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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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If the thunder don't get you, then the lightning will.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2016, @05:18AM
Actually it wouldn't be terrible if the Linux kernel supported NT syscalls. If you've ever tried Wine, you might have noticed that Wine does NT syscalls with a userspace daemon, which has the painful consequence of mode-switching in and out of the kernel for calls that Linux and Windows would just do in the kernel. There have been attempts to make wineserver into a kernel module, but it's like, Wine, and as you know Wine is an M$ W1nbl0ws compatibility thing which should always suck forever, so nobody seriously gives a fucking shit about it.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Friday April 15 2016, @05:26AM
Make it a kernel module at the peril of kernel panic?
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2016, @05:36AM
Well let's see now. If I want to run Windows software that makes lots of system calls, which will I choose,
(1) Wine makes kernel calls in userspace with lots and lots of overhead. Sure it slow but itz teh bestest evar cuz rezsons!!1!!1one
(2) Windows makes kernel calls in the kernel. Now why wouldn't I want this?
So yeah. I'm sticking with Windows because fuck you.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2016, @05:41AM
Good riddance. You clearly don't care about freedom, or else technical quality wouldn't be paramount for you.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2016, @05:53AM
Care about Freedom, you say. I do not believe you. Here is why.
ReactOS is a project to clone Windows by building an NT compatible kernel for Wine.
Longene is a project to build a hybrid NT and Linux kernel capable of running both Windows software and Linux software.
Do you care about these Free projects, and why not? Because they are not Linuxy enough for you, that is why not.
You do not care about Freedom. You only care about your social clique of Linux dweebs.
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Friday April 15 2016, @06:42AM
Or maybe because they re-implement something already available. If they do it well enough, I'm certain (no, IANAL) they will infringe on several patents and be sued into oblivion.
If I want Windows, I pay for it and use it. If I want Windows, but slightly more stable, I get a VM on my Linux and install Windows there, taking snapshots on a regular base (that's what I actually do). Re-implementing existing Windows, open source or otherwise, is doomed to fail because some Windows Software depends on unspecified behaviour. Best you can get is something "good enough for most things".
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(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2016, @07:27AM
Or maybe because they re-implement something already available.
The entire purpose of Linux is to re-implement something that is already available. Not only is Unix already available but BSD is free. Linux does not even need to exist. There is only one reason Linux is not a footnote in history. Linux has an insanely loyal following of rabid fanboys frothing at the mouth about how everything that is not Linux is complete crap.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by edIII on Friday April 15 2016, @07:39AM
I'll take it.
If it's FOSS that means no telemetry, no licensing fees, and a "good enough" slice of working programs to be useful. If a large enough slice, then developers might even consider isolating their development to what that is. Just like web development is often "flattened" to what works across all browsers.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Friday April 15 2016, @06:32AM
If I want to run Windows software that makes lots of system calls, which will I choose,
Easy. You chose Windows. Linux is for people mainly running Linux software.
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