14 ms·

>Windows 10 is on a path to becoming a hybrid Windows/Linux system This sounds promising, something closer to OSX would give apple competition for devs like my

>Windows 10 is on a path to becoming a hybrid Windows/Linux system This sounds promising, something closer to OSX would give apple competition for devs like myself that want a linux based system and a fluffy "it-just-works" gui

dragonelite 6y ago
From what i can gather, China is hedging away from windows and onto the Linux based distro UOS(deepin). I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft is also making some preparation for that movement so they can still offer software for the Chinese market.
jmnicolas 6y ago
There's already WSL for your Unix needs. However MS seems to fall back on its old bad habits and the "it-just-works" gui is less true since a while now (I would say a year): we had some major pains after every Windows update at work to the point where the admin blocked them in the firewall. I think their release schedule (twice a year) is way too fast, and they should focus more on stability.
- rubidium 6y ago
  LTSB for the win. I don’t know why more orgs don’t default to that.
  - jmnicolas 6y ago
    We're 2 to manage IT tasks in the company (my real qualification is software dev though). We don't have access to Microsoft anything (too expensive) so we use the licenses that comes with the computers we (rarely) buy. I still haven't managed to convert all our workstations from Win 7 to Win 10 (and yes we still have a couple XPs), there are special apps on them that needs the intervention of one of our provider, it's complicated. Last year one of our provider sent us some machines with LTSB 2016 installed. They're already at their EOL. Edge is not available and there's not even an image viewer on this OS, MS Photos is impossible to install (and is crap anyway, it regularly fails to show an image that any other viewer including Paint can open etc). Color me unimpressed.
    - xist 6y ago
      LTSB (or LTSC) aren't designed for general purpose web office machines. This is one of the reasons it's difficult to get LTSC, it's only available via enterprise and it's designed for a very specific non changing long term environment. It will never have the most updated drivers, or the integration of the latest/greatest web browser or microsoft store. LTSB is amazing fit for things like kiosks, POS, appliance that are designed for a single purpose only. Uptime & Stability is the purpose, not enduser focus. You should never use it outside of a large enterprise where you can support it.
  - tmottabr 6y ago
    It is not used on most orgs because LTSB is not meant to be used on desktops, Microsoft docs even say it is not meant for desktops and so they will likely not support you if you use it in a desktop. LTBS is meant for stuff like ATM or POS as replacement for the older Windows embedded versions.
- simonh 6y ago
  WSL 2 uses Hyper-V itself, so yes that's exactly what we're talking about.
kubanczyk 6y ago
The ecosystem is already there for devs, except for those interested with directly interacting with their laptop's hardware. I've migrated from MBP to Win10 WSL three months ago and it's like a breath of fresh air for general $DayJob backend CRUD-like work. I'd still prefer a Linux laptop, but WSL is so much closer to a real Linux box. I don't think I touched PowerShell or any .BAT stuff even once.
- selsta 6y ago
  WSL2 is a simple virtual machine. Nothing you couldn’t do on macOS with e.g. multipass.
  - withinboredom 6y ago
    But it’s not simple. It’s nothing like a “simple” VM.
    - Sangeppato 6y ago
      It's a headless VM that runs on Hyper-V
      - AstralStorm 6y ago
        Once Microsoft finishes the work on DXGI for Linux, it won't even have to be headless. It's also very paravirtualized, which is why HyperV enlightenments are required for WSL2 guest.
      - withinboredom 6y ago
        That's a gross over-generalization: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/wsl-2-where-is-it-and-where-is-it-going/#:~:text=The%20WSL%202%20hypervisor%20is,interactions%20between%20Windows%20and%20Linux https://www.techrepublic.com/article/wsl-2-where-is-it-and-w....
        Sangeppato 6y ago
danieldk 6y ago
This sounds promising, something closer to OSX would give apple competition for devs like myself that want a linux based system and a fluffy "it-just-works" gui I switched from macOS to Linux. GNOME and others are pretty good these days. I did try Windows + WSL2 out of curiosity, but my brain is just fundamentally incompatible with non-unix systems. Moreover, I was really annoyed that when Windows installed drivers automatically, it also installed a lot of Realtek and Intel crapware with it. Why? It would be really nice though if Microsoft could make a Linux version of Office (even if it was just Wine-based), because the web version is too limited. Oh, and the Affinity suite would be nice as well ;).
- withinboredom 6y ago
  > Why? You’d have to ask the driver developers. In my experience though, that crapware is the only way to configure the hardware since config files aren’t a thing in Windows.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    On the other hand, because config files aren't a thing you don't have to learn 15 different poorly documented often-changing config file formats.
- harha 6y ago
  Coming from Mac and Linux, I sometimes need to use Windows and I'm always surprised how they managed to make it so incredibly difficult to use and bloated. A minimal version of Windows along with a good package manager and a UX closer to Windows 2000 (or at least without the whole Control Panel / Settings App confusion) would be amazing.
  - Joeri 6y ago
    Supposedly windows 10X will be that thing. I have to say I find the settings / control panel dichotomy issue overblown. I rarely need to go into control panel anymore, and pretty much never without it being a clickthrough from the new settings app.
smartmic 6y ago
For me it feels quite the opposite. OS X is built upon on a Unix core and shares such common heritage. There is consistency in the design throughout all OS levels. On the contrary with Windows and GNU/Linux, IMHO two very incompatible architectures. The business rationale for Microsoft behind this is clear but hybrids represent mostly a temporary transition state. So the question is, what comes next, where is the journey to go?
- EE84M3i 6y ago
  >There is consistency in the design throughout all OS levels. There is...? What sort of examples come to mind?
  - dippersauce 6y ago
    I cannot speak for the other poster, but there are several levels where consistency is significantly better. The GUI is of course the most noticeable, especially as the “iOS-ification” of macOS continues. But for a developer, the methods you interact with are more consistent across platforms and apps. Porting an app between iOS and macOS can be as simple as changing a few method names and setting a new target in XCode. For the most part one can assume things like app bundle layouts and where files will be dropped on the system. Most of this consistency lies parallel to where Apple enforces it, which comes with its own downsides. That consistency isn’t absolute though, rough spots like the boundary between Mach and the BSD components still exist.
severino 6y ago
So what's wrong with Linux if you want a Linux based system? I don't remember the last time I got a Linux desktop which didn't "just work"; of course I try to avoid exotic hardware components, but the truth is that you can run into driver problems and issues too when running operating systems you pay money for, like Windows.
- milankragujevic 6y ago
  I would say that these days the exotic components are the ones that DO work on Linux, and various common components just don't, or work "on paper" but with debilitating bugs.
  - willis936 6y ago
    I really feel this. I manage about a hundred computers for scientists/students. Total free reign. Some want to use linux. I’m sorry, you will never have working audio. Oh. It looks like the available linux drivers don’t play nice with this sandy bridge mobo and the dm will fail to initialize. The list goes on. Never have I seen lack of hardware support on windows. I think that’s the essence of “just works” here.
    - tomrod 6y ago
      Weird. Outside of wifi Debian and Fedora always just work for my exotic configs.
      - willis936 6y ago
        Ububtu is almost exclusively requested. I wouldn’t say most of these configs are exotic, just legacy.
        jacquesm 6y ago
        You must be filing a lot of tickets then.
      - 6y ago
qwertox 6y ago
I'm not sure if Windows 10's GUI is still a fluffy "it-just-works" GUI. Windows 7 did make a lot of sense, but configuring Windows 10 has become confusing. You have two versions of the configuration tools, the legacy one and the new HTML-like one, and the latter seems to be almost unusable because of how it is structured. Not to mention that the HTML-variant doesn't work when you VNC into a laptop which has its lid closed and the attached monitor is turned off. Then it's not possible to scroll, because the pages are broken, as if the HTML-renderer is unable to obtain proper display metrics.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  Good evidence that Microsoft has already begun making Windows more like Linux Desktop.
jacquesm 6y ago
So use Linux if you want an 'it just works' gui. It just works. I've been using Linux as my daily driver since just about forever and it works just fine. Very, very rarely do I hit the limitations of the system, usually this is when trying to do something weird such as running 8 sound cards in the same machine or some other strange hardware feat. But other than that it is very hard to find flaws in the day-to-day use and for more mundane use cases it just works accurately describes the state of affairs. If you have to develop for Windows then that's of course another matter.
- mhoad 6y ago
  I would second this. I finally got rid of my MacBook Pro after all kinds of hardware problems and moved to Linux as my daily driver. I made a point of buying a new laptop that was built by a System76 type company in Europe to avoid any weird hardware compatibility issues and it really does work perfectly for me. I’m using Pop_OS 20.04 for what it’s worth.
- baryphonic 6y ago
  I recently had an issue with my Linux Mint desktop where a power outage somehow introduced a hard disk error that was not easy to resolve (unless one knows exactly what to look for in the logs and knows the correct `fsck` incantation from memory). Linux is definitely still worth it, but the "just works" factor is just significantly less than MacOS.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    If that had happened to you on Windows instead of doing an fsck you might have had to re-install from scratch. And I've had OS/X helpfully suggest to 'initialize a harddrive' with some perfectly good data and a borked boot block on it. Fixing that took a lot more magic than just an fsck, no matter what the incantations. Once you have trouble at that level any OS will be tricky to get going again because a lot of the underlying assumptions have failed.
    - baryphonic 6y ago
Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
>something closer to OSX would give apple competition for devs like myself that want a linux based system Apple has been consistently removing native *nix tools from the system with every iteration. I was recently surprised to see it still had SFTP built-in (although I'm not sure how long that would last). But, homebrew still does save the day. I wonder whether binary notarization requirements will affect that too.
- aunty_helen 6y ago
  Exactly, if apple wants to keep people buying 6 grand laptops they need to realise removing tools like scp that 1% of their users use isn't going to be ok if there's a competent alternative.
pjmlp 6y ago
Nothing that Windows NT 3.51 didn't offer already, Microsoft just wasn't serious regarding POSIX compatibility. Had Microsoft kept POSIX support on par with Win32 and Linux would never taken over.
phkahler 6y ago
>> This sounds promising, something closer to OSX would give apple competition for devs like myself that want a linux based system and a fluffy "it-just-works" gui No, don't. That seems to be what they want. It's not about running linux apps on Windows. It's about blending the two so that even Linux apps are dependent on Microsft APIs and such. What is the point of bringing native DX12 to linux if not that? BTW they floated that a while back and the kernel folks said no. It's the "extend" phase they are in now. Once they extend linux and you jump on with that gui, then the work to extinguish the other options, or just dont care because they get to take in money for every user of MS/linux hybrid. This is painfully obvious and a bunch of people on here are saying "STFU" unless you have proof of their intentions, which is a stupid argument given the history and current efforts to "extend".
- derefr 6y ago
  > What is the point of bringing native DX12 to linux if not that? Oh, easy: it’s so games written for DX12 on Windows—that are currently run on Linux using Wine—can have a direct, low-overhead GPU driver path, rather than Wine needing to translate DX12 calls into OpenGL/Vulkan calls first. Of course, if you’re a game-engine developer, you know you can achieve the same by just writing your engine to target Vulkan instead of DX12. But if you’re e.g. Steam, you’d love to see more games “automatically made” multi-platform (with comparable performance), so that you can sell them to your Linux userbase. Microsoft themselves are—maybe surprisingly—in the same boat as Steam here. The various game studios they own publish multi-platform games. Those platforms don’t necessarily include Linux, but they do often include Android. And merging code into the upstream Linux kernel is one way to get it to appear in Android. ————— This change would also allow the graphics of Linux programs running in a VM on Windows to be accelerated through virtualization (i.e. having the X/Wayland server on Linux act as a Windows DX12 client.) It’s analogous to the reason that some VM software offers special-purpose “host-guest filesystem” drivers to the guest, that allows the guest to just pass through filesystem requests at a high level, rather than needing a virtual block device or a networked-filesystem protocol. This is the reason Microsoft themselves offered. I feel like there’s a lot more money on being able to easily port Windows games to Android, though.
  - 6y ago
chooseaname 6y ago
I get poopoo'd every time I say it, but I think eventually Windows will be a UI on top of Linux.
vms20591 6y ago
I've seen a comment in reddit sometime before that said, "I would use Linux if it had all the programs I use day to day in Microsoft Windows". Though I can understand this, Microsoft providing support for Linux inside Windows is far from being the right approach. Its only going to make users stay on it. Rather, software makers should release their products for Linux as well. Microsoft is working towards the goal making Windows the de facto platform for all kinds of users. People - users, developers, artists or anyone, should see this beyond software. They should see the philosophy that drives it, the "Free Software" movement paved way for an ecosystem where "Knowledge Freedom" was more important.

dragonelite 6y ago

From what i can gather, China is hedging away from windows and onto the Linux based distro UOS(deepin). I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft is also making some preparation for that movement so they can still offer software for the Chinese market.

jmnicolas 6y ago

There's already WSL for your Unix needs. However MS seems to fall back on its old bad habits and the "it-just-works" gui is less true since a while now (I would say a year): we had some major pains after every Windows update at work to the point where the admin blocked them in the firewall. I think their release schedule (twice a year) is way too fast, and they should focus more on stability.

rubidium 6y ago
LTSB for the win. I don’t know why more orgs don’t default to that.
- jmnicolas 6y ago
  We're 2 to manage IT tasks in the company (my real qualification is software dev though). We don't have access to Microsoft anything (too expensive) so we use the licenses that comes with the computers we (rarely) buy. I still haven't managed to convert all our workstations from Win 7 to Win 10 (and yes we still have a couple XPs), there are special apps on them that needs the intervention of one of our provider, it's complicated. Last year one of our provider sent us some machines with LTSB 2016 installed. They're already at their EOL. Edge is not available and there's not even an image viewer on this OS, MS Photos is impossible to install (and is crap anyway, it regularly fails to show an image that any other viewer including Paint can open etc). Color me unimpressed.
  - xist 6y ago
    LTSB (or LTSC) aren't designed for general purpose web office machines. This is one of the reasons it's difficult to get LTSC, it's only available via enterprise and it's designed for a very specific non changing long term environment. It will never have the most updated drivers, or the integration of the latest/greatest web browser or microsoft store. LTSB is amazing fit for things like kiosks, POS, appliance that are designed for a single purpose only. Uptime & Stability is the purpose, not enduser focus. You should never use it outside of a large enterprise where you can support it.
- tmottabr 6y ago
  It is not used on most orgs because LTSB is not meant to be used on desktops, Microsoft docs even say it is not meant for desktops and so they will likely not support you if you use it in a desktop. LTBS is meant for stuff like ATM or POS as replacement for the older Windows embedded versions.
simonh 6y ago
WSL 2 uses Hyper-V itself, so yes that's exactly what we're talking about.

kubanczyk 6y ago

The ecosystem is already there for devs, except for those interested with directly interacting with their laptop's hardware. I've migrated from MBP to Win10 WSL three months ago and it's like a breath of fresh air for general $DayJob backend CRUD-like work. I'd still prefer a Linux laptop, but WSL is so much closer to a real Linux box. I don't think I touched PowerShell or any .BAT stuff even once.

selsta 6y ago
WSL2 is a simple virtual machine. Nothing you couldn’t do on macOS with e.g. multipass.
- withinboredom 6y ago
  But it’s not simple. It’s nothing like a “simple” VM.
  - Sangeppato 6y ago
    It's a headless VM that runs on Hyper-V
    - AstralStorm 6y ago
      Once Microsoft finishes the work on DXGI for Linux, it won't even have to be headless. It's also very paravirtualized, which is why HyperV enlightenments are required for WSL2 guest.
    - withinboredom 6y ago
      That's a gross over-generalization: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/wsl-2-where-is-it-and-where-is-it-going/#:~:text=The%20WSL%202%20hypervisor%20is,interactions%20between%20Windows%20and%20Linux https://www.techrepublic.com/article/wsl-2-where-is-it-and-w....
      - Sangeppato 6y ago

danieldk 6y ago

This sounds promising, something closer to OSX would give apple competition for devs like myself that want a linux based system and a fluffy "it-just-works" gui I switched from macOS to Linux. GNOME and others are pretty good these days. I did try Windows + WSL2 out of curiosity, but my brain is just fundamentally incompatible with non-unix systems. Moreover, I was really annoyed that when Windows installed drivers automatically, it also installed a lot of Realtek and Intel crapware with it. Why? It would be really nice though if Microsoft could make a Linux version of Office (even if it was just Wine-based), because the web version is too limited. Oh, and the Affinity suite would be nice as well ;).

withinboredom 6y ago
> Why? You’d have to ask the driver developers. In my experience though, that crapware is the only way to configure the hardware since config files aren’t a thing in Windows.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  On the other hand, because config files aren't a thing you don't have to learn 15 different poorly documented often-changing config file formats.
harha 6y ago
Coming from Mac and Linux, I sometimes need to use Windows and I'm always surprised how they managed to make it so incredibly difficult to use and bloated. A minimal version of Windows along with a good package manager and a UX closer to Windows 2000 (or at least without the whole Control Panel / Settings App confusion) would be amazing.
- Joeri 6y ago
  Supposedly windows 10X will be that thing. I have to say I find the settings / control panel dichotomy issue overblown. I rarely need to go into control panel anymore, and pretty much never without it being a clickthrough from the new settings app.

smartmic 6y ago

For me it feels quite the opposite. OS X is built upon on a Unix core and shares such common heritage. There is consistency in the design throughout all OS levels. On the contrary with Windows and GNU/Linux, IMHO two very incompatible architectures. The business rationale for Microsoft behind this is clear but hybrids represent mostly a temporary transition state. So the question is, what comes next, where is the journey to go?

EE84M3i 6y ago
>There is consistency in the design throughout all OS levels. There is...? What sort of examples come to mind?
- dippersauce 6y ago
  I cannot speak for the other poster, but there are several levels where consistency is significantly better. The GUI is of course the most noticeable, especially as the “iOS-ification” of macOS continues. But for a developer, the methods you interact with are more consistent across platforms and apps. Porting an app between iOS and macOS can be as simple as changing a few method names and setting a new target in XCode. For the most part one can assume things like app bundle layouts and where files will be dropped on the system. Most of this consistency lies parallel to where Apple enforces it, which comes with its own downsides. That consistency isn’t absolute though, rough spots like the boundary between Mach and the BSD components still exist.

severino 6y ago

So what's wrong with Linux if you want a Linux based system? I don't remember the last time I got a Linux desktop which didn't "just work"; of course I try to avoid exotic hardware components, but the truth is that you can run into driver problems and issues too when running operating systems you pay money for, like Windows.

milankragujevic 6y ago
I would say that these days the exotic components are the ones that DO work on Linux, and various common components just don't, or work "on paper" but with debilitating bugs.
- willis936 6y ago
  I really feel this. I manage about a hundred computers for scientists/students. Total free reign. Some want to use linux. I’m sorry, you will never have working audio. Oh. It looks like the available linux drivers don’t play nice with this sandy bridge mobo and the dm will fail to initialize. The list goes on. Never have I seen lack of hardware support on windows. I think that’s the essence of “just works” here.
  - tomrod 6y ago
    Weird. Outside of wifi Debian and Fedora always just work for my exotic configs.
    - willis936 6y ago
      Ububtu is almost exclusively requested. I wouldn’t say most of these configs are exotic, just legacy.
      - jacquesm 6y ago
        You must be filing a lot of tickets then.
    - 6y ago

qwertox 6y ago

I'm not sure if Windows 10's GUI is still a fluffy "it-just-works" GUI. Windows 7 did make a lot of sense, but configuring Windows 10 has become confusing. You have two versions of the configuration tools, the legacy one and the new HTML-like one, and the latter seems to be almost unusable because of how it is structured. Not to mention that the HTML-variant doesn't work when you VNC into a laptop which has its lid closed and the attached monitor is turned off. Then it's not possible to scroll, because the pages are broken, as if the HTML-renderer is unable to obtain proper display metrics.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
Good evidence that Microsoft has already begun making Windows more like Linux Desktop.

jacquesm 6y ago

So use Linux if you want an 'it just works' gui. It just works. I've been using Linux as my daily driver since just about forever and it works just fine. Very, very rarely do I hit the limitations of the system, usually this is when trying to do something weird such as running 8 sound cards in the same machine or some other strange hardware feat. But other than that it is very hard to find flaws in the day-to-day use and for more mundane use cases it just works accurately describes the state of affairs. If you have to develop for Windows then that's of course another matter.

mhoad 6y ago
I would second this. I finally got rid of my MacBook Pro after all kinds of hardware problems and moved to Linux as my daily driver. I made a point of buying a new laptop that was built by a System76 type company in Europe to avoid any weird hardware compatibility issues and it really does work perfectly for me. I’m using Pop_OS 20.04 for what it’s worth.
baryphonic 6y ago
I recently had an issue with my Linux Mint desktop where a power outage somehow introduced a hard disk error that was not easy to resolve (unless one knows exactly what to look for in the logs and knows the correct `fsck` incantation from memory). Linux is definitely still worth it, but the "just works" factor is just significantly less than MacOS.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  If that had happened to you on Windows instead of doing an fsck you might have had to re-install from scratch. And I've had OS/X helpfully suggest to 'initialize a harddrive' with some perfectly good data and a borked boot block on it. Fixing that took a lot more magic than just an fsck, no matter what the incantations. Once you have trouble at that level any OS will be tricky to get going again because a lot of the underlying assumptions have failed.
  - baryphonic 6y ago

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago

>something closer to OSX would give apple competition for devs like myself that want a linux based system Apple has been consistently removing native *nix tools from the system with every iteration. I was recently surprised to see it still had SFTP built-in (although I'm not sure how long that would last). But, homebrew still does save the day. I wonder whether binary notarization requirements will affect that too.

aunty_helen 6y ago
Exactly, if apple wants to keep people buying 6 grand laptops they need to realise removing tools like scp that 1% of their users use isn't going to be ok if there's a competent alternative.

pjmlp 6y ago

Nothing that Windows NT 3.51 didn't offer already, Microsoft just wasn't serious regarding POSIX compatibility. Had Microsoft kept POSIX support on par with Win32 and Linux would never taken over.

phkahler 6y ago

>> This sounds promising, something closer to OSX would give apple competition for devs like myself that want a linux based system and a fluffy "it-just-works" gui No, don't. That seems to be what they want. It's not about running linux apps on Windows. It's about blending the two so that even Linux apps are dependent on Microsft APIs and such. What is the point of bringing native DX12 to linux if not that? BTW they floated that a while back and the kernel folks said no. It's the "extend" phase they are in now. Once they extend linux and you jump on with that gui, then the work to extinguish the other options, or just dont care because they get to take in money for every user of MS/linux hybrid. This is painfully obvious and a bunch of people on here are saying "STFU" unless you have proof of their intentions, which is a stupid argument given the history and current efforts to "extend".

derefr 6y ago
> What is the point of bringing native DX12 to linux if not that? Oh, easy: it’s so games written for DX12 on Windows—that are currently run on Linux using Wine—can have a direct, low-overhead GPU driver path, rather than Wine needing to translate DX12 calls into OpenGL/Vulkan calls first. Of course, if you’re a game-engine developer, you know you can achieve the same by just writing your engine to target Vulkan instead of DX12. But if you’re e.g. Steam, you’d love to see more games “automatically made” multi-platform (with comparable performance), so that you can sell them to your Linux userbase. Microsoft themselves are—maybe surprisingly—in the same boat as Steam here. The various game studios they own publish multi-platform games. Those platforms don’t necessarily include Linux, but they do often include Android. And merging code into the upstream Linux kernel is one way to get it to appear in Android. ————— This change would also allow the graphics of Linux programs running in a VM on Windows to be accelerated through virtualization (i.e. having the X/Wayland server on Linux act as a Windows DX12 client.) It’s analogous to the reason that some VM software offers special-purpose “host-guest filesystem” drivers to the guest, that allows the guest to just pass through filesystem requests at a high level, rather than needing a virtual block device or a networked-filesystem protocol. This is the reason Microsoft themselves offered. I feel like there’s a lot more money on being able to easily port Windows games to Android, though.
- 6y ago

chooseaname 6y ago

I get poopoo'd every time I say it, but I think eventually Windows will be a UI on top of Linux.

vms20591 6y ago

I've seen a comment in reddit sometime before that said, "I would use Linux if it had all the programs I use day to day in Microsoft Windows". Though I can understand this, Microsoft providing support for Linux inside Windows is far from being the right approach. Its only going to make users stay on it. Rather, software makers should release their products for Linux as well. Microsoft is working towards the goal making Windows the de facto platform for all kinds of users. People - users, developers, artists or anyone, should see this beyond software. They should see the philosophy that drives it, the "Free Software" movement paved way for an ecosystem where "Knowledge Freedom" was more important.