Linux snickers at Microsoft's victory declaration | Hacker News Reader

Linux snickers at Microsoft's victory declaration

zdnet.com

69 pointsmindstab48 comments

I've been interacting quite a bit with with Microsoft people in the last couple of years.

I was shocked to meet a bunch of people within Microsoft that have recently migrated there from Sun. Joel Franusic, the BizSpark evangelist for Silicon Valley has roots as a php/perl/linux Admin, and has been a Super Happy Dev House organizer since the early days.

They are working really hard to change Microsoft's attitude towards open source and *nix in general. They are trying to change the attitude from one of competition to that of cooperation. And, I believe that's why you see things like Microsoft joining the Apache foundation, Microsoft contributing a lot of patches to Linux, funding the port of Node.js to Windows, etc...

So, perhaps the change in wording is a hall mark of a change in attitude, rather than a declaration of victory. I could be wrong.

The crew at BizSpark Silicon Valley have been the biggest supporters of our Hackers & Founders tag line of the "Linux of Incubators." http://angel.co/hackers_and_founders

<full disclosure> Microsoft BizSpark sponsors a number of Hackers & Founders events in Silicon Valley[1]. I don't make any money from them, however. They cover the costs for some of the events that we hold to help startups and founders. </full disclosure>

ref:

[1] http://hackersandfounders.tv

That's all well and good.

But.

But: I've been hearing this for well over a decade. "Microsoft's attitude toward Linux is changing." Again and again and again and again.

And then some new instance of FUD emerges, or a legal attack on a Free Software / open source advocate or company, some trumped-up performance benchmark, chairs in low-earth orbit. Whatever. The behavior has always failed to match the rhetoric.

I'm sure there are people at Microsoft who like Linux and respect it a bunch. With a few tens of thousands of employees, I also suspect there are those who dislike it, hate it, and/or misunderstand it badly.

As for the company as a whole, my read is that the overall attitude remains negative.

I'll believe there's a lovefest for Linux after 5-10 years of non-idiotic behavior from Microsoft.

As for caring: not so much anymore. Microsoft are increasingly irrelevant to the tech landscape. Not that they don't have a huge presence, but it's simiply not as significant to future development as it was ten or twenty years ago. Apple have a bigger market cap and are dominating emerging consumer markets (phones, tablets), Google are beating hard on Apple's heels and are pushing traditional enterprise tools (desktop apps, mail, calendar) into the cloud. Various cloud service providers are abstracting large server farms for many organizations. You can get your job done while only touching on Microsoft products very tangentially in more and more places.

It's no longer a world of "a PC on every desktop and Microsoft Windows on every PC". Not by a long shot.

It'll take a management change and some serious actions.

Let's make no mistake, the company has been compeltely and 100% opposed to Linux for a very long time now. What exactly would it take to constitue a change of heart? Seriously? I would think they could extend patent amnesty to all Linux distributions. They could embrace the Mono project. They could acutally release some software on Linux. How about media player codecs? When they come up with something like JPEG-XR or VC1, how about an MIT or BSD or GPL licensed reference implementation?

Short of porting a major application to Linux (Office?) I think a sizable contingent would never believe them. As others have mentioned, if you're building web apps, how do they even matter other than having a crappy browser that you have to code for?

Just one example, but the asp.net mvc source/reference implementation is available under a liberal license and plays nice with mono.

Mono isn't exactly killing it as the go to development platform.

Microsoft aren't opposed to _all_ free software licenses. They've been rather fond of BSD licensed software from the get-go (it was used and may still appear among copyright credits in Windows).

The GPL is another matter.

Though in recent kernels, Microsoft have contributed more than Google have.

I read Microsoft's original change of wording completely differently - it wasn't that they had defeated Linux, it was that Windows had already lost (largely because their competitors changed the game.) Competitors no longer compete only with Internet Explorer, they now offer an alternative to the entire Windows OS. Linux on the desktop (GNOME/KDE) didn't win per-se, but the browser did win, and Windows isn't a necessary choice for a browser-first system.

>it was that Windows had already lost (largely because their competitors changed the game.) Competitors no longer compete only with Internet Explorer, they now offer an alternative to the entire Windows OS. Linux on the desktop (GNOME/KDE) didn't win per-se, but the browser did win, and Windows isn't a necessary choice for a browser-first system.

Is that reflected in sales figures?

They do acknowledge competition from Apple(OS X and iPad) and Google(Chromebook) and OS X has been offering a very big and popular alternative to 'the entire Windows OS' since inception.

How can you say Windows already lost while they are shipping on 85% of the PCs and laptops in the US and much higher worldwide?

It's reflected in (my reading of) Microsoft's statement.

Sales figures are retrospective; this section of their 10-K is forward looking.

Also, if you define the market to include smartphones and tablets, I'm pretty sure Microsoft doesn't have 85% market share. The open question is whether that broader definition represents the future of "the computer market" or whether it should remain a separate category.

Of course, you're welcome to your own interpretation - lots of people read it very differently than I did.

would you care to share data sources for your confidence?

I am not arguing they are wrong, I am just unable to google concrete data for PC and smarthphone + tablets usage in a recent time period.

A few sources... I wouldn't put too much faith in the details, but in terms of rough magnitude they're probably pretty accurate.

Gartner says PC sales in 2011 will be <400 million. I'm pretty sure that's mostly Windows: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870330090457617...

iPad sales looking like 40 million (or more) for 2011: http://blogs.computerworld.com/18550/apple_2011_ipad_sales_h...

Smartphone sales were 100 million in Q2 alone; Windows share of that was 1.6% (!): http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9219112/Gartner_Smart...

Chromebook? hahahahaha

"Supercomputers, the fastest of the fast, run Linux almost exclusively."

And it's so disappointing. Consider the Blue Gene series. Great new architecture, custom networks, custom hardware. Initially, they put Linux on the I/O nodes and a custom kernel on the compute nodes, because you want a minimum of OS noise (see the FTQ benchmark for more info on this). But everyone clamored for Linux on compute nodes--so now we boot this enormous Linux kernel on each compute node. Plan 9 was ported (I did some of it), but nobody wanted it because it wasn't Linux.

I'm of the opinion that no group in the world is as set-in-their-ways and reactionary as the supercomputing application developers. If it can't run Linux and Fortran 77, they don't want it.

Plan 9 was a very interesting OS, but it always gave me the impression to be too desktop/workstation influenced. While you could have your heavy lifting carried out on big processing nodes on the net, it depended on having the same one-size-fits-all OS on all boxes. There was a time when we envisioned powerful computers running powerful software on every desktop. That time has more or less passed - most people now are very happy with the browser, the modern equivalent of the 3270.

And I have to tell you that being able to sit down at any 3270 in any company building and to have access to your stuff readily available was, in several ways, a better (if uglier) experience than what desktop workstation provided.

Plan 9 also committed the cardinal sin of being different for the sake of being different. You can build a better Unix without making "vi" a MIPS emulator.

We invent things that are ahead of their time. It's a shame so much of the technology is lost when that happens.

As for the Fortran 77 thing... Well... They have lots of code that has already been written and tested. Do you really want to port it to something else? Besides, legend says F77 compiles to very efficient code.

Possibly the biggest motivation for porting Plan 9 was that it provides a very light-weight yet featureful kernel. Linux is way too big, but the compute node kernels IBM and Cray have been coming up with may be too simple. Plan 9 provides a rich environment but doesn't demand much of the environment.

And yes, Fortran 77 can be quite efficient... but on the other hand, we're also seeing a lot of new software being written in Python, which (at least according to our process traces) tries to open thousands of non-existent files on startup. So efficiency isn't everything they care about... it's partly that they were used to Fortran, and now they're used to Python, and something scarily new like Plan 9 is, well, scary.

Oh, and good luck trying to convince people that MPI isn't necessarily the only solution for parallel programming. If the community at large has its way, we'll still be using Linux and MPI in 2040.

> and something scarily new like Plan 9 is, well, scary

Plan 9 would be more OK if it didn't try to be so not Unix.

That's too bad. It saddens me that, of the three more advanced widely used OS, two are variations of the 70's Unix theme while the third is the bastard child of VMS with lots of lipstick on it. :-( Plan 9 deserved better.

I don't get that impression for plan 9 at all. It included lots of features that suggest it was designed for heterogeneous clusters. Like simple convenient cross compiler support. You could run mips, your office mate could run sparc, and you could effectively and somewhat transparently use both to get your work done. I think plan 9 was actually trying to transform the network to be like your 3270 example.

> It included lots of features that suggest it was designed for heterogeneous clusters.

... all running Plan 9. I see your point - when it was conceived we had RISC workstations and Pentium PCs and they all could run some flavor of Plan 9, but today we have x86 PCs and ARM gadgets running browsers and x86 boxes running app servers and databases buried in data-centers. It could be built on Plan 9, but that's not how it ended up being.

As a great Ubuntu fan I must say: It's strange why mobile plattforms are always a example for the success of Linux.

Android may be using a Linux kernel, but it has next to nothing to do with traditionel Linux distros, that are developed in colaboration.

This is more a myth than reality.

It's definitely not a compatible environment, but I'd argue with "next to nothing". Android shares the same kernel, is built with the same toolchain, has the same underlying POSIX environment (albeit a reimplemented one, not the GNU software itself), uses most of the same base library set (libjpeg, zlib, etc...), uses most of the same middleware components (bluez, wpa_supplicant, etc...).

The one big architectural difference is that they ripped out the X server and replaced it with their own minimal window system. But even then the rendering API (OpenGL ES) is an existing standard from the desktop world. And the only hugely different component is the API: they wrote an app framework in Java and run it on their own VM. But that's just the skin. Underneath it's all still linux.

To someone who does nothing but write apps using top-level frameworks, Android looks "next to nothing" like "Linux". To someone who actually knows linux, it's all the same stuff.

It's interesting that you say this. If POSIX was all that there is to it, then isn't Apple iOS/Mac OS the same as Android and (insert-your-favorite-distro-here) Linux? I think ultimately the differences between user-facing (and even developer-facing, API-level stuff) components are way more important than the fact that POSIX is so common. After all, we would't describe two computers as basically the same because they both have a CPU/RAM/Storage unless we were comparing them to say, a car.

All I'm saying is that by any complexity metric you want to pick (lines of code, whatever) Android and "Linux" are far, far more alike than different. The layer you are picking as "way more important" only seems more important to you because it's the layer you live in.

The rest of the software is really important too (where would you be without the networking stack or video codecs, for example?) and to those people (and there are lot of us!) bringing up software on Android is more or less the same as doing it on desktop linux.

> All I'm saying is that by any complexity metric you want to pick (lines of code, whatever) Android and "Linux" are far, far more alike than different.

Citation needed. The Android-specific stuff makes up a lot of code.

A quick "du" over a fairly stale source tree shows the "external" tree as larger than the rest of the source trees added together. And that's not including the kernel, which is (by far) the largest single component.

Really: you need to get your head out of app space if you want to talk about platforms. There's an immense amount of code in a modern system that you never see. And Android (correctly) sucked it all in from linux instead of reimplementing it.

> Really: you need to get your head out of app space if you want to talk about platforms.

Do you know that comex has written several jailbreaks for iOS? I think he's more qualified to talk about mobile platforms than either of us.

When we compare two systems, we should look at the code that is different. Everything about desktop Linux and Android is different except for the stuff that all computers need to do. Basic OS services are a solved problem, and that's why you don't see too many people writing OSes today.

Why restrict yourself to traditional distros? The biggest advantage of Linux that its supporters have been explaining for a while is that because it is open source, it can be modified to suit your needs and build whatever cool product you want with it.

Google did just that with Android. Therefore it is a perfectly valid example for this article to claim rightfully that Linux is winning.

And it'a perfect example of the kind of innovation that OSS enables. Thanks to Linux, instead of wasting time building a new kernel from the ground up Google was able to spend that time building something entirely new on top of it.

You see the collaboration because desktop and server distros are so much bigger than Android, Bada, MeeGo and WebOS. OTOH, you can see the collaboration of Google, Samsung, Nokia and Palm/HP on the Linux kernel itself, even on your desktop or server.

As for collaboration, although Android is open-source, it's not developed by a community - it's Google's gift to the world built on top of a Linux kernel.

Did I miss something? Microsoft is not a small competitor in this field: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/who-is-win...

Yes, Android is rocking it, and so is iOS.. but 10% of the mobile smartphone market is nothing to sneeze at. And those are old numbers.

I guess "the year of the Linux desktop" may never come, but it also may be irrelevant :) Linux may still "win"

Mark Shuttleworth says Ubuntu is making inroads on desktops and is poised to take off:

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/738

FWIIW, IMHO there never will be a "year of the linux desktop." Linux on the desktop is an infiltration, not a blitzkrieg. As such, it will only be recognizable in retrospect.

I've switched back to Windows from Ubuntu. I found one of the big reasons for me to use Linux was how much easier it was to move around / manage files between my desktop and other machines using the command-line.

With Dropbox, that has become less relevant for me. I just have a Linux server sitting somewhere that is kept automatically in sync with my Windows desktop and I can open an SSH session with a single click. With the pain of moving stuff back and forth in Windows gone, I no longer care for the pain of stuff like getting Flash or a Java plug-in to work in Linux.

Even as a passionate Ubuntu follower, I don't see the possibility of Ubuntu going main-stream. The OS may match or even exceed the capabilities of Windows, but it is more important to have a diverse number of generally used apps. I feel Chrome OS has a very good chance of getting mainstream popularity. It does what it intends to do pretty well.

But... Chrome OS is little more than Chrome, running on a Linux base. You can run Chrome on Ubuntu, and still access all your files and such. There are even tools to let you mount your Gmail storage space locally so you can use it for a document store.

The apps are all moving onto the web these days anyway - Ubuntu can run anything Chrome OS can.

I'm pretty interested in seeing where Chrome OS will lead us to. I heard a lot of talk lately about moving support and other browser-based jobs to a Chromebook. If Google could gain a foothold in the business world, we could see a shift there.

Chromebook is interesting but it needs to be cheaper than the Windows alternatives as it was predicted to be before launch, somewhere at $199.

Right now, for about the same money($450), more or less, you can buy a better equipped Windows laptop/netbook and then run Chrome browser on top of it. Add some free MSE antivirus and you've got a machine that's useful as a general purpose computer even without a constant tether to the cloud while working about the same with the cloud.

Have you tried a ChromeBook? The current hardware is a bit slow, the software is still very much a version 1, but in my experience it's like an iPad for "real computing": because it has a keyboard you can use it for emails etc, and in my opinion it has a similar "joy factor" to the iPad - it lets you do what you want without overloading you with superfluous junk.

As someone that has had to deal with far too many Windows machines in the past, a Windows laptop with bolt-ons simply isn't the same experience. Perhaps if you put it into "kiosk mode", set Chrome to boot as the desktop, disabled the task bar, disabled running all other apps etc. But what you've got there is no longer Windows as far as the user is concerned, and so why would the hardware manufacturer pay Microsoft their $15 for the OS license?

Just like with Apple, there's possibly a price premium at the moment, but the scary thing for Microsoft is that - unlike Apple - there's no inherent reason for a price premium with a ChromeBook. Google could actually subsidize the price.

I haven't tried a Chromebook yet, will try to get my hands on one.

>Just like with Apple, there's possibly a price premium at the moment, but the scary thing for Microsoft is that - unlike Apple - there's no inherent reason for a price premium with a ChromeBook. Google could actually subsidize the price.

That's what the speculation was before they set the price, that it will debut at around $150 to $200. But it didn't happen yet.

Also, did you take a look at Windows 8?

I definitely agree that it isn't an obvious choice at the current price point, but perhaps that's because Google knows that it isn't ready yet (needs better hardware, offline support in Google Apps, a more sensible approach to managing files). It's definitely worth borrowing one to try it out though - you do get a good sense of what a cloud-orientated machine will be like.

I suppose if you're going to try out a ChromeBook, it's only fair that I try out Windows 8. That prospect doesn't exactly fill me with joy though!

Since you were wondering about Microsoft's strategy for tablets/netbooks(especially ARM based ones), I was asking if you had seen the demo videos.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p92QfWOw88I&hd=1

http://allthingsd.com/20110601/microsofts-windows-8-demo-fro...

I've seen some of the previews. I don't put too much stock in them - Longhorn looked pretty awesome as well, until it shipped as Vista.

My concern is that once every faction at Microsoft has had their say, you end up with this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k

That was an video made at Microsoft. It is an example of a personality trait called "taking a chill pill and being able to laugh at yourself". Source for this info : http://www.ipodobserver.com/ipo/article/Microsoft_Confirms_i...

BTW, Microsoft's packaging of its hardware products is very sleek and futuristic.

Disclaimer : I'm an MSFT intern (and in a week I won't have to type this anymore phew).

Chromebooks start at $350.

Microsoft declared victory? Was there a press release, or some kind of public celebration? Somehow, I missed that. I work at Microsoft, and no one invited me to the party.

Both the original article and this followup are the worst kind of link bait.

Ed Bott's article + this one are the digital equivalent of penis-length-measurement contests. Why is this cheap attempt at acting like Sherlock Holmes on the front-page of HN ?

I am an intern @ MSFT. I use win @ work. Windows+Ubuntu on my home box and load up FreeBSD in a VM (on my home machine) from time to time and used a Mac till very recently (it died not very close to a refresh of the MBP lineup to make it worth waiting and not too far from a refresh to buy the one on sale at the time).

I don't see why these types of articles have to focus on the notion of a 'victory' for either side. Microsoft isn't winning, but it's making a lot of money in various areas, so it's not losing either.

Microsoft probably is concerned about declining market share, but to suggest it was always targeting 100% of the market is misleading (there are people that have always and will always run Linux, and there are other people -- particularly large enterprises -- that they are much more focused on).

It's strange that Linux was suddenly taken off the list in their stock filing but I think the article comes with some caveats.

Android in the mobile would be listed as 'Android' in their SEC filing, since it's not really a traditional Linux distro like RedHat/Ubuntu/Gentoo, SuSe etc etc. Also, even Meego/Maemo, WebOS, Bada are based on the Linux kernel, but there's no common ecosystem among these as there is in desktop/server Linux distros.

While they may have only a 15% share in the Web server market, it's a VERY lucrative 15%.

Just as people like to remind us that the iPhone captures half the profit in the mobile market with a smaller marketshare, Windows Server/SQL Server/Sharepoint/Exchange etc. are big money as reflected in the revenue numbers, 4.5 billion USD last quarter or 17 billion last year just for the Server and Tools division. It's really hard to calculate how much money is directly made off LAMP/RoR/Python.

Maybe they don't see Linux as an immediate short term threat anymore, but that is far from dismissing it completely, as the article projects.

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