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Microsoft has developed its own Linux: in-house software-defined networking OS

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Microsoft has developed its own Linux: in-house software-defined networking OS

#121

Post by hga »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #105

Lesson: Microsoft is willing to improve their proprietary offerings using leveraging free software others built. This is the main reason for FOSS uptake everywhere and makes great business sense for them. They also make a killing in patent royalties on the Android ecosystem. If anything, Nadella is focusing Microsoft more on the dollar than prior politics. It's the same Microsoft, though, far as I can tell with many…

Ah, I can't believe no one has remember up to now how after buying Skype, Microsoft replaced its "volunteer" supernodes with 10,000 boxes running grsecurity Linux: http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-s...

On the other hand, that wasn't public like this. But it's a far cry from the two tries required to replace Hotmail's front end Apache FreeBSD servers with IIS? NT a decade or so earlier. Or the much more recent Danger Hiptop/Sidekick NetBSD + Java + sane servers -> Windows CE + Exchange that in probably the largest part doomed their $1 billion Kin effort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin which took only weeks to fail hard once it hit the market.

Re: Microsoft has developed its own Linux: in-house software-defined networking OS

#122

Post by dx211 »

npsimons wrote: post #83
cbd1984 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all the Old People, replace Microsoft with IBM above and transpose this back into the 1990s. IBM went from EBCDIC and Micro Channel Architecture and SNA to "Well, they'll never actually beat Compaq and Dell in the primary growth market, but they still own the tippy-top of the Enterprise world. That's something." Oh, and about this time, IBM shifted focus from AIX to getting behind Linux in a big way. Remember the…

37, started using Linux in '98 (what can I say, late bloomer), but ran OS/2 before that as "rebelling against the M$ hegemony" (plus OS/2 was technically superior). I still have some of the IBM Linux ads. I still don't trust Microsoft and even if I did, I consider most of their offerings piss-poor and only "industry standard" because the "industry" is run by upper management idiots. (note that the "industry" I refer…

40, started using Linux in '93 or '94. You're probably old enough to realize that even though you're kind of in the same casino, those "upper management idiots" are playing a vastly different game than you or your startup. What portion of your work, for example, is spent figuring out whether the EU is going to give you a seven-figure fine for not localizing something, or whether a vendor from a non-NATO country can troubleshoot a server with a given client's PII on it, or whether the update you're pushing this week has been tested to make sure none of the 27 major products that take dependency on it are going to break? If your only metric is how much chrome the end user sees...

Re: Microsoft has developed its own Linux: in-house software-defined networking OS

#123

Post by frik »

buffoon wrote: post #12
zamalek wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add Sharepoint (Microsoft's true cash cow[1]) to that list of yours and, yep, Windows definitely isn't going away. [1]: http://www.tannerhelland.com/4993/microsoft-money-updated-20...

AD, Sharepoint, Office 365 is already canned in Azure/O365. You won't be buying a Windows Server license to run them any more and it's feasible that they may even not run on Windows at some point in the future. Office's server portion and Sharepoint is all .Net so expect them to move it to ASP.Net 5 at some point.

SharePoint is a cash cow, but its implementation is such an old mess with lots of parts stayed unchanged since v2003. Nowadays Microsoft India is mainly working on it. The most polished version was v2007, since then little has changed.

SharePoint is basically the server part of Office. It's a web CMS, a web based Office (viewer), with AD account login support. I wonder why there is no open source SharePoint alternative e.g. coded in PHP.

Re: Microsoft has developed its own Linux: in-house software-defined networking OS

#124

Post by [deleted] »

debacle wrote: post #93
Aldo_MX wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GPL is not a cancerous license, if I would use a negative adjective to describe it, it would be: misused . I understand when people wants to keep making FOSS better by releasing entire projects with a GPL license, but I don't understand when people release simple stuff such as a code example with a GPL license...

The GPL is a cancerous license. If you use GPLed code, your code must (almost always) become GPLed, thus the GPLed codebase grows. If a GPLed project use other OSS code, it tends to be able to keep those changes, but the opposite can't generally be reciprocated (You can't take GPLed aspects of Linux and port them to a project under the BSD license without changing the license of that software). This is not a bad thin…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft has developed its own Linux: in-house software-defined networking OS

#125

Post by robotresearcher »

debacle wrote: post #93
Aldo_MX wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GPL is not a cancerous license, if I would use a negative adjective to describe it, it would be: misused . I understand when people wants to keep making FOSS better by releasing entire projects with a GPL license, but I don't understand when people release simple stuff such as a code example with a GPL license...

The GPL is a cancerous license. If you use GPLed code, your code must (almost always) become GPLed, thus the GPLed codebase grows. If a GPLed project use other OSS code, it tends to be able to keep those changes, but the opposite can't generally be reciprocated (You can't take GPLed aspects of Linux and port them to a project under the BSD license without changing the license of that software). This is not a bad thin…

> This is not a bad thing.

Which is why cancer is not a good metaphor.

Re: Microsoft has developed its own Linux: in-house software-defined networking OS

#126

Post by hvs »

debacle wrote: post #93
Aldo_MX wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GPL is not a cancerous license, if I would use a negative adjective to describe it, it would be: misused . I understand when people wants to keep making FOSS better by releasing entire projects with a GPL license, but I don't understand when people release simple stuff such as a code example with a GPL license...

The GPL is a cancerous license. If you use GPLed code, your code must (almost always) become GPLed, thus the GPLed codebase grows. If a GPLed project use other OSS code, it tends to be able to keep those changes, but the opposite can't generally be reciprocated (You can't take GPLed aspects of Linux and port them to a project under the BSD license without changing the license of that software). This is not a bad thin…

I think the reason for the downvotes is that there are positive/neutral things that grow without the negative connotations of "cancer."

Re: Microsoft has developed its own Linux: in-house software-defined networking OS

#127

Post by acd »

AFAIK Microsoft uses Mellanox Infiniband networking in Azure. So this Linux distro is most likely controlling Mellanox hardware. Do you know which Mellanox model of infiband switches they use?

"InfiniBand enables the most efficient cloud – Microsoft Azure" source: http://www.mellanox.com/related-docs/applications/TOP500_NOV...

Re: Microsoft has developed its own Linux: in-house software-defined networking OS

#128

Post by astrodust »

dalke wrote: post #43
DanBC wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS used to really trash open source, with Ballmer calling GPL "cancer". (Although the company pulled back from that extreme). When MS took over Hotmail they got rid of FreeBSD that was running it. But MS have used Unix for years. They released MS IE for Unix. (The only person I know who ever used it was on HN.) Perhaps more bizarre was the Windows Media Player for Unix. Their TCP/IP stack was from BSD for ages (and p…

The first Unix I ever touched was Microsoft's Xenix. Wikipedia says MS first released Xenix in 1980.

What's also crazy is it ran on the 80286, something most PC-based UNIX systems never even tried to pull off.

Re: Microsoft has developed its own Linux: in-house software-defined networking OS

#129

Post by amyjess »

cbd1984 wrote: post #78
dalke wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first Unix I ever touched was Microsoft's Xenix. Wikipedia says MS first released Xenix in 1980.

For a while, Xenix was the best-selling Unix under the sun. (But not the Sun. It ran on commodity 16-bit IBM PCs.) ((I refuse to resist puns. They just flow through me.))

> I refuse to resist puns. They just flow through me.

Then you'll like this one.

When I was in college, we had a computer lab full of Sun workstations running Solaris. It was officially called the Solarium.

Re: Microsoft has developed its own Linux: in-house software-defined networking OS

#130

Post by astrodust »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #52
x5n1 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have a choice. Linux has already won. Heard of Android? Yeah that's the Linux kernel right there, over a billion mobile devices. Heard of Mac OS? That's a Unix kernel right there. Microsoft makes a proprietary operating system with cumbersome licensing restrictions. Microsoft is 10 years from death if it does not embrace Linux.

> Microsoft is 10 years from death if it does not embrace Linux. FWIW, I remember people saying this in 1999 as well...

Don't confuse "death" with "irrelevance".

There are companies out there still shambling along that used to be dominant but are now ghostly memories of their former selves.

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