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Comment by city41 | Hacker News Reader

I think a key point that is being missed here is most of the people excited about this probably run OSX, not Linux. OSX has long been the "'Linux' for people who don't really want to run Linux" (not really meant as an insult, I'm typing this from OSX right now).

Apple is just as proprietary, commercial and anti-competitive as Microsoft here.

FWIW, this excites me because it potentially means I can go from two machines to one, and always have IE/Edge at my fingertips. It will greatly improve my dev workflow if it pans out like people are hoping it does.

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> Apple is just as proprietary, commercial and anti-competitive as Microsoft here.

I respectfully disagree. The OSX kernel XNU is open source, as are a ton of its components. That's huge in a lot of situations. Some things - not a lot, granted, but some, like FreeBSD's C++ stack and compiler - are even upstreamed back to mainstream open source projects by Apple employees.

>That's huge in a lot of situations. Some things - not a lot, granted, but some, like FreeBSD's C++ stack and compiler - are even upstreamed back to mainstream open source projects by Apple employees.

^ Citation need.

Clang/LLVM?

The joke (I think) being that Apple doesn't upstream a lot of code.

I agree that Apple is much more pragmatic right now. IMHO Microsoft is looking to emulate Apple in this regard: leverage open source when it makes sense, release code back to open source projects when it makes sense.

While not open source, I've seen parts of the windows source (never really had the time to read it in full detail) in my work, most probably coming from the MS vs EC situation some years back[0]. Yes, there are still hidden parts (docs mostly, I recall my friends doing memory forensics research had a "fun" time to get information on IP connection structures for example), but it's not as secretive as many people think it is.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp_v_Commission#Si...

Pretty much this - it's going to make my life as a developer easier. Having Linux right there when I'm working on an Microsoft platform will remove a clunk in my user experience of having a VM open all the time for when I want to drop into Linux.

Apple has contributed to key open source projects such as LLVM and WebKit. They have also open sourced Swift.

They have identified the core of their business and they feel comfortable there. They get a 30% royalty for each App Store transaction, they make large profits selling iPhones and Macs. They monetize their software indirectly as a part of a larger end-to-end solution.

Microsoft during their monopolic era was much more beyond that, they were going for all.

> Microsoft during their monopolic era was much more beyond that, they were going for all.

Yes, absolutely. Bill Gates was not a "nice" man. These days many people fawn over him "oh he's so lovey dovey, he's going to save the world with all his money as a philanthropist". LOL -- how many have actually sat at the same table (behind closed doors) with Billy boy pounding the table telling everyone attending (ISPs, major telecoms) how Microsoft was going to run the show, run the world. Microsoft is a ruthless company. Satya Nadella was part of this ruthless culture when he first joined MSFT 25 years ago. Why would the ruthless culture of Microsoft suddenly change because they've figured out how to peg Ubuntu Linux to the kernel? Ever hear of a Trojan Horse? This announcement today sure smells like horse manure.

Explain to me how it could be a Trojan horse when it's their own OS that they are modifying? They aren't exactly going in and sabotaging the Linux kernel project here...

There's also a logical fallacy that because Nadella worked for MS for the past twenty five years, he's as power hungry as Gates. This reeks of the type of elitist nonsense the keeps people from wanting to adopt Linux.

EDIT: Removed insult, came with arguments instead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

Apple is a hardware company while Microsoft is a software company.

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