linux to do.
Pursue or abandon certain lines of research? Dump more money into another line of research? Acquiesce to certain proposed laws that don't really benefit the open source community? Influence. I don't like the idea of MS influencing potentially important decisions that Linux needs to make, now or in the future.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Thursday November 17 2016, @06:12PM
Linux having the fate of Firefox? I shudder at the thought...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by RedGreen on Thursday November 17 2016, @08:46AM
"They might not be able to crush all of Linux, but if they use their money and resources to move adoption to technologies and code they write for Linux, then MS Linux (tm) isn't so far off. They could make other systems have as much trouble as non-systemd ones do today."
Interesting copy the Redhat model to dominance since they have deeper pockets they just may be able to pull it off.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 17 2016, @10:33AM
> Interesting copy the Redhat model to dominance since they have deeper pockets they just may be able to pull it off.
Back when redhat IPO'd the CEO said, "The goal is not to make Redhat as big as Microsoft. It is to make Microsoft as small as Redhat."
An MS distribution of linux would signal the success of that approach.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday November 17 2016, @05:43PM
What trouble? I wasn't aware they caused any trouble for the users. Are you talking about trouble for the distro developers?
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday November 17 2016, @07:57PM
You may not be aware that systemd causes end users trouble, but I am, and my problems are trivial compared to some that have been reported. (I've always eventually been able to get my systems back up, even if it meant reinstalling the OS.) If you are a user who follows the most common use case, then probably systemd won't cause you any problems. If you have an unusual configuration, be prepared for some work, at best. A couple of times it caused so much trouble I started thinking of BSD, but I was always able to eventually get the thing working again. It's just that every time I re-install my alternate system (i.e., the one in the partition I'm not doing most of my work in...which varies) I need to go through and hand edit the fstab table. For awhile it was worse, but they seem to have polished systemd a bit. I still don't like the concept of binary logs, but I'm not much of a sysadmin, so that doesn't directly impact me unless problems different from what have happened so far occur. And I think the problems with it bricking systems were usually with the beta version (which apparently should have really been called the alpha version).
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday November 17 2016, @08:55PM
No, I'm quite sure systemd can cause end users trouble in a distro that uses it. I don't use systemd - I do all I can to avoid it! The GP was saying it causes trouble for non-systemd distributions (or that they have trouble). I'm asking what kind of trouble it is, as I've not had any as a user.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday November 17 2016, @10:58PM
For users of distros that avoid systemd, the problem is packages that are re-written to depend on its presence.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Thursday November 17 2016, @02:41PM
I don't think they're going for Embrace-Extend-Extinguish here. I think they're going for a different strategy, which I'm going to call Stupify-Sabotage-Sink. It works something like this:
Stupify - Throw previously unseen sums of money at open-source developers and organizations, so they'll give you a voice in the discussions of what to do next.
Sabotage - In the discussions of what to do next, convince them to take foolish system architectures and/or poorly designed UIs, so that the developers involved with the project will waste thousands of hours on something that either doesn't help or actively make things worse.
Sink - After they've wasted boatloads of time on pointless coding, use how far behind the times they are as the reason why everyone should use your spying mechanism^W^W operating system.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.