Does Microsoft want to switch to Linux?

I’ve been expecting Canonical to announce a new majority shareholder for a while. It hasn’t happened yet but Microsofts close cooperation on WSL and 18.04 on hyperV makes me think it could still happen.

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Lots of groups of people love it. tight control, restricted underlaying system, sandboxed everything. its great, and I assume at least partially a reaction to ChromeOS. Its (potentially) the perfect system for 90% of people and 90% of use cases.

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I’m a bit skeptical, just because it would be a bad investment for Microsoft because Canonical is cooperating completely without a Microsoft rep at the helm.

Why spend money when friendship works just as well?

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True, but Nazi Germany invaded her erstwhile ally Italy as soon as it looked like the cooperation might cease.

Wow, Goodwin’s Law in under 25 posts. Not quite fair on Microsoft, I prefer to think of Oracle as the Nazi’s :stuck_out_tongue:

Surprised no one has mentioned Azure Sphere. It’s a thing, just not released yet. Azure Sphere is a Microsoft operating system that uses the Linux kernel. It’s going to be for IoT and embedded devices, for now, but considering their direction lately I imagine they’re going to take off.

A healthy dose of skepticism is fine, in my opinion. Too much more and you’re going to get left behind. The branches of online Linux communities I’ve seen on Reddit and Spiceworks that are still a hard anti-Microsoft seem to be intentionally missing the point to hold onto their ancient notions about what Microsoft is.

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Completely agree there. Today’s Microsoft is not yesterdays creature. Of course, it’s still a corporation that needs to make profit so viewing things with a healthy dose of skepticism is a good thing to have. The same needs to be kept in mind for Apple and Google etc.

Oracle though, they actually wear jackboots and goose step around the corporate office, it’s true, a friend of my uncle’s neighbour went to Redmond this one time. Wait maybe that was just a Bryan Cantrill monologue, I forget…

EDIT, I should have said Redwood for Oracle, Redmond is Microsoft :blush:

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I don’t see the developer market as large enough to generate enough revenue to care about. But, yes, I’m sure MS wants devs to live on Azure and I’m sure they noticed the extent of Linux use on Azure.

Like everyone else, MS is betting consumers will eventually migrate from using locally installed applications to using cloud-based applications. In that scenario, it is to Microsoft’s financial advantage to push for an OS-agnostic cloud because it won’t be able to duplicate the hardware/software lock-in of Apple or even Google/Android.

The more MS gets its revenue from cloud products/service and reduces its need for revenue from sales of Windows and Windows software, the wider the opening for Linux in its planning. At the same time, OS-agnostic means OS-agnostic.

Meanwhile, Microsoft can’t give up control of its product line to the Linux community. That’s why there won’t be headlines some day about MS killing Windows and adopting Linux. But, MS could become a serious and significant player in Linux development , churning out code it wants to use in its products.

Welcome to 2011 :wink:

Microsoft has contributed heavily to the Linux kernel for a long time. Employees at Microsoft are free to use OS X and Linux (in certain roles, I don’t think support for ADDS can use Arch lol).

When .NET Core released, there were posters everywhere that had the devil in the middle of a snowstorm (presumably in Hell) wearing winter clothes with the title of “It finally happened” :joy::rofl::rofl::rofl:

Can’t hate a culture like that.

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this has got to be my favorite quote ever.

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Feel free to use it any time.

as a linux guy im forced to use sharepoint at work alot, believe me i will :wink:

True. I did not mention that, but I was primarily addressing consumer application development, where my interests are. I don’t put developer tools in that category.

I think Microsoft “hate” is silly. It’s a business. Hardball protection of its quasi-monopoly status did offend, and the anti-FOSS rhetoric probably scared some ill-informed boardrooms away from considering Linux.

But, those days are gone. Consumers do not want a splintered technology market riddled with incompatibilities and annoying differences. Microsoft’s dominance was rooted in that provision of de facto standards, as are today Google and Apple in their areas. Consumers do not want and will not use dozens of search engine choices, just like we don’t want multiple phone OS’s.

It’s one global market. We should expect to see continued dominance by a relative handful of corporations and institutions. Especially the institutions that create and enforce standards.

Consider the historical context of e/e/e. If Microsoft wanted to ‘switch to linux’ it would have aligned itself to the venture before RMS had to create GNU GPL to protect against this kind of thing.

It was highlighted above by one other observant comments that your position is grounded in an assumption that Microsoft’s primary motivation is to decrease development costs. Microsoft is not very concerned with that as much as planned obsolescence and locking down things that used to be free. Consider the case of the McCormick Reaper . The reaper was a technology that was developed to destroy unions, yet it was very expensive to implement, and was slower and more expensive than the manual human practice that came before it. But it destroyed the unions so internet articles praise the invention of the reaper but fail to mention the inherent elite telos. (Idhe 1990, pp34-35)

Consider how John Deere has begun locking down hardware so that Farmers can no longer have any other option but to use John Deere to repair. Something that used to be free to learn, such as gas engine and drive train mechanics, has been locked down inside private software patents and repair contracts. The options to become competent in this space are severely limited so that capital can flow in a more predictable manner, a model that benefits shareholders, not farmers. Again, elite telos.

So no, I don’t believe Microsoft is as innocent as this post assumes or at least reads to me. Technology is never neutral, it has a political bent, no matter how much the ideology of ‘technological progress’ professes qualities of neutrality such as science.

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I think the short answer is no.

The long answer is more involved of course; but i think it boils down to “if you can’t beat em, join em”.

Microsoft isn’t just a public company under financial incentives that promote creation of shareholder value. It’s also a community of savvy technicians that can see the value and pervasiveness of GNU Linux; especially in their own community… the community of technicians. This is especially so where enterprise is concerned; and extremely obvious when considering what is commonly used to run the server stations that make up much of the infrastructure for the internet.

Microsoft really hasn’t been in a position to be consistently supportive of GNU Linux; so there’s been instances of anti-competition distributed through it’s history with it. The resolve that has been demonstrated in spite has probably made quite an impression. The ability of GNU Linux to compete in the marketplace as the proverbial strange guest is enough to earn the respect of anyone.

Microsoft understands that Open is the future; and I suspect that they want to be a part of it. So, I don’t think that Microsoft wants to join the Linux wave. I think they are dipping their toes into the open ecology to understand it and eventually do their own thing with it. This is probably a pretty long game though.

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I agree
windows biggest advantage was that its like a comfortable old shoe that most people are reluctant to get rid of.

originally their server software always included a gui as do their modern versions.
this made it easy for many people to administer their server networks without a lot of technical training. this made it popular for industries because they didnt have to hire a lot of it specialist’s
the downside is the vulnerabilities of the file system.
apples used multi-partitioning schemes that put some of the partitions off limits to the average user and this was a lot more secure than MS.

both os’s had their advantages and downfalls as would any os.
linux os’s are not for everyone especially not the “old shoe lovers”

you have to be willing to accept change and have that urge to explore something new,
I have had people put themselves down by saying they are too stupid to learn linux but that’s where they are wrong! If you are smart enough to ask questions you are smart enough to learn.

the question is are you brave enough to ask questions?

so should MS go open source? should they employ multi-partion and choice of formats like linux uses?
the answer is yes they should! its definitely to their advantage (IF they get away form advertising on their os)

If I was a windows user and they had open source I would gladly donate to them for the familiar gui’s
but as it stands now the hardware cost’s you (unavoidable) the os cost you, (avoidable) and the programs you want to run cost you. (also avoidable)

you can have several hundred invested in software you want for running a windows or mac computer

open source software is for the largest part completely free the only cost to you is you have to learn how to use it, and that’s what the user forums are for.

I don’t think it works to assume Microsoft today acts for exactly the same reasons as it acted in the 1980’s, or any other previous years.

In any case, MS won’t “switch” lock, stock and barrel to Linux because it would then be responsible for a product over which it lacks the control it would need to meet that responsibility. I.e., MS can’t get away with using the kind of warranty typically used by Linux distributions and developers: “This product is warranted for absolutely nothing…” And it’s not about to throw everything overboard and turn into a version of Red Hat, Suse or Canonical, subsisting on support subscriptions.