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For the first time ever, Microsoft will distribute its own version of Linux
- rconti 9y agoStep 3: Extinguish.
- wyldfire 9y agoMore like step 0 -- the cycle begins again.
- DiabloD3 9y agoMicrosoft must still abide by all the applicable FOSS licenses; not only that, Ubuntu and the systemd crew already tried the EEE tactic and it largely blew up in their faces.
- pritambaral 9y agoIt's more than just licenses, though. With this program, Microsoft is going to be providing a service in addition to simply putting out their build of the Linux kernel: the userspace, libraries in it, and associated cloud services. They can put as little or as much they want in these service layers, and these service layers are free from copyleft license restrictions (little embedded Linux software is AGPL, and their cloud services are almost certainly not going to be AGPL). Now, I'm not saying they're going to do this, but, if they wanted to, everything above the kernel is very easy to "extend" in a capturing effort. Indeed, Ubuntu and systemd have successfully extended layers above the kernel to great success. It's a good thing that both are open source (and that systemd is LGPL), but that was not a very neccessary requirement to the extensions they have built.
- andrepd 9y ago>Ubuntu and the systemd crew already tried the EEE tactic and it largely blew up in their faces. How so?
- DiabloD3 9y agoDebian has allowed users to go back to sysvinitrc (for both security and stability reasons), and Redhat has been trying to EEE the systemd project entirely to fix their issues with it.
- d33 9y agoTheir own distro? And what would they really gain?
- boznz 9y agoMicrosoft is a different company now from the one you probably think it is, the latest podcast of Exponent http://exponent.fm/episode-147-there-always-a-bigger-fish/ http://exponent.fm/episode-147-there-always-a-bigger-fish/ was very enlightening
- mistrial9 9y agoperfect double-speak ! X is not the same as X You could go far as a new M$ft representative.. submit your Social Media credentials pending our approval.
- zeusk 9y agoJust finished hearing it, mostly BS and external gossips. The guy claimed he "worked" within Windows for a while but was a Business Development Rep (Sales) at Microsoft for less than two years (2011-2013).
- jensvdh 9y agoEmbrace Extend Extinguish
- castle-bravo 9y agoNot if RMS has anything to say about it.
- torstenvl 9y agoAny chance they'll call it XENIX?
- cybertronic 9y agoThe beginning ot the end of Windows?
- mehrdadn 9y agoI don't see that coming in the foreseeable future, unless they make a Linux desktop that is as user-friendly as Windows.
- monocasa 9y agoWhat if they keep trending towards making Windows as user friendly as Linux?
- freeone3000 9y agoThere's no more VP of Windows. It's pretty clear MSFT is making a hard cloud push. Seriously - they gave out Windows for free for three years and NOW you think it's not a priority?
- garamirez 9y agoMore fragmentation.. awesome!
- IncRnd 9y agoI can't wait until I get to use Microsoft Linux Windows 10 Home Edition! It will be the most advanced, easy to use, and comprehensive version of Linux ever! Plus, it will have the most spyware, call home features, and random slowdowns yet! Before I forget... Microsoft Linux Windows 10 Home Edition Extended with the included Open Source Power Pack will have Bob and Clippy. MiLiWi 10 Home will be especially augmented by the customer friendly features you've come to expect. The removal of Elf, dwarf, and other nonsensical needless bloat!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- larkeith 9y agoCould someone please update the url to the non-AMP link: https://www.businessinsider.in/For-the-first-time-ever-Microsoft-will-distribute-its-own-version-of-Linux/articleshow/63791833.cms https://www.businessinsider.in/For-the-first-time-ever-Micro...
- mehrdadn 9y agoOr maybe the .com one: http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-azure-sphere-is-powered-by-linux-2018-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-azure-sphere-is-pow...
- larkeith 9y agoOops, this is much better - I've no idea how I got .in, thanks for catching that!
- Groxx 9y agoAlong similar lines: seems like it might be worth blocking all amp links by default, unless there's an automatic way to get the root URL when one is provided.
- lexicality 9y agoAll amp pages have to have a <link rel="canonical"> in them to be valid, so a crawler could find the root via that.
- robertelder 9y agoLot's of people are mentioning the well-known phase 'Embrace, extend, and extinguish', but what if it ends up being Linux that does the extinguishing? Linux has always been a pain for the average user to run on a laptop or desktop, but these days Windows isn't that much better and I don't think it'll get much better. I'm sure lots of you will think I'm crazy, but I figured it would be an interesting discussion topic.
- incompatible 9y agoWindows seems far worse to me, and has always seemed worse. Somebody just asked me to help fix their Windows laptop, which is running ridiculously slowly. My inclination is to wipe it and install a fresh version of Windows. That'd be pretty easy in Linux (I use a separate /home partition and routinely reinstall the OS) but Windows is such a mess, how do you untangle the user's own data and installed software?
- mehrdadn 9y ago> That'd be pretty easy in Linux (I use a separate /home partition and routinely reinstall the OS) but Windows is such a mess, how do you untangle the user's own data and installed software? %UserProfile%\{Desktop,Documents,Music,Pictures,Videos,...}?
- incompatible 9y agoIs %UserProfile% an environment variable? Will there be multiple settings of it? Hopefully if the user's data is all in one subdirectory tree and I could cope. I'm not sure if it will work for software though, it tends to require random setup like registry changes and would also require reinstallation. Which may be difficult if it was pay-to-install software of if the original vendor is defunct.
- mehrdadn 9y ago> Is %UserProfile% an environment variable? Is $HOME an environmental variable? It's certainly exposed as one. Same here. > Will there be multiple settings of it? Will there be multiple settings of $HOME? You can certainly set it to a different value for some program, but does that mean you have multiple settings of it? Same here. > Hopefully if the user's data is all in one subdirectory tree and I could cope. "Hopefully" the same is true when you do the same on Linux and cope there? > I'm not sure if it will work for software though, it tends to require random setup like registry changes and would also require reinstallation. Which may be difficult if it was pay-to-install software of if the original vendor is defunct. ...what? You explicitly asked about saving "user's own data" and not "installed software". The entire point of your comment was that you wanted to wipe the software while keeping the user data. So I gave you a solution for keeping the user data that let you wipe the software. Now you complain it doesn't work for migrating installed software?!
- lexicality 9y agoBetter URL: https://amp.businessinsider.com/microsoft-azure-sphere-is-powered-by-linux-2018-4 https://amp.businessinsider.com/microsoft-azure-sphere-is-po... Honestly, amp-businessinsider-com.cdn.ampproject.org is the kind of url you try to teach grandma not to click on so she doesn't enter her bank details on halifax-online-co-uk-personal-logon-login.jsp.secure.tk when they send her an email
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y agoWow, this is a really disappointing thread. There are very few substantive comments here. I came to the comments to dispute this claim from the article: >It's the first time ever that Microsoft has made Linux part of a product offering. Microsoft has offered Linux distributions on Azure for a few years now, and has ported a fair bit of their software to Linux, including VSCode, MSSQL, Powershell, etc. But it looks like I also need to comment on all of the negativity in this thread. This change from Microsoft is a Good Thing. Microsoft has been making some serious strides towards being a better citizen of the technology community in the past few years, and this is something to be celebrated. If you think you can scorn Microsoft out of existence, you're delusional. Microsoft is here to stay. You can choose to respond to these promising changes with optimism, or you can respond to them with spite - which of these responses do you think is going to encourage Microsoft to continue in their course of positive change? By all means, we should continue to hold their feet to the fire for stupid crap like Windows 10 being spyware. But we can't just be angry at them all the time - we have to celebrate the things they do right, too. Microsoft is clearly making a sustained effort to improve. They've done positive things they can't turn back on, like releasing large amounts of open source software under OSI licenses. Be happy!
- zeth___ 9y agoAnyone who was alive in the 90/00's can't be happy with microsoft, anymore than anyone who was alive in the 70s/80s can be happy with big blue. Are they different companies now? Yes. But not by choice, the market beat them down and made both irrelevant compared to what they were. I am happy with a small Microsoft and small IBM. Microsoft however is still too big for my liking.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y agoThe 90's ended almost 20 years ago! They are a different company and you're just being an old fogey. As I said: Microsoft is here to stay. You can choose to be a bitter old man about it, or you can choose to be grateful that they're moving in a better direction. But you can't make them go away.
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- zeusk 9y agoEven better URL: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-microsoft-azure-sphere-secure-and-power-the-intelligent-edge/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-microsoft...
- mistrial9 9y ago.. checks AU/X manuals for a precedent ..
- 2trill2spill 9y agoThis is awesome, keep it up Microsoft. They also ship their own version of FreeBSD as well[1]. [1]: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/freebsd-now-available-in-azure-marketplace/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/freebsd-now-available...
- askvictor 9y agoArticle is very light on detail, but from the MS announcement, this seems to be essentially a distro for IoT and the like; I was about to ask what it's based on, but having read that, I'll be guessing it's minimal and built from the ground up. I'm also very curious about what the microcontroller design announced involves - obviously powerful enough to run Linux, and customisable, so I'd be guessing ARM based (small chance of MIPS or RISC, but probably not)
- pasbesoin 9y agoEmbrace, extend... You know what comes next. P.S. Maybe it will be different, this time. However, there's some significant history to overcome, if some of us are to come to believe this.
- youdontknowtho 9y agoMicrosoft could use similar techniques to the way they ported SQL Server to let all Windows software run on Linux. I don't think they will, but it's always something that could happen. They have said multiple times that they are open to open sourcing Windows. It could happen...stranger things have. This is really just them giving their customers what they want. They are a business after all.
- bifrost 9y agoI think this is an interesting market shift for MSFT. I worked there in the late 90's and was there for the introduction of Windows2000. Hillariously most of their big acquisitions ran FreeBSD and/or Solaris and I don't ever recall anyone considering Linux much of a threat since it never really worked for the workloads we were seeing. Even today I rarely see anyone using Linux as a desktop (MSFTs primary market) so 20 something years later its still not really a threat. MSFT is smart enough to offer what people want, maybe this will get more people to try it, not a bad thing.
- andreiw 9y agoI think the bigger news here is the custom MCU design. What is it? Is it Arm-derived, and if not - why? Anyone pay attention lately to MSFT’s activity on LKML?
- andreiw 9y agoArm derived: 32-bit Cortex-A and a Cortex-M for radio. Curious what the security arch is...
- codedokode 9y agoWhy did they design a custom chip? To make it harder to run non-Microsoft versions of Linux?
- nunez 9y agoWasn't Xenix a Microsoft-maintained *nix?