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The annual Debian developers conference, debconf 16, is taking place July 2-9 in Cape Town, South Africa, featuring for the first time ever Microsoft as a silver sponsor.
This seems consistent with the strategy, that pessimists may define EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish), of seeking close integration with the GNU/Linux system.
The move, from a traditionally hostile company that recently started showing enthusiasm towards open source software, is causing a mixture of derision and opposition in the community. As the grey beards in the IT community might recall, most of Microsoft partners, from IBM to the humble dev, tend to end up screwed in the long term. Will GNU/Linux be the exception?
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Debconf 2016 Welcomes... Microsoft!
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New crypt. See /usr/news/crypt.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2016, @05:03AM
Wouldn't be the first time Microsoft did a Unix. Remember Xenix? No of course you don't.
The burning question is whether Microsoft will discontinue NT in favor of Leenix. Remember when Apple discontinued Mac OS in favor of OSX? No of course you don't.
What could be the motivation. Golly I wonder if the NT developers at Microsoft are growing up to be old grey beards themselves and the cheapest way for Microsoft to move forward is to replace them with millennials who are so very passionate about Linux.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2016, @08:33AM
That lasted for all of about 12 months.
...and YOU couldn't buy it to put on YOUR box.
M$ would only sell licenses directly to hardware manufacturers.
I borked the markup just a bit. [soylentnews.org]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Touché) by maxwell demon on Friday April 15 2016, @08:47AM
I may be old, but I'm not demented, you insensitive clod.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Friday April 15 2016, @11:31AM
Not on your life. For one reason: The GPL, which means that if they do that, any Windows compatibility layer they build in will have to be GPL too. Which means that some reasonably enterprising geeks can remove any of the bad stuff that it does to invade people's privacy or show ads on their screen, compile their own, and poof one of Microsoft's biggest cash cows is gone.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by jummama on Friday April 15 2016, @06:57PM
Not necessarily. Wine is all in userspace, so if Microsoft decided to make a Windows subsystem for Linux, they could put it all in userspace and do whatever license they want, with or without source code.
That said, if they wanted to bring in support for Windows drivers, that code would need to be in the kernel, and thus would have to be GPL.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday April 15 2016, @02:27PM
Anyone remember A/UX? :-)
Anyway, to me it seems that the fox is now in the hen house. But yes, maybe trying to outsource Windows kernel development to young, enthusiastic new-ways-of-working Indians didn't work out so well.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Informative) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Friday April 15 2016, @03:48PM
Some of us old folks remember Xenix. Solid operating system. Plug a multiple-port serial card into your 286 and it would drive a lot of Wyse terminals.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)