exFAT in the Linux kernel
cloudblogs.microsoft.com
cloudblogs.microsoft.com
Edit: to expand, the corporate world runs on Excel/PowerPoint/Outlook. Microsoft milks them on Windows/Office licensing and is very aggressive against organizations that try to do Linux deployments. They're a convicted monopolist that got away easily when at some point the option on the table was to split OS and Office into two different companies. If they want to continue to use Office to keep Windows dominant that's their strategy. WSL and their other "love Linux" efforts are all about making sure developers stay on Windows. If you want to do all that fine but don't patronize us by then claiming you love Linux.
For the email, can’t you write it anywhere? Difference is it’s not officially a draft in an email client.
The installer fails on wine last time I checked, but porting an installation from windows works fine, and the account and license connection is fine too.
Office 365 web apps (free), Office 365 the monthly updating desktop Windows version of MSOffice (not free)
As with all things multicloud and Microsoft, it’s easy to get into trouble in the community cloud.
Shouldn’t we appreciate that after decades of bad blood they’ve decided to now wise up? Shouldn’t we give the benefit of the doubt?
Companies have to face it. Community-which was once considered auxiliary bullshit that needed lip service—has now become the de-facto requirement for how to engage users and customers in a technology business. Now that we see them doing it we want to criticize them?
Nothing is stopping any of MSFT's OSS-Forward ideas from being brought up by capable people in other contexts.
> Community-which was once considered auxiliary bullshit that needed lip service—has now become the de-facto requirement for how to engage users and customers in a technology business.
I don't know what you're referring to; I don't see any difference in community engagement in the industry on the whole compared to 10 years ago.
If they didn't supported SQL server o Linux then no one would use it, as using MS Windows on VMs forces an additional premium on deployment costs.
As I see it, supporting Linux on a specific use case is not a sign of wising up, but a desperate concession to try to stay relevant.
Those are really the same thing, "wising up" and "trying to stay relevant".
Linux users often choose Linux because they want to be in control of their data and devices, cloud services are about giving control of that away to companies.
People that go through the trouble of installing Linux on a Desktop Machine, where Windows or MacOS was probably pre-installed, will either dual boot or use Linux exclusively. If they dual-boot, they will probably just use Office on the non-Linux System and not care.
But if they use Linux exclusively they will very probably care about the freedom and control Linux brings.
Then I switched jobs, they gave me a new MacBook that doesn't run Linux so I use osx.
Ten years ago I cared about privacy, now I feel like that ship has sailed. My own privacy is not that important. The privacy of my fellow citizens is gone. I mourn it kind of, but you can't close Pandora's box.
Another category is people who installed it themselves because they like it better, but for non-ideological reasons. Like, a large chunk of programmers feel much more comfortable on Linux than Windows.
(I’m not sure what to make of your point about dual booting — it’s hard to believe anyone would “not care” about having to do a full reboot every time they wanted to do something as common as view an office document. Now “let me finish reading that interview candidate’s resume” goes from something I can alt-tab to while compiling into an ordeal of saving all my open work, rebooting, downloading and opening and reading it, rebooting again, reopening all my work...)
You may have been able to get away with that kind of broad generalization a decade ago (actually mo -- that's not true, AWS and Canonical's push to cloud started MORE than a decade ago. Google too. Let's call it 15 years ago), but that is certainly not the case now.
And frankly, I think putting Linux users in a box where only FOSS drivers are allowed (even though Nvidia GPUs are doing much of the best work for CUDA) and to use it you have to be lock-step with an ideology that very few people will ever be able to be "pure" enough to follow completely (assuming they want to follow that ideology in the first place), does the Linux ecosystem a major disservice.
I would posit that the vast majority of developers and end-users who access and use Linux on a daily basis are doing it at least in part through a cloud service -- whether its a cheap VPS or a large cluster of machines.
*Disclosure: I work at Microsoft on Azure. These are my thoughts and do not represent those of others. I primarily use a Mac but have been playing with/arguing about Linux for 20 years -- going back to when I was 15 years old. I also use WSL on Windows.
I have mixed feelings about closed-source blobs tainting my kernel. AMD did a terrific job open-sourcing their driver stack. I use Nvidia for deep learning out of necessity but I resent it, as I'm completely locked into X11 because they can't be assed to implement GBM. Nvidia has also gotten a stranglehold over the DL and HPC markets with CUDA, causing a chicken-and-egg problem where OpenCL isn't well supported because none of the cards that require it have serious power, and it's not worth AMD putting lots of money into the HPC market because it's locked into CUDA.
NVidia needs Linux more than Linux needs NVidia (imagine competing on HPC while running Windows-only!) And yet, they contribute nothing to the kernel and stymie efforts towards unified standards like GBM.
it's shades of DirectX all over again. that's the problem with tainting.
Microsoft may or may not “love” the tiny subset of users who run Linux-based desktops and are unwilling to use web applications. But that doesn’t mean they don’t “love” Linux as a foundational technology of modern computing.
People always talk about “the year of the Linux desktop” (and not always ironically!) but honestly, whether a random person can play 4k Netflix on their Linux laptop is like 0.1% of why Linux matters in the world.
You're being disingenuous. Linux users are users of Linux and software that runs on Linux.
In the context of service deployment, this clearly refers to users who need to deploy Linux VMs to run software that runs on Linux.
The kernel is irrelevant. This use case clearly refers to Linux distributions, which nowadays probably means Debian or a Debian-based distro. So obviously in this context a Linux users means someone who needs to deploy a Debian-based distro on VMs to deploy and run software on it. In fact, more often than not when people refer to running Linux they are actually implying that they need to deploy and run software on a specific ecosystem, such as a combination of a package manager, package repository, service manager, and even f Directory tree layout.
This is not a way of life or a cult. It's a technical requirement that must be met for people to do their job.
That's exactly the point I was making. People who run Debian-based desktops are a tiny subset of that group. Hell, I have a Linux desktop and not even I run Debian.
The other day there was a thread on HN about which laptop is great for Linux. Tons of people recommended Lenovo, a guy from Redhat said it's even the brand that's used internally and I got a little depressed and smh. Nobody mentioned superfish. Those glorious days of Linux are gone.
Superfish was on Ideapads, and it was bundled Windows software.
While both are by Lenovo, they are separate product lines.
Ideapads are in market segment, that is extremely price sensitive, but not quality-sensitive. If the competition would cost 10 bucks less, it would be a huge win for them, so everyone tries to minimize price while preserving margins as much as possible.
In the end, these devices do ship with Windows, which has privacy problems anyway.
All this is moot, when you put Linux on it, which was the context we were talking about.
It does, but those are "theoretical" in comparison to the degree Lenovo stooped on, it doesn't excuse Superfish at all. Windows isn't a free for all platform, yet.
> All this is moot, when you put Linux on it, which was the context we were talking about.
_That_ time. I'll copy a response I provided two months ago as Lenovo on HN has become a seriously annoying groundhog day for me:
I can't know that whatever harmful and irrational environment that led to Superfish in IdeaPad won't affect ThinkPads in the future. Even in the most generous understanding where IdeaPad is a different, physically separate branch of the company, and Superfish was an act of incompetence and not outright malice I can't be expected to keep up with the insider intrigue of the company to notice any changes that could negatively affect me. More importantly, leadership is still responsible for setting irrational environment that lead to Superfish, whatever that environment was. This is a multi-billion dollar company, there is no excuse for such incompetence.
Was superfish stupid mistake? Yes, it was. Does it mean you should condemn the company for the rest of eternity? Probably not.
Perhaps there is some boundary that shouldn't be crossed. You seem to be arguing there isn't.
Perhaps global and successful companies should exercise some due diligence and have a department that would control quality and firewall wacky ideas.
Perhaps we as CEs should hold companies responsible so that they stop perpetuating never ending shenanigans that this industry is known for. If even we don't boycott bad actors how can we expect normal users to do it.
> Does it mean you should condemn the company for the rest of eternity? Probably not.
If they showed some contrition perhaps? Name and fire entire chain of people responsible for it and donate a year of their net income to foreign FOSS organizations - in ideal world the company should've gone bankrupt, so the penance should be hard. Then I'd be more ready to believe them they would do better in the future.
You seem to be talking about a subset of Linux users. And then a subset of that subset who find cloud apps as bad as vegetarians may find meat.
They're both buggy as hell, the type of bugs that will make your document render in unintended ways when somebody opens it on the other side. At some point, Word for Mac decided to remove whitespace between words on my resume - I couldn't see them and generally exported to PDF, but I didn't hear back from prospective jobs that asked for a word format specifically.
Office 365 Web and desktop application really need a complete revamp, they have reproducible bugs and horrible UI/UX in edge cases.
I also really hate when Microsoft decides I want to store my sensitive data on their cloud for no apparent reason despite saving to local disk, it really seems like a 'whoops we accidentally did this but you should try it!' kind of move from MS. This is the perfect example of a monolithic application with chronic feature creep.
I never understood why they made it a effectively a different product. (Once you go past the trivial interaction) Different features, different behaviours, different problems. Why is excel for Mac not the same engine with a different UI?
They really need to start from scratch and build solid, easily testable product because the current methodology doesn't work.
I especially love the bugs where when in one specific track changes mode typing in the comments section drops keys, or when using 'read aloud' the voice randomly changes gender. Office 365 on a Windows 10 LTSC virtualised host w/ no other software.
Isn't that exactly what you're trying to do with the web version
I also like Abi Word, but it's only a word processor, not a full suite. I keep it around because it will open damn near any word processing format.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-microsoft-is-taking-on-the...
This almost always means you're speaking to a recruiter who is going to strip your identity from the resume so they can hold it hostage for an agreed commission. This also puts your submission at a disadvantage because you're automatically 10% more expensive than the next guy.
If you're submitting your job application, double check that you're submitting through the company's preferred channel. Look for the job on their own website. And be suspicious when they request an editable file format.
I'm glad it's becoming more common knowledge though. Recruiters have long been redundant compared to job search websites like seek.
Where do you think MD (Managing Directors), CxOs and other high level people go for jobs?
The majority of them will get their next position through who they know, not a job board.
PDF files aren't safe either. Even if you gave them a JPEG, they'd just transcribe your data into their own little CV template.
The answer isn't to try to "beat" the recruiter with PDFs and JPEGs; the answer is to run away and find a more direct path to the employer.
A tactic I've used in the past is buying a burner number (prepaid sim), called recruiters with a fake name, number and resume and asked them to provide details about the job which many of them name completely. The ones that don't generally indicate that other recruiters do exactly what I'm doing to them in order to steal clients.
I don't feel bad about screwing over an industry which has no place in the modern world, particularly when they're opportunistically trying to make a buck from me and/or my future company while adding very, very little value :)
S4B server edition is still in active dev
I've read some horror stories about Slack, and I shudder to think what would happen if my company moved to it.
The fact they have office on Android, iOS, and osx proves it's about market share and common sense, not some fabricated hatred or fear of Linux on the desktop.
Well, the same argument could be applied to their open source contributions. Considering that [canonical corporate view is that] patented ideas are expensive to produce, and that exFAT is patented, what's the financial justication for open sourcing it (the specs or else)?
The argument is ultimately against "Windows love Linux". The thesis of the parent is just that they're doing unsubstantial moves (or worse, manipulative ones), and that if they "truly loved Linux", they would do something substantial, which, for the corporate world, is to support Office on Linux.
As for MS's contribution to open source you have to consider the difference in magnitude between the revenue that Office generates and the revenue that their other open source contributions do (would?). Then consider also the development effort involved.
It looks like OP just wants exactly what MS doesn't offer completely disregarding the alternatives, and I'm pretty sure they would not be willing to pay the markup for the extra development involved.
Do you have a source for this hyperbole??
I'll believe Microsoft loves Linux when I can install Windows after Linux and it doesn't mess up the bootloader as if it were the only game in town.
I know that Linux is merely a kernel but I wonder how things would have played out if the kernel contained some form of graphical environment. There are so many competing environments that you have massive choice but also nothing that really works well either.
https://docs.microsoft.com/it-it/windows/win32/fileio/exfat-...
>26-Aug-2019 Seventh release of the Basic Specification, which includes the following changes:
Updated legal terms pertaining to the specification, including:
Removal of Microsoft Confidential notice
Removal of Microsoft Corporation Technical Documentation License Agreement section
Updated copyright notice to 2019
Till now the documentation wasn't AFAIK publicly available or it was anyway "restricted".
I've written a FAT12/16/32 driver for an embedded system before; and oddly enough, the documentation I had at the time was far easier to understand than this one. I didn't expect exFAT to be this complex, or perhaps the doc is just excessively verbose --- for example, the whole first paragraph of the 4th section is saying nothing more than "there may be 1 or 2 FATs, one after the other, and NumberOfFats is the field that says how many there are" except it takes 5 sentences to do so.
That said, this spec is written in a style that's easier to understand than a lot of the other "open specifications" docs that MS has released, but I suspect that's because this one was once an actual NDA'd implementer's document rather than the others which I've heard may have been released purely for legal reasons related to the antitrust than anything else.
Now if only they'll do this for NTFS...
EDIT: See here - https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/873#issuecomment-425...
I'm not sure what's the expiry on 2008 submission.
How so? I never had that problem.
I guess I never noticed a problem because either I mostly use ext3/4, or I am so used to using legally dubious drivers that I forgot they were there.
I mean, who ever gives you a FAT formatted disk? I don't have floppy drive anyway :p
More info at: https://fossbytes.com/fat32-vs-ntfs-vs-exfat-difference-thre...
If I was a betting type, I'd wager that Microsoft's FAT patents (and various legal settlements where they got to say "Linux infringes on hundreds of patents" without ever needing to specify the patents) had a lot to do with that change, since, with the exception of a few manufacturers who continued to ship devices with external SD slots, and USB-OTG which is kind of a bonus feature, Android finally didn't need FAT for interoperability.
Most USB flash disks I've seen (and I've seen many) are even nowadays mostly FAT32. "Portable drives" aka USB-to-SATA are shipped preformatted to NTFS, and only with the advent of SDXC did preformatted exFAT start to appear.
(It has to do with driver support, I would guess - exFAT works in Win7+, but as long as the world runs on WinXP kiosks (ugh), vendors go with the lowest common denominator. Note that a flash disk will go places - what's your car entertainment system running? Linux? Android? Windows CE? Anfient Embedded Monftrofity? Will it support exFAT? Unlikely.)
If OSX and EFI had out of the box support for Linux filesystems we could at least stop using FAT on pendrives. I personally will look forward to that.
As well, if you ever look at a live-CD (like the installers for most modern Linux distros are), it will usually be using SYSLINUX, which limits itself to 8.3 filenames, for various good reasons to do with floppies, PXE, and ISO9660. Mount an Ubuntu CD in Windows and you'll see them.
I.e. my EDC flash disk has FAT32-formatted first partition, yet is bootable. This is surprisingly versatile.
Actually UEFI REQUIRES the bootable partition to be FAT (not not exFAT).
UEFI also requires the executables to be in the COFF format ( instead of the normal ELF one ) too.
When Apple was at death's door (around the arrival of OS X) they were very open about protocols and formats (e.g. JPG, mp3, ssh, whatever) and happily paid the Danegeld so their customers could encode mp3s and RTF files etc. They proclaimed how important open formats were and managed somehow to get unprotected files in their music store. I thought to myself that they would lose "religion" if they ever achieved any success and indeed, they don't really care so much. They don't even oppose it, just don't care.
So I wonder if this is MS seeing that exFat might be replaced just to save a few pennies of BOM cost and that they need to be in the thick of IoT things, having lost the embedded OS competition. And while exFat is hardly a big money earner, staying relevant matters. With linux beating Ones in the Azure cloud, every bit helps.
BTW I'm a long term apple user; my comments about the waxing and waning of their commitment to openness is a dispassionate observation.
> To be clear, Microsoft isn’t open-sourcing exFAT — but it is making sure anyone building with Linux can use it. 'It’s important to us that the Linux community can make use of exFAT included in the Linux kernel with confidence.'
exFAT is still not open source, and still can't be distributed with the kernel. So what changed? It will now be easier to integrate it into a custom kernel instead of using FUSE? Why is this better than the current situation, where you'd install exfat-utils for example? Are there benefits of using a kernel module that I'm missing which makes this important news?
We also support the eventual inclusion of a Linux kernel with exFAT support in a future revision of the Open Invention Network’s Linux System Definition, where, once accepted, the code will benefit from the defensive patent commitments of OIN’s 3040+ members and licensees.
Still some patent squirrelly words (they imply you have to sign a patent cross licensing agreement with the OIN - not sure of the implications) and no timeline.
Ref: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/08/28/exfat...
To my reading, the OIN is a "mutually assured destruction" organization for patents around Linux that owns some of the patents outright and basically tries to insure that if any member sues another member or licensee over any of their patents the OIN itself and all the other members should band together and counter-sue over the remainder of the patents. It seems an interesting nuclear option to protect Linux from patent lawsuits.
Or, if they want to contribute an official driver, they should have contribute it at the same time as the spec, IMO.
[1]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQzODQ
It means that exFAT will be available everywhere. For instance, right now if you want exFAT support on Fedora or RHEL, you have to enable rpmfusion and install fuse-exfat and exfat-utils from there; once it's in the upstream kernel, it will be available on a default install.
And yes, this is _much_ better than using a FUSE interface to the filesystem.
Does a userspace filesystem driver lose a lot of performance to context switching, or is there something unique to filesystems that slows them down in user space?
Yes.
Try the two versions out, and see for yourself if you are curious.
For another, that's probably a desktop, not a smartphone.
The Spectre/Meltdown situation must have made FUSE much, much worse than it was already. I wonder if anyone did any benchmarks for that
Microsoft isn't giving away it's exFAT patents. They are merely suggesting, that everyone licensed them at Microsoft's own terms. Those terms include becoming a member of Microsoft-sponsored patent ring and agreeing to it's terms and conditions: https://www.openinventionnetwork.com/joining-oin/oin-license.... The conditions can be changed anytime (!!) and the patent license terminates if you sue Microsoft or any other OIN member for any patent violations whatsoever.
Nikon, ZTE, Xiaomi, Samsung and thousands of others (basically all, who were or still are patent-trolled by Microsoft) haven't magically become members of OIN, and it's unclear if they ever will.
Google and Red Hat are members, but neither produces any devices with external SD-cards...
Patent trolls are probably collectively experiencing a migraine after this news.
So my guess would be that the definition of "derivative work" would apply.
https://www.openinventionnetwork.com/joining-oin/linux-syste...
If you haven't signed OIN licensing agreement, you do not receive any relevant patent grants, period.
If we took the GPL2 linux driver and imported it using our linuxkpi emulation layer, is that a "linux-derived system" enough? :)
Universal Disk Format (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format).
I can confirm it works on Linux, and works on Windows (at least W10). The wikipedia article indicates it works on newer MacOS'es, but I can't confirm that fact.
Yet, it seems there's no way to format to it out of box on macOS and support looks dodgy. I'm not willing to bet my data on an unreliable file system implementation.
Nope, although it is most commonly used on optical media it is not restricted to only optical media.
From the wikipedia article:
Specifications
The UDF standard defines three file system variations, called "builds". These are:
Plain (Random Read/Write Access). This is the original format supported in all UDF revisions ... Plain build
Introduced in the first version of the standard, this format can be used on any type of disk that allows random read/write access, such as hard disks, DVD+RW and DVD-RAM media. Metadata (up to v2.50) and file data is addressed more or less directly. In writing to such a disk in this format, any physical block on the disk may be chosen for allocation of new or updated files.
Since this is the basic format, practically any operating system or file system driver claiming support for UDF should be able to read this format.
I have had zero issues with it from Linux or Win (I think I started using it when the "work pc" was Win7, but am not 100% sure of that). It has just worked, with no problems, for my use cases.
Performance wise, well, the performance is limited by the USB sticks (they are USB2 sticks) so from what I can tell, UDF is not the limiter, the USB2 interface or the flash cells in the stick are the performance limiter.
That might eventually change with the recent patent grant.
Seems like going over the network is the easiest option for people who use multiple OSes, though it comes with incompatibilities in permissions, ownership and also comes with a speed hit.
I doubt if Apple would provide implementations of APFS for non-Apple operating systems. So that probably leaves Microsoft to push NTFS (since ReFS isn’t a common option anymore as per Wikipedia) if it desires. But Microsoft seems to be on a cost cutting mode (cf the adoption of Chromium in Edge).
Are there viable and good options suitable for these three operating systems?
Honestly I hope even Windows abandons NTFS soon. It's the worst part of using Windows. e.g. Try and develop any Node project on Windows and it's painful - takes literally minutes to delete the node_modules folder whereas on Linux/Mac it takes seconds. It only recently got long pathname support (260+ chars long)...
https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/873#issuecomment-425...
Also they could support fat while not having the main system storage using fat.
Microsoft managed to make their patent encumbered exFAT file system a required part of the SDXC card spec, just as their much-abused patents on FAT32 were expiring.
I guess it is gracious of them to partially undo the damage they've done, now that they have given up on Windows Phone.
Business as usual.
Microsoft hasn't charged consumers for upgrades to Windows for years - and surely that is because they expect to profit from advertising.
The same can pretty much be said for Windows Pro and small businesses. Why is there no subscription to Windows? Why can't I pay to get 3 more years of security fixes for Windows 7 however an enterprise can?
It is great to see the changed attitude and embracing of open source software! This will ease the use of large external disks, sharing files between Windows and Linux systems. It will help with larger USB memory sticks which no longer needs to be reformatted. It will also make it much easier to deal with SD cards from cameras and mobile phones.
Is exFAT only good for file storage considering it has no journal ling? putting rootfs on it may have a dysfunction system relatively easily without fsck I assume.
So I don't share the excitement with most folks here. Until driver gets better, exFAT is not rock solid option for sharing data between OSes.
1) We finally have a file system that works across operating systems, which is a big deal if you ever do anything in a multi-OS environment.
2) exFAT is heavily used in the film production world, and the convenience of knowing it'll mount properly on any OS so you can duplicate it a few times is much more important than whether or not it's a "safer" file system in general. It doesn't need to survive forever -- the card just has to make it from the camera to the computer on the other side of the set, or survive a trip from one office to another on a shuttle drive that by this point is not the only place that data exists.
Regardless, it's still more mature in general than I remember it when it started to appear in high-end cameras around 2012/2013. When your Blackmagic camera shoots exFAT but isn't capable of deleting files off it without a computer...
3) Should something still go wrong (like, oh, the time I was almost responsible for losing $60k of footage my second day on a job due to unexpected use of exFAT + a truly unfortunate and odd-defying day of bad luck) the fact that Microsoft is implementing it in the kernel should still be a huge help -- it will be a proper implementation (not a reverse-engineered sometimes-working mess), will perform much better than FUSE, and just generally improve reliability. Trust me, when your card with irreplaceable footage won't mount, you'd rather not have to fight that battle on two fronts, with one of them being your Linux implementation.
If you're trying to recover video (which is one of the easiest types of data to recover, due to it being large, sequentially written, and bitstreams containing easily recognisable sync markers), and especially from a storage device that's being exclusively used for video, the actual filesystem doesn't really matter because practically all of the sane ones will store the file data in a contiguous range of blocks. Depending on the exact codec, you may even be able to dd the raw device into a decoder and it'll simply find the first valid sync marker and start decoding from there.
Windows installer creates several partitions: System (ESP), MSR at the beginning of the disk and Recovery at the end of the disk.
The NTFS support depends on device. From devices that I have around, Intel NUCs do support it, Asrock X399 board does not.
I have yet to see the Windows installer to create NTFS-based ESP partition. If manufacturer does that for specific device (where it is guaranteed, that it will support NTFS), that's different thing.
How about their FAT patents??
If so this is really cool.
Everything else is just cheap marketing.
MS don't have to drop Windows to support Linux. They can walk and chew gum at the same time.
.Net Core brings MS's equivalent to Java to Linux and enables the use of a better language set (C#/F#) and allows for a relatively seamless development experience.
What's not to like?
I was unclear; their revenue streams are still overwhelmingly comprised of proprietary tech.
Darwin and AOSP are massive compared to the toys MSFT is throwing over the Linux wall. This idea that they need to lose money is a strawman.
Their code used to be their core value and source of profit; they are open-sourcing a lot of it now because that's not true anymore and they might as well get some publicity out of it. If you look at companies like Google and Facebook who publish lots of open-source, you'll see the same trend --- it's opened because it's not worth anything to keep it secret anymore.
It’s a WIP and they just granted a patent license to the OIN for fuck’s sake. Even 10 years ago this would have sounded like science fiction.
Open Source is not an impediment to Microsoft's attacks on users' freedom.
You can get a job on LinkedIn to write code on GitHub that runs on Windows and talks to a server deployed to Azure with a single click from within the README.md .
In that ecosystem, permissively licensed Open Source software just helps Microsoft exploit you.
Which is why Microsoft unironically love Open Source and are very happy to see paid and unpaid shills shout that from the rooftops.
Dumping soon-to-expire patents to get goodwill from people they need to encourage into or prevent leaving that ecosystem is a strategic move that is designed to make sure you don't escape in the long term.
Pointing this out isn't shitting on the poor, defenceless corporation.
It's just not being fooled by their attempts to fleshmask Open Source.
They still hate Free Software.
Listen, my first job outta high school was at Red Hat. For the majority of my life I hated Microsoft and everything they stood for. The bottom line is, money talks (the virtues or lack thereof of that are for a different debate) and they realized that people became familiar with Linux which was superior for most non-desktop use cases, enabled innovation at a greater pace and also was a path around all the Microsoft bullshit and customers were abandoning ship. Eventually they had NO CHOICE but to evolve or die.
So, really they haven't done anyone any favours then?
Why do you think so many people look upon their acts as something with good intentions?
Just better marketing spin?
Right now it just looks like something they were forced into doing because they were losing on the devtools market.
Yeah the hoops of going to the Store, searching for "ubuntu" and clicking Install
Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux
The exact same thing they require to enable or disable any optional windows feature like ie 11, windows media player, I is, ...
.... no?
> We won the war. They’re mending their ways.
"We" (?) are either there or not. The half-measures of mending continue at the pace of their choosing.
> Even 10 years ago this would have sounded like science fiction.
A strong point in favor of continued skepticism.
Nobody is calling Red Hat's Ansible Tower or other closed-source products some change of heart in the company and this is no exception in the reverse.
edit: Always good to be downvoted when responding to a comment poisoning the well (and cursing) with a comment that does neither.
Or the next war
It aligns with the current management that they're doing what they're doing. They had "terminal services for Unix" for some time, then there was war on Linux, now it's open standards again, and it may change again in the future.
"We" didn't "win" annoying. It's just a happy period. Let's be happy about it and not take it for more than it is - liking what the current MS management does.
Maybe their interests have just shifted higher on the protocol stack.