25 ms·

Head of Oracle Linux Moves to Microsoft

166 points by guardian5x 11y ago

bithush 11y ago
It would be amazing to see a Microsoft GNU/Linux distro in the future. To be honest it wouldn't exactly be hard for Microsoft to do. Take a Debian base, add whatever bits they need to make sure it works nicely in Azure, have an official Microsoft apt repo and they are done. I actually think it will happen. It makes sense for Microsoft to have an official Linux distro that they can offer true support for.
- adamnemecek 11y ago
  Not linux but close https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix
  - Ologn 11y ago
    Radio Shack used to sell TRS-80 Model 16 microcomputers running Xenix in their stores to business customers. At least up until the mid-1990s, many local Radio Shack stores were using these machines as their point-of-sale, inventory and financial systems. Xenix in general was the most widely used Unix in terms of installs into the late 1980s.
    - vram22 11y ago
      >Xenix in general was the most widely used Unix in terms of installs into the late 1980s. Interesting, didn't know that ... Because PC hardware was cheaper and more ubiquitous, could be one reason, maybe. On a related note, UNIX became big in India (people used to call it a Unix country) in the mid or late 1980's, per what I've read, because of a government decision on computerization. The Rangarajan Committee (he later became the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, which is like the US's Federal Reserve) recommended use of UNIX as the operating system for nationalized banks' back-office automation, because of its multi-user and multi-tasking nature (and possibly / likely because it was cheaper than mainframes, maybe even because less proprietary). UNIX usage in India took off due to that (thousands and thousands of bank branches in India), and hence many devs and admins developed Unix skills ... I was part of that trend, and benefited from it a lot, professionally, in terms of learning ...
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    My first UNIX, a couple of years before GNU/Linux was even a thing.
    - vram22 11y ago
      Cool. My first Unix was some PC-based clone, the name of which I cannot remember now, but was also a while before Linux. Not sure whether it was before Xenix or not, though I used Xenix (SCO Xenix at the time, IIRC, or was it SCO Unix) a year or so later. First Unix's name may have started with E-something. Everex? Not sure. I think I also got to use Interactive Systems' PC Unix (PC-IX?) around the same time as the first one. Soon after, moved to Unix on higher Motorola 680x0 processor based minicomputers, and even a multi-CPU SMP RISC Unix (from MIPS) for a while. Later SVR3 and SVR4. Didn't like 4 though. By then (as I learned later) the UNIX wars had started, and it seemed to be a clunky hybrid of features from the SVR3 and BSD camps. Later worked a good amount on HP-UX too, on their PA-RISC business servers. Liked HP-UX. Pretty stable and powerful OS with a good patch management system and many other features and tools (HP PRM, Glance Plus, Ignite, MC/ServiceGuard, etc.). The hp-ux mailing list was good too - very friendly and helpful people, I helped out others too. Never got to work on Solaris, though, which I regret. I remember I first wrote my selpg utility [1] on a HP-UX box (for a large corp customer, at their request), and then released it on the HP-UX mailing list. Some people appreciated it. [1] http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/09/my-ibm-developerworks-article.html http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/09/my-ibm-developerworks-arti... http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/10/print-selected-text-pages-to-pdf-with.html http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/10/print-selected-text-pages-... Good fun doing a lot of systems stuff on those machines for some years.
      - intrasight 11y ago
        "Santa Cruz Operation" yup, that brings back memories...
      - pjmlp 11y ago
        Thanks for sharing. I did Xenix, DG/UX, Aix, got my first Linux distribution in the form of Slackware 2.0. Tried to get Coherent before, but could not afford it. Afterwards Red-Hat, Mandrake and SuSE were my favourite ones until I ended up with Ubuntu. At work I also got to use Solaris and HP-UX. My first experience with containers was with HP-UX vaults. However I never managed to leave the worlds of Amiga, Windows and BeOS behind. Specially in terms of Demoscene, IDEs culture, graphics and game coding.
  - vram22 11y ago
    Yes, MS has been involved with Unix from much before the recent moves. Possibly a less known fact to some.
    - RyJones 11y ago
      They even shipped IE for Solaris in the 90s! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX
- diskcat 11y ago
  What would be the point of using microsoft's linux?
  - revelation 11y ago
    The same as using a lot of the other Microsoft stuff: you can pay and have someone fix $problem on a deterministic timescale. You can upgrade without having to fear your production system will come crashing down.
    - greglindahl 11y ago
      Huh, I've done both of those with Linux for more than a decade. Can you name some features more unique to Microsoft?
    - marcosdumay 11y ago
      > you can pay and have someone fix $problem on a deterministic timescale Really? When did MS start fixing bugs for their paying customers in a deterministic timescale? The point about upgrades may be good, but MS has started breaking things on update recently too.
      - Spooky23 11y ago
        For years. You open up a crit sit that is tagged as a product defect and they will turn fixes around quickly. If you are strategic to them, they'll fly in people.
  - pkaye 11y ago
    Running it on Azure?
  - toyg 11y ago
    They could use it as stepping stone for businesses heavily invested on Linux or already having a mix of Linux and Windows: "we guarantee this is the best Linux distribution for compatibility with MS tech (Msad, powershell, Azure, mono etc etc)".
- talideon 11y ago
  They're already done something not exactly unlike that, albeit not for general use: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/09/microsoft_sonic_debian/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/09/microsoft_sonic_debi...
  - bithush 11y ago
    Kind of. SONIC is very specialised. It isn't a desktop or server version of Linux for general purpose applications. Also it just happens to run on Debian.
- Intermernet 11y ago
  My prediction is that they'll continue to work on the recently announced "Windows Subsystem for Linux"[1] and attempt to cover a larger and larger portion of the Linux ABI. If people can develop, and run the majority of Linux programs on Windows, and those programs are competitive in performance, and those programs have MS support backing, then they have a huge win in the enterprise space. Personally, I'm happy to keep providing whatever mix of OS services customers request, but I'm very interested in where this could be going [1]: https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/03/30/run-bash-on-ubuntu-on-windows/ https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/03/30/run-bash-o...
  - zeta0134 11y ago
    I think this is an amazing move for Microsoft. If they get the kinks worked out and get it working well on Windows Server, they'll have one platform that can run pretty much all the major enterprise software without virtualization. That's great; it's a way for Linux shops to convert to Windows Server without having to fully commit right away, because they'll still be able to quite easily run their existing stack and leverage their developers who are used to Linux tooling.
    - tluyben2 11y ago
      Why is that good though; why would Linux shops want to convert? In the space I work in companies (including enterprises) like the fact they can do whatever with the source code and that they can audit whatever part they want. MS has that too but not for many clients and you cannot do whatever with it. The freedom in Linux means a lot to a lot of people even if you maybe could get a bit more perf or support from a paid platform. We have people working with VS (a few only) and because of our tooling it works smoothly anyway. I have no clue why you would switch to something paid and closed...
  - rgbrenner 11y ago
    It sounds like a rehash of Windows Services for Unix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX What's different this time? My prediction is that it'll languish in obscurity, rarely used, and eventually be discontinued.
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  I posted my prediction over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11388418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11388418 > I think eventually, we'll see Windows transform into a Linux distro with a Windows UI.
  - wslh 11y ago
    Windows [kernel] is a very advanced operating system with an incredible wide support for third party drivers. I think the prediction would be more oriented to running them side by side.
    - therein 11y ago
      Yeah they wouldn't just toss away millions of lines of kernel code.
      - Karunamon 11y ago
        I recall reading somewhere (can't find it for beans now) that the Windows kernel was a huge mess codewise since many of the original developers have moved on and poor to nonexistent documentation was left, meaning that the modern employees had to basically reverse engineer a lot of the code. Take this with a grain of salt, of course.
        ocdtrekkie 11y ago
        This isn't super unusual for very old code.
        mlvljr 11y ago
        Here are some comments from the times of the source code leak: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/15/71552/7795 http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/15/71552/7795 I'd say, the user experience has improved since then overall (meaning the code quality, too, in one of the most practical senses).
        11y ago
- brudgers 11y ago
  The current iteration of Windows 10 tries to abstract away hardware under a higher level "Windows" layer and mostly get rid of variation between windows for embedded, mobile, and Intel platforms. With the new Bash/Ubuntu feature, I think Windows is moving on to abstract away the operating system. My wild-ass prediction for a Microsoft Linux distribution is one in which Microsoft Windows replaces X-windows. Wayland is already trying to do this because of the perceived security vulnerabilities of X-windows' architecture. In a limited sense, this is sort of an old idea when it comes to nix: there were paid GUI products for layering on top of nix thirty years ago, e.g. Open Look and Motif.
  - WhoBeI 11y ago
    That'd be nice. No more dual booting presuming they bring DirectX along. It seems far of though. Microsoft would have to give up a lot of lower level control.
  - vram22 11y ago
    Was Motif paid? Edit: Checked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_(software) According to that article, it was, initially. Didn't know.
  - PeCaN 11y ago
    What would they gain though? NT is a pretty good kernel with very broad hardware support. If anything, they'd just make NT fully POSIX-compliant. They'd get the same benefit with a fraction of the effort of porting Windows-the-GUI to Linux.
    - yazaddaruvala 11y ago
      > What would they gain? Long term deprecation of their work force? Reduction in operating costs? Why pay people to support / extend a kernel / hardware drivers when Linus will do it for free?
    - asveikau 11y ago
      > If anything, they'd just make NT fully POSIX-compliant. They did this with the POSIX subsystem, and the ability to do this was in mind very early in NT history. They ripped it out in Windows 8, IIRC. I guess it's back.
- cyphar 11y ago
  > It would be amazing to see a Microsoft GNU/Linux distro in the future. Except it would almost certainly be proprietary and would take away your freedoms. I don't understand why everyone is suddenly giddy about the "new Microsoft". They haven't embraced free software, they've just released a few bits as free software while still keeping the conglomeration proprietary.
cowardlydragon 11y ago
With cores galore, there is no reason that an OS couldn't be developed that couldn't do high performance Linux + Windows binary compatible program execution virtually (ha) seamlessly. Microsoft could be the perfect company to do this... and sweep up OSX compatibility at the same time. DOSBox/Bochs can handle legacy emulation... But they're too stupid to do that, as in ignorance...
systems 11y ago
i wish if microsoft adopt an underdog like mageia linux but i guess ubuntu make more business sense
be5invis 11y ago
So, is Microsoft planning another plot against Linux?
- B1FF_PSUVM 11y ago
  No, they've always been at war with Eastasia.
williesleg 11y ago
Microsoft Xenix rebooted! Woohoo!!!!
e12e 11y ago
What I'm curious about: Isn't Oracle Linux mostly a joke of a copy-cat distribution? Apart from them acquiring Ksplice and possibly delaying ksplice-like functionality in SuSe and RedHat a couple of years, isn't Oracle Linux mostly just an excuse to drain Oracle users for OS license money for those that don't want to be constrained by limited hardware support in Solaris? I guess what I'm asking, why would Microsoft want this person? (No offence intended to anyone involved)
- rodgerd 11y ago
  > Isn't Oracle Linux mostly a joke of a copy-cat distribution? Yes, it's RHEL with the serial numbers filed off. > isn't Oracle Linux mostly just an excuse to drain Oracle users for OS license money It's: 1/ revenge on Red Hat for buying JBoss when Larry wanted it. 2/ part of Oracle's vertical integration story. Oracle Linux sales reps will tell you Oracle DB isn't fully supported on RHEL (i.e. they reserve the right to force you to reproduce production support problems on a rebuilt platform) and Oracle have been trailing certification on the last couple of releases of the DB on RHEL vs. OEL. I imagine the end game Oracle are hoping for is undercutting Red Hat until they can run a hostile takeover, then shut down either the JBoss or WebLogic product lines, and generally do unto Linux what they've been doing to MySQL.
- johannes1234321 11y ago
  Oracle has a few extra patches in their kernel. They also created bttrfs. Maybe also other things.
  - skuhn 11y ago
    If you use their "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel", it's actually a totally different (and much newer) kernel version than the one that ships with the equivalent RHEL release. Interestingly, they also provide it across OEL versions, so you can use the more modern kernel with the horribly outdated RHEL userland of your choice. For instance, UEK R4 is based on the 4.1.12 Linux kernel. RHEL 7 ships with 3.10.0. It still makes me nauseous to deal with Oracle, but providing support for a relatively modern kernel release is a step in the right direction. Now if they could shorten RHEL's time between major releases and get them out on a consistent timeframe, that would be another big step in the right direction. Of course then you're practically shipping Ubuntu.
diebir 11y ago
I highly doubt these Linux games will amount to much for Microsoft, but it's fun to watch. Their fundamental problem is (which they realize pretty well i seems) that they have lost developer's mind share. .NET may be a fine ecosystem and C# may be a great language but in all practical senses it is Windows-only. All these Mono/open source CLR games are not even the slightest blip on the radar for a practical day-to-day backend operations running cross platform (which is mostly Linux, but Windows as well). MS is lagging behind the Java ecosystem by 20 years. It's fun to watch them scramble and try this and that, but I suspect that the train has left the station long ago. I think Oracle Linux has been a joke. I don't know anyone in their right mind using that. RH or CentOS, yes. Oracle Linux? Most IT professionals will pay extra to have nothing to do with Oracle. Heck, I am considering risking moving to OpenJDK, just so I have nothing of Oracle in sight.
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  With MS supporting CLR on Linux, I don't see what the problem is. They now have a limited IDE and runtime support for cross-platform. FWIW I've used Mono in production on Linux in telecom, and it's handled many billions of messages over the years. With F# nonetheless. Apart from a few rare issues here and there it's been a great experience.
  - Scarbutt 11y ago
    IMO the point still stands, in general it will be years before the CLR and .NET native is considered a serious alternative to Java/JVM on linux, although microsoft is doing a great effort, so who knows how long real adoption will take, I guess it can get closer to Golang, adoption wise, than to Java, the introduction of Swift is not going to make it easier for them either.
  - zxcvcxz 11y ago
    >limited IDE and runtime support Key word: limited I don't believe MS will ever fully support Linux 100%. They will always make their software tooling more compatible with their OS even though they have the ability to create software for Linux that is on par with the Windows counterparts. Microsoft purposely leaves their "cross-platform" software gimped out so that anyone who does decide to take up .NET on Linux will eventually want to switch to Windows because Microsofts support for Linux is half assed. Hopefully most people can see through the obvious MS shilling that's been going on lately. Some people seem to believe the "new bash" coming to windows is somehow a game changer and that this means they no longer need Linux. Please. Setting up any serious development process in this Frankenstein OS is going to be a nightmare and it's going to break every tool chain conceivable.
oscargrouch 11y ago
Im just imagining the Linus smile nowadays. This is a really impressive achievement comparing with the Microsoft and the Linux of the nineties. I remember creating dial-up internet provider in the nineties using Linux, and all the prejudice the IT people have towards it. "Eww, you are using Linux? here.. i have a Solaris for you" or : "Why dont you just use NT 4?"
- feld 11y ago
  Well Solaris has always been a technically superior OS, but the userland was unfriendly compared to Linux.
  - krakensden 11y ago
    I suspect the impression of Solaris' superiority is colored by the low ratio of users to impressive blog posts.
  - oscargrouch 11y ago
    Specially back than, of course, but back in the day, we wouldnt be able to afford for a Solaris and consulting(i didnt know how to manage one) giving our small size, and, i dont know how it was in the US, but in Brazil it was something really expensive. Im saying this more in the light of what Linux was considered back then, and what it is right now.. In that time a OS maded by a "bunch of hippies" were something people used to laugh about, and people that use it like me were also mocked because of it, because of the seroius money and industry involved in other solutions.. while Linux was the OS of the "looser". We live in a completely different world now, thanks specially to Linus, Stallman, and all the other people we wouldnt be able to name.
jschlemm 11y ago
After the mess they made with windows metro/store apps, half-implementing apis and horrible documentation I would be wary of anything microsoft starts
biggio 11y ago
1st april
calgoo 11y ago
Its funny that my first reaction to the title was: Ugh he comes from Oracle, he is a leach that will try to destroy everything that is good! Then I read the article and it actually looks like he is a Open Source supporter etc.
jjman 11y ago
Microsoft Doors? anyone?
arca_vorago 11y ago
Sorry to be such a buzzkill, but even former oracle devs have told me software goes to oracle to die. Excuse me if I dont care that horrible company a got a guy from slightly less horrible company b because of his knowledge in a field company b wants to embrace only because they are recognizing it is much more of a threat than ever before (largely because of their failures in the first place). So while everyone is drinking the "ms is open sourcing everything" coolaid, I'm still sipping on "lessons from the 90s tea".
known 11y ago
Looks like Satya Nadella is venturing into Linux platform

166 points by guardian5x 11y ago

It would be amazing to see a Microsoft GNU/Linux distro in the future. To be honest it wouldn't exactly be hard for Microsoft to do. Take a Debian base, add whatever bits they need to make sure it works nicely in Azure, have an official Microsoft apt repo and they are done. I actually think it will happen. It makes sense for Microsoft to have an official Linux distro that they can offer true support for.

adamnemecek 11y ago
Not linux but close https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix
- Ologn 11y ago
  Radio Shack used to sell TRS-80 Model 16 microcomputers running Xenix in their stores to business customers. At least up until the mid-1990s, many local Radio Shack stores were using these machines as their point-of-sale, inventory and financial systems. Xenix in general was the most widely used Unix in terms of installs into the late 1980s.
  - vram22 11y ago
    >Xenix in general was the most widely used Unix in terms of installs into the late 1980s. Interesting, didn't know that ... Because PC hardware was cheaper and more ubiquitous, could be one reason, maybe. On a related note, UNIX became big in India (people used to call it a Unix country) in the mid or late 1980's, per what I've read, because of a government decision on computerization. The Rangarajan Committee (he later became the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, which is like the US's Federal Reserve) recommended use of UNIX as the operating system for nationalized banks' back-office automation, because of its multi-user and multi-tasking nature (and possibly / likely because it was cheaper than mainframes, maybe even because less proprietary). UNIX usage in India took off due to that (thousands and thousands of bank branches in India), and hence many devs and admins developed Unix skills ... I was part of that trend, and benefited from it a lot, professionally, in terms of learning ...
- pjmlp 11y ago
  My first UNIX, a couple of years before GNU/Linux was even a thing.
  - vram22 11y ago
    Cool. My first Unix was some PC-based clone, the name of which I cannot remember now, but was also a while before Linux. Not sure whether it was before Xenix or not, though I used Xenix (SCO Xenix at the time, IIRC, or was it SCO Unix) a year or so later. First Unix's name may have started with E-something. Everex? Not sure. I think I also got to use Interactive Systems' PC Unix (PC-IX?) around the same time as the first one. Soon after, moved to Unix on higher Motorola 680x0 processor based minicomputers, and even a multi-CPU SMP RISC Unix (from MIPS) for a while. Later SVR3 and SVR4. Didn't like 4 though. By then (as I learned later) the UNIX wars had started, and it seemed to be a clunky hybrid of features from the SVR3 and BSD camps. Later worked a good amount on HP-UX too, on their PA-RISC business servers. Liked HP-UX. Pretty stable and powerful OS with a good patch management system and many other features and tools (HP PRM, Glance Plus, Ignite, MC/ServiceGuard, etc.). The hp-ux mailing list was good too - very friendly and helpful people, I helped out others too. Never got to work on Solaris, though, which I regret. I remember I first wrote my selpg utility [1] on a HP-UX box (for a large corp customer, at their request), and then released it on the HP-UX mailing list. Some people appreciated it. [1] http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/09/my-ibm-developerworks-article.html http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/09/my-ibm-developerworks-arti... http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/10/print-selected-text-pages-to-pdf-with.html http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/10/print-selected-text-pages-... Good fun doing a lot of systems stuff on those machines for some years.
    - intrasight 11y ago
      "Santa Cruz Operation" yup, that brings back memories...
    - pjmlp 11y ago
      Thanks for sharing. I did Xenix, DG/UX, Aix, got my first Linux distribution in the form of Slackware 2.0. Tried to get Coherent before, but could not afford it. Afterwards Red-Hat, Mandrake and SuSE were my favourite ones until I ended up with Ubuntu. At work I also got to use Solaris and HP-UX. My first experience with containers was with HP-UX vaults. However I never managed to leave the worlds of Amiga, Windows and BeOS behind. Specially in terms of Demoscene, IDEs culture, graphics and game coding.
- vram22 11y ago
  Yes, MS has been involved with Unix from much before the recent moves. Possibly a less known fact to some.
  - RyJones 11y ago
    They even shipped IE for Solaris in the 90s! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX
diskcat 11y ago
What would be the point of using microsoft's linux?
- revelation 11y ago
  The same as using a lot of the other Microsoft stuff: you can pay and have someone fix $problem on a deterministic timescale. You can upgrade without having to fear your production system will come crashing down.
  - greglindahl 11y ago
    Huh, I've done both of those with Linux for more than a decade. Can you name some features more unique to Microsoft?
  - marcosdumay 11y ago
    > you can pay and have someone fix $problem on a deterministic timescale Really? When did MS start fixing bugs for their paying customers in a deterministic timescale? The point about upgrades may be good, but MS has started breaking things on update recently too.
    - Spooky23 11y ago
      For years. You open up a crit sit that is tagged as a product defect and they will turn fixes around quickly. If you are strategic to them, they'll fly in people.
- pkaye 11y ago
  Running it on Azure?
- toyg 11y ago
  They could use it as stepping stone for businesses heavily invested on Linux or already having a mix of Linux and Windows: "we guarantee this is the best Linux distribution for compatibility with MS tech (Msad, powershell, Azure, mono etc etc)".
talideon 11y ago
They're already done something not exactly unlike that, albeit not for general use: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/09/microsoft_sonic_debian/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/09/microsoft_sonic_debi...
- bithush 11y ago
  Kind of. SONIC is very specialised. It isn't a desktop or server version of Linux for general purpose applications. Also it just happens to run on Debian.
Intermernet 11y ago
My prediction is that they'll continue to work on the recently announced "Windows Subsystem for Linux"[1] and attempt to cover a larger and larger portion of the Linux ABI. If people can develop, and run the majority of Linux programs on Windows, and those programs are competitive in performance, and those programs have MS support backing, then they have a huge win in the enterprise space. Personally, I'm happy to keep providing whatever mix of OS services customers request, but I'm very interested in where this could be going [1]: https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/03/30/run-bash-on-ubuntu-on-windows/ https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/03/30/run-bash-o...
- zeta0134 11y ago
  I think this is an amazing move for Microsoft. If they get the kinks worked out and get it working well on Windows Server, they'll have one platform that can run pretty much all the major enterprise software without virtualization. That's great; it's a way for Linux shops to convert to Windows Server without having to fully commit right away, because they'll still be able to quite easily run their existing stack and leverage their developers who are used to Linux tooling.
  - tluyben2 11y ago
    Why is that good though; why would Linux shops want to convert? In the space I work in companies (including enterprises) like the fact they can do whatever with the source code and that they can audit whatever part they want. MS has that too but not for many clients and you cannot do whatever with it. The freedom in Linux means a lot to a lot of people even if you maybe could get a bit more perf or support from a paid platform. We have people working with VS (a few only) and because of our tooling it works smoothly anyway. I have no clue why you would switch to something paid and closed...
- rgbrenner 11y ago
  It sounds like a rehash of Windows Services for Unix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX What's different this time? My prediction is that it'll languish in obscurity, rarely used, and eventually be discontinued.
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
I posted my prediction over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11388418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11388418 > I think eventually, we'll see Windows transform into a Linux distro with a Windows UI.
- wslh 11y ago
  Windows [kernel] is a very advanced operating system with an incredible wide support for third party drivers. I think the prediction would be more oriented to running them side by side.
  - therein 11y ago
    Yeah they wouldn't just toss away millions of lines of kernel code.
    - Karunamon 11y ago
      I recall reading somewhere (can't find it for beans now) that the Windows kernel was a huge mess codewise since many of the original developers have moved on and poor to nonexistent documentation was left, meaning that the modern employees had to basically reverse engineer a lot of the code. Take this with a grain of salt, of course.
      - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
        This isn't super unusual for very old code.
      - mlvljr 11y ago
        Here are some comments from the times of the source code leak: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/15/71552/7795 http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/15/71552/7795 I'd say, the user experience has improved since then overall (meaning the code quality, too, in one of the most practical senses).
        11y ago
brudgers 11y ago
The current iteration of Windows 10 tries to abstract away hardware under a higher level "Windows" layer and mostly get rid of variation between windows for embedded, mobile, and Intel platforms. With the new Bash/Ubuntu feature, I think Windows is moving on to abstract away the operating system. My wild-ass prediction for a Microsoft Linux distribution is one in which Microsoft Windows replaces X-windows. Wayland is already trying to do this because of the perceived security vulnerabilities of X-windows' architecture. In a limited sense, this is sort of an old idea when it comes to nix: there were paid GUI products for layering on top of nix thirty years ago, e.g. Open Look and Motif.
- WhoBeI 11y ago
  That'd be nice. No more dual booting presuming they bring DirectX along. It seems far of though. Microsoft would have to give up a lot of lower level control.
- vram22 11y ago
  Was Motif paid? Edit: Checked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_(software) According to that article, it was, initially. Didn't know.
- PeCaN 11y ago
  What would they gain though? NT is a pretty good kernel with very broad hardware support. If anything, they'd just make NT fully POSIX-compliant. They'd get the same benefit with a fraction of the effort of porting Windows-the-GUI to Linux.
  - yazaddaruvala 11y ago
    > What would they gain? Long term deprecation of their work force? Reduction in operating costs? Why pay people to support / extend a kernel / hardware drivers when Linus will do it for free?
  - asveikau 11y ago
    > If anything, they'd just make NT fully POSIX-compliant. They did this with the POSIX subsystem, and the ability to do this was in mind very early in NT history. They ripped it out in Windows 8, IIRC. I guess it's back.
cyphar 11y ago
> It would be amazing to see a Microsoft GNU/Linux distro in the future. Except it would almost certainly be proprietary and would take away your freedoms. I don't understand why everyone is suddenly giddy about the "new Microsoft". They haven't embraced free software, they've just released a few bits as free software while still keeping the conglomeration proprietary.

cowardlydragon 11y ago

With cores galore, there is no reason that an OS couldn't be developed that couldn't do high performance Linux + Windows binary compatible program execution virtually (ha) seamlessly. Microsoft could be the perfect company to do this... and sweep up OSX compatibility at the same time. DOSBox/Bochs can handle legacy emulation... But they're too stupid to do that, as in ignorance...

systems 11y ago

i wish if microsoft adopt an underdog like mageia linux but i guess ubuntu make more business sense

be5invis 11y ago

So, is Microsoft planning another plot against Linux?

B1FF_PSUVM 11y ago
No, they've always been at war with Eastasia.

williesleg 11y ago

Microsoft Xenix rebooted! Woohoo!!!!

e12e 11y ago

What I'm curious about: Isn't Oracle Linux mostly a joke of a copy-cat distribution? Apart from them acquiring Ksplice and possibly delaying ksplice-like functionality in SuSe and RedHat a couple of years, isn't Oracle Linux mostly just an excuse to drain Oracle users for OS license money for those that don't want to be constrained by limited hardware support in Solaris? I guess what I'm asking, why would Microsoft want this person? (No offence intended to anyone involved)

rodgerd 11y ago
> Isn't Oracle Linux mostly a joke of a copy-cat distribution? Yes, it's RHEL with the serial numbers filed off. > isn't Oracle Linux mostly just an excuse to drain Oracle users for OS license money It's: 1/ revenge on Red Hat for buying JBoss when Larry wanted it. 2/ part of Oracle's vertical integration story. Oracle Linux sales reps will tell you Oracle DB isn't fully supported on RHEL (i.e. they reserve the right to force you to reproduce production support problems on a rebuilt platform) and Oracle have been trailing certification on the last couple of releases of the DB on RHEL vs. OEL. I imagine the end game Oracle are hoping for is undercutting Red Hat until they can run a hostile takeover, then shut down either the JBoss or WebLogic product lines, and generally do unto Linux what they've been doing to MySQL.
johannes1234321 11y ago
Oracle has a few extra patches in their kernel. They also created bttrfs. Maybe also other things.
- skuhn 11y ago
  If you use their "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel", it's actually a totally different (and much newer) kernel version than the one that ships with the equivalent RHEL release. Interestingly, they also provide it across OEL versions, so you can use the more modern kernel with the horribly outdated RHEL userland of your choice. For instance, UEK R4 is based on the 4.1.12 Linux kernel. RHEL 7 ships with 3.10.0. It still makes me nauseous to deal with Oracle, but providing support for a relatively modern kernel release is a step in the right direction. Now if they could shorten RHEL's time between major releases and get them out on a consistent timeframe, that would be another big step in the right direction. Of course then you're practically shipping Ubuntu.

diebir 11y ago

I highly doubt these Linux games will amount to much for Microsoft, but it's fun to watch. Their fundamental problem is (which they realize pretty well i seems) that they have lost developer's mind share. .NET may be a fine ecosystem and C# may be a great language but in all practical senses it is Windows-only. All these Mono/open source CLR games are not even the slightest blip on the radar for a practical day-to-day backend operations running cross platform (which is mostly Linux, but Windows as well). MS is lagging behind the Java ecosystem by 20 years. It's fun to watch them scramble and try this and that, but I suspect that the train has left the station long ago. I think Oracle Linux has been a joke. I don't know anyone in their right mind using that. RH or CentOS, yes. Oracle Linux? Most IT professionals will pay extra to have nothing to do with Oracle. Heck, I am considering risking moving to OpenJDK, just so I have nothing of Oracle in sight.

MichaelGG 11y ago
With MS supporting CLR on Linux, I don't see what the problem is. They now have a limited IDE and runtime support for cross-platform. FWIW I've used Mono in production on Linux in telecom, and it's handled many billions of messages over the years. With F# nonetheless. Apart from a few rare issues here and there it's been a great experience.
- Scarbutt 11y ago
  IMO the point still stands, in general it will be years before the CLR and .NET native is considered a serious alternative to Java/JVM on linux, although microsoft is doing a great effort, so who knows how long real adoption will take, I guess it can get closer to Golang, adoption wise, than to Java, the introduction of Swift is not going to make it easier for them either.
- zxcvcxz 11y ago
  >limited IDE and runtime support Key word: limited I don't believe MS will ever fully support Linux 100%. They will always make their software tooling more compatible with their OS even though they have the ability to create software for Linux that is on par with the Windows counterparts. Microsoft purposely leaves their "cross-platform" software gimped out so that anyone who does decide to take up .NET on Linux will eventually want to switch to Windows because Microsofts support for Linux is half assed. Hopefully most people can see through the obvious MS shilling that's been going on lately. Some people seem to believe the "new bash" coming to windows is somehow a game changer and that this means they no longer need Linux. Please. Setting up any serious development process in this Frankenstein OS is going to be a nightmare and it's going to break every tool chain conceivable.

oscargrouch 11y ago

Im just imagining the Linus smile nowadays. This is a really impressive achievement comparing with the Microsoft and the Linux of the nineties. I remember creating dial-up internet provider in the nineties using Linux, and all the prejudice the IT people have towards it. "Eww, you are using Linux? here.. i have a Solaris for you" or : "Why dont you just use NT 4?"

feld 11y ago
Well Solaris has always been a technically superior OS, but the userland was unfriendly compared to Linux.
- krakensden 11y ago
  I suspect the impression of Solaris' superiority is colored by the low ratio of users to impressive blog posts.
- oscargrouch 11y ago
  Specially back than, of course, but back in the day, we wouldnt be able to afford for a Solaris and consulting(i didnt know how to manage one) giving our small size, and, i dont know how it was in the US, but in Brazil it was something really expensive. Im saying this more in the light of what Linux was considered back then, and what it is right now.. In that time a OS maded by a "bunch of hippies" were something people used to laugh about, and people that use it like me were also mocked because of it, because of the seroius money and industry involved in other solutions.. while Linux was the OS of the "looser". We live in a completely different world now, thanks specially to Linus, Stallman, and all the other people we wouldnt be able to name.

jschlemm 11y ago

After the mess they made with windows metro/store apps, half-implementing apis and horrible documentation I would be wary of anything microsoft starts

biggio 11y ago

1st april

calgoo 11y ago

Its funny that my first reaction to the title was: Ugh he comes from Oracle, he is a leach that will try to destroy everything that is good! Then I read the article and it actually looks like he is a Open Source supporter etc.

jjman 11y ago

Microsoft Doors? anyone?

arca_vorago 11y ago

Sorry to be such a buzzkill, but even former oracle devs have told me software goes to oracle to die. Excuse me if I dont care that horrible company a got a guy from slightly less horrible company b because of his knowledge in a field company b wants to embrace only because they are recognizing it is much more of a threat than ever before (largely because of their failures in the first place). So while everyone is drinking the "ms is open sourcing everything" coolaid, I'm still sipping on "lessons from the 90s tea".

known 11y ago

Looks like Satya Nadella is venturing into Linux platform