Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 19 submissions in the queue.
posted by martyb on Friday April 15 2016, @04:56AM   Printer-friendly
from the speechless dept.

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?


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2016, @05:53AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2016, @05:53AM (#332088)

    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.

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   0  
       Troll=1, Underrated=1, Total=2
    Extra 'Troll' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   0  
  • (Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Friday April 15 2016, @06:42AM

    by q.kontinuum (532) on Friday April 15 2016, @06:42AM (#332099) Journal

    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".

    --
    Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2016, @07:27AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2016, @07:27AM (#332118)

      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

      by edIII (791) on Friday April 15 2016, @07:39AM (#332121)

      Best you can get is something "good enough for most things".

      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.