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This. It's been MICROS~1's primary tactic against competitors for at least 1/3 of a century now and nothing has changed: now the company just _says_ it likes FOSS.

Does Windows set up dual-boot if Linux is installed first? Naw.

Does Windows read or write Linux filesystems? Naw.

Has MS open-sourced any significant or important parts of Windows where it won't benefit directly? Naw.

It is in MS' direct interests if PowerShell or .NET are supported on other platforms; it makes them more credible tools.

Did we get source for Explorer or anything? Naw. Calculator. Big fat hairy deal.

Has MS open-sourced any obsolete products that might actually be of use or interest, such as the final versions of MS-DOS (25 years old) or Windows 9x? Naw. They contain things like Explorer and so on that are still used. Can't go actually _helping_ people.

It's all marketing flim-flam. Don't believe the hype.

Linux is doing great on phones and servers and so on. On the desktop, only ChromeOS is not a rounding error. So, if MS can embrace-and-extend the Linux desktop, and make Win10 a better desktop Linux than Linux, then it helps MS and it helps Win10.

And with what it learns from that, it can apply to WSL in the datacentre and on Azure, where it can make Windows Server a better Kubernetes than Kubernetes.

Which, let's face it, would not be all that hard.

2 comments

> Linux is doing great on phones

... you're fine with Google taking Linux, hiding it inside a proprietary system, not releasing source code for things people want to use like Google services?

> and servers and so on.

A use case where the most desirable setup is to have the Linux servers on someone else's computing platform, preferably in another state or country, with minimal services running on it, preferably locked behind an SSH interface that only an automation tool accesses guarded by an automated deployment tool, trading the "Linux can run for years without reboots" former gloating for being able to kill/redeploy dozens of times per day.

This is what counts as "popular" in 2020, Linux as a small piece of necessary plumbing that everyone wants to push away from human contact. A far cry from the dreams of Linspire, Ubuntu, Ubuntu-phone.

Microsoft make WSL pleasant to install and use, and now it's one of the most talked about ways to deal with Linux.

And you're pretending that what you really wanted was source code for Windows Explorer? Oh please. As if.

Well done for signally failing to get a single point I made. Well up to HN commenter standards -- perhaps you'll make it on to https://twitter.com/hn_commenter

I am typing on Linux right now. I work for a Linux vendor. I like Linux and use it every day. I do not run Windows at all, anywhere, unless someone is paying me to.

As for Android, there is this thing called AOSP. Check it out. You might also wish to contribute to Replicant, since you are so passionate: https://replicant.us/

If you look hard enough on Google, you can probably find my (rather positive) reviews of Linspire from back when it was new. (It wasn't as good as Corel LinuxOS.) You'll also find me praising Ubuntu's efforts and bemoaning their cancellation.

Linux is anything but small; it is huge. It is what allows me to keep the lights on and put food and drink on my family's table.

MS executing its hallmark embrace-and-extend on it is _disastrous_ news and is one of the biggest dangers Linux has ever faced.

Don't shoot the messenger.

How do you explain your contradictory beliefs that "Linux is huge and doing great" and that Microsoft is desperately trying to make its tools look credible with marketing and hype, and at the same time Microsoft is bordering on world domination with _disastrous_ news that might extinguish Linux forever? Or where Linux is the dominant computing platform everyone serious uses, and at the same time in danger of being squished by Microsoft?

> "As for Android, there is this thing called AOSP. Check it out."

It's what you get if you remove all the things people want, like Chrome and YouTube and drivers and Google store, and are left with just a kernel which nobody cares about. It's what manufacturers take, and put something nice but proprietary on top before it becomes desirable. (btw, if Android counts as a huge successful use of Linux, how is Microsoft adding a Linux VM option to Windows going to extinguish Android?)

> "MS executing its hallmark embrace-and-extend on it is _disastrous_ news"

It isn't news, WSL has been around for years, and before that the Unix subsystem for more years. And why are you afraid that Microsoft doing literally anything with Linux might lead to you running Windows? How is that going to happen?

> "Linux is anything but small; it is huge."

Then how is Microsoft adding a Linux VM option to Windows a "disaster"? Is it huge and doing great, or tenuous and barely holding on?

> "It is what allows me to keep the lights on and put food and drink on my family's table."

You just said you would use Windows if someone paid you. Linux being extinguished wouldn't stop you from earning. Not to mention the doublethink involved in how Linux can both "be extinguished" and still exist in Windows, or how Linux being used in Android, extended in proprietary ways, is great, but being used in Windows is not great.

Because it's just anti-Microsoft fearmongering, not anything which makes rational or reasonable sense.

EEE was about standard protocols; if Microsoft extend SMTP or HTML and everyone becomes dependent on their version, they could leverage that to kill Netscape. If Microsoft put a Linux VM in Windows, that doesn't change what happens on your server, on your phone, on your laptop. If people start developing for "Microsoft Linux" because it's /better/ because Microsoft builds things people want, that's called "competition".

Do you genuinely believe that you are refuting my arguments here? My points are not complicated or difficult, and your responses are facile.

Linux is strong on servers and phones.

This is, in part, because you can deploy tens of thousands of servers (and tear them down again) at very little cost, and Google gives Android away.

No software licensing.

Being cheap to do means not much money goes into Linux development as a result. Google is doing it to weaken Apple.

Always follow the money.

Windows still dominates desktops. This makes MS money. Not from Windows, but what goes on top: Office and Exchange and Server licences. Evidence: MS gave Win10 away for free in order to get it established.

If Linux development slows and stabilises, then it will be easier to run Linux binaries on other OSes that merely emulate Linux. (Examples: WSL, FreeBSD Linuxulator, Joyent SmartOS.)

If MS manages to make WSL a better Linux than Linux, then it strengthens the market for Windows running Linux workloads, which weakens Linux.

There are multiple markets here. You have to consider all of them and their interactions.

No, E&E is _not_ about standards and protocols. It is about money.

Netscape was free for non-commercial use. In business, you had to pay. Also, Netscape sold one of the leading web servers. That is how Netscape made money.

MS made IE free, but free is no good if the product isn't as good. So it built IE into Windows, and IIS into Windows Server, and gave them away for free, including upgrades. To make them desirable, it added some snazzy interactive stuff in the form of ActiveX (client-side) and ASP (server-side).

Result: Netscape couldn't sell its pro products any more and went broke.

Ubuntu is big on servers because Ubuntu is a good desktop, and when it came out, the other decent desktops -- e.g. SUSE -- cost money. Ubuntu took their market share but didn't make any money. Within a decade, most young techies knew Ubuntu first so they chose it for server stuff too, and servers make Ubuntu money.

Ditto Red Hat and SUSE (now). Give the desktop away for free, make money on servers.

Follow the money.

If Windows can do that better, nobody will bother with Linux. The money goes to MS instead, then RH & SUSE & Ubuntu will die, and I will be out of a job.

It is not about standards. It is about money.

MS doesn't care about Stallmans GNU goals. What they do care about are developers not being annoyed with working on a Windows machine (or nowadays using their Azure clouds).

Speaking for myself, I'm coming from the gamedev world (lately webdev) and as such was mostly tied to windows due to various tools(Photoshop,Modo,3dsmax in the past,etc) but that didn't mean that I was going to suffer by using IIS or spend a fortune on Windows server licences or higher hardware reqs for appplication servers for no good reason.

So yes, MS will ignore OSS for their core Windows stuff, HOWEVER they will probably also play nice in the wider OSS (If not FOSS) community since they probably see Azure as the third leg of the future (apart from Windows and Office) and as such will ensure that everyone who uses it (be it for Windows or Linux deployments) are happy with it (And trashing things in the OSS community will thus be counterproductive).

This is _precisely_ the sort of thought the company wishes to cultivate:

* That they don't care about Free Software (they do, it is a hated enemy).

* That they are ignoring the FOSS world (they're watching it closely and working out how to stealthily attack it).

* That they'll play nice and so should be welcomed (they are a merciless enemy to be constantly wary of).

In other words, their marketing team's message of "we've changed, we're nice and friendly now, trust us" is working perfectly.

What motive does MS have to "watch and stealthily attack" the FOSS world? Which parts of that world threaten their existence?

Looking at the last few quarterly reports, I'm inclined to agree with the parent commenter here, and your comment doesn't do much to substantiate your point as it stands.

This is the motive, as someone cited before me:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

I was merely agreeing.

Look at MS' history. It used this tactic to kill or maim a long list of companies: Netscape, Lotus, WordPerfect, Aldus, Novell, Sybase, STAC, Central Point Software, Quarterdeck, and dozens more.

It tried it with Sun and Java -- it failed, but only just.

It tried it with the WWW itself with ActiveX and IIS ASP. Again, this only just failed.

It has a long long history of being the nastiest, most deceitful, dishonest, back-stabbing company in the computer industry -- and that is saying a lot.

It is not a coincidence that Gates became the richest man in the world.

Cory Doctorow's Twitter summary is pretty good (short thread): https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1304811968398729218

The LA Times did a great investigative piece on the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation _thirteen years ago_: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-jan-07-na-gates...

TL;DR -- it spends just enough money that Gates & Buffett don't pay tax on the interest of their wealth; it does not do ethical investment of any kind; its objective is whitewashing the reputation of a retired criminal, in which it is very successful.

I have yet to see any evidence that the company culture that Gates created and Ballmer continued has changed in any substantive way.

> "Look at MS' history. It used this tactic to kill or maim a long list of companies: Netscape, Lotus, WordPerfect, Aldus, Novell, Sybase, STAC, Central Point Software, Quarterdeck, and dozens more."

Netscape defunct 2003, FireFox still exists. Lotus 1-2-3 last release 2002. Sybase still existed until it was sold to SAP in 2010 and SAP killed it in 2014. WordPerfect still exists. Quarterdeck defunct 1998.

Sun, Java, ActiveX, ASP. 1990s.

Anything from this last decade? And, how is "this tactic" going to stop you from using Linux?

> "It has a long long history of being the nastiest, most deceitful, dishonest, back-stabbing company in the computer industry -- and that is saying a lot."

Cruelty, ruthlessness, and exploitation goes with success in capitalism.

> "TL;DR -- it spends just enough money that Gates & Buffett don't pay tax on the interest of their wealth; it does not do ethical investment of any kind; its objective is whitewashing the reputation of a retired criminal, in which it is very successful."

Character attack on a retired man, based on bad things which happened a generation ago, while giving free pass to Google who are strongarming the web with AMP and unilateral changes to Chrome, and unilateral standards which were proprietary Google internals released to the world, because they use Linux in their advertising-spyware mobile platform, and to Amazon, a much maligned company run by one of the current world's richest people, known for its mistreatment of employees and abusive attitude to the publishing industry, and for using its cloud platform to steal and reimplement popular services and put them out of business, free pass for current bad behaviour because they let people run Linux cheaply?

The reason MS didn't have to do this stuff in the last decade or 2 is because it has already killed all its opponents.

Name another big desktop app vendor will hundreds of millions of seats. Name another industry-leading groupware system.

The last big dominant rival MS took down was Nokia's phones operation, but it mainly succeeded there because Google and Apple accidentally helped: Evidence: MS doesn't make phones any more. It derailed the #1 smartphone vendor's own OS efforts and planted an MS exec in charge so that vendor used exclusively MS phone OSes, but it wasn't good enough. The OS failed and the vendor left the market.

Apple is in a different market. Apple sells hardware. Its OSes are free. It also makes a cut on content for those devices.

Character attacks? Have you bothered to read any of the links I have supplied to support my argument?

I remember the 90s just fine, but i think MS also knows that they lucked out on the antitrust rulings with getting their fingers slapped. Also on top of it Gates isn't there in charge to be ruthless any more (and the competitors today knows the things to watch out for).

But more importantly than all that... MS knows they aren't competing with other companies per-se but rather ecosystems, open source and developer mindshare. If we don't like it we can fork off things and go on our way (like developers did during the Ballmer era despite him jumping around chanting developers....).

Windows isn't even the most used personal OS today, Android is.

Funnily enough thanks to MS in part, not because they sabotaged Nokia (Many N insiders have spoken about how dysfunctional and unfocused their management was even before MS came into the picture), But rather because they fucked over their enthusiastic WinPhone7 users, retailers and devs with WP8 not supporting the prev generation of devices and API's changing.

WP7 had a far snapper and easier to understand UI than contemporary Android devices, but once they dropped the WP8 news the old devices just lay on shelves and sellers who had bet on WP7 selling were left with un-sellable devices and didn't feel like buying a new batch to see it happen again.