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Comment by tn13 | Hacker News Reader

> being a platinum member entails donating $500k

The important thing about this news is not the title or the amount. The important thing to notice that Microsoft has moved from extreme hostility to active co-operation with general Linux community. This is a good move and it benefits Linux community lot more than Microsoft.

I always felt that it was needless to paint MS/Linux as some kind of zero some game to begin with. Sad that MS's top leadership fell prey to it in the initial years trying to hurt Linux.

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How does this benefit the Linux community even more? Microsofts move to include shells and a kernel compatible with Unix may end up being one of the most damaging things to Linux in a long time.

All of the casual users that don't care about open source will just give in and use Windows as their OS when they hit a driver snag or something since they still get the userspace tools they like.

Which is what "casual users" have been doing with macOS for a while now: getting some of the BSD userspace tools they like in a friendlier overall OS package.

If anything Microsoft is providing a way to encourage Windows users that would never touch a BSD or Linux userspace tool to give it a try. That's a possible way to bring new users to Linux: teach them how to do things with Linux userspace tools and encourage them to dive deeper until they can do everything they want with Linux userspace tools and then maybe encourage them to switch.

If anything, Microsoft has given the Linux community the keys to possibly embrace some "casual users" that otherwise never would have explored Linux.

We must also not forget that other companies have since proven that the idea of a proprietary operating system (or just kernel) as the main base of IP has started to look somewhat obsolete anyway. Now we have proprietary services and systems like Android and macOS have demonstrated that you can take an (at least partly) open source OS and slap most of the proprietary bits in userspace quite successfully. For that matter the "next version" of Windows might as well be a rebranded version of Android or something. Why keep maintaining your own OS kernel when you can have the community do it for you with a modest donation?

NT will be with us for a while yet, though I can't understand the business case for not end of lifing it at some point, especially when most of the engineers you hire don't know it well.

I don't see how this means they have stopped being hostile. For example, they are still suing android manufacturers.

I think they are doing this because they think they have to and not because they have actually embraced anything. I think they are trying to buy goodwill.

All of these companies in the mobile space seem to be constantly suing each other though right? Microsoft is no more hostile than Apple or Google in this regard?

I think you misspelled co-option.

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