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Is it possible that Canonical is about to be bought by Microsoft? Collaborating to Windows 10's WSL IMHO hints at that, and no doubt it would be a brilliant mov

Is it possible that Canonical is about to be bought by Microsoft? Collaborating to Windows 10's WSL IMHO hints at that, and no doubt it would be a brilliant move by the latter - swallowing almost the whole server market (which is something they have been wanting since when Windows NT was a thing) in one move. And then we might see Ubuntu integrate more tightly with Windows, or perhaps even turn into the first GNU/Windows distro... (though I'd rather wish Microsoft would replace their kernel, and collaborate with WINE instead, but the latter could intriguingly come too, as a natural consequence of becoming the "largest" distro in the market) I don't how the market would react at that though: panic, and everybody moving to Debian, or rather enthusiastic adoption? Edit: clarified

type0 10y ago
I hope not, it would be damaging to Canonical brand, the same way it was damaging to Nokia - and look what happened to them in the phone market.
- simonh 10y ago
  To be fair what was already happening to Nokia in the phone market just kept on happening.
nxc18 10y ago
The Windows NT kernel is generally excellent and has a lot of nice things that make it more appropriate for things like the desktop (the existence of a stable driver model/API comes to mind). People clamor for Linux to be everywhere, but the effects of never really being designed are clear; it is an amazing collection of kludge accumulated over decades in an attempt to catch up to NT. The only real advantage of Linux over NT for the x86 desktop is that it is free. Making NT open source in some way (kind of like the macOS model of open kernel + closed userland) would be a better move for the community; NT is part of a fundamentally different family of operating system designs. I'm personally not a fan of giving up on diversity and wholly adopting an OS monoculture. Without NT, your options would be Unix variants (*BSD), kludged Unix variants (macOS), and Unix clones (Linux).

type0 10y ago

I hope not, it would be damaging to Canonical brand, the same way it was damaging to Nokia - and look what happened to them in the phone market.

simonh 10y ago
To be fair what was already happening to Nokia in the phone market just kept on happening.

nxc18 10y ago

The Windows NT kernel is generally excellent and has a lot of nice things that make it more appropriate for things like the desktop (the existence of a stable driver model/API comes to mind). People clamor for Linux to be everywhere, but the effects of never really being designed are clear; it is an amazing collection of kludge accumulated over decades in an attempt to catch up to NT. The only real advantage of Linux over NT for the x86 desktop is that it is free. Making NT open source in some way (kind of like the macOS model of open kernel + closed userland) would be a better move for the community; NT is part of a fundamentally different family of operating system designs. I'm personally not a fan of giving up on diversity and wholly adopting an OS monoculture. Without NT, your options would be Unix variants (*BSD), kludged Unix variants (macOS), and Unix clones (Linux).