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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

#141

Post by hga »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #131
hga wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Holy crap, I didn't even know about the Skype event! Thanks for the link. Probably the best and funniest endorsement grsecurity ever had haha. However, I've enjoyed for years calling them on running Hotmail on FreeBSD and what it took them to replace the reliable AS/400 running their business with Windows servers. Funny shit. Kin situation is another I didn't know about. Just wow. Most companies would have to work to…

Baller's consistent ability to create material losses no doubt had a large part in his downfall, see also e.g. the Xbox 360 hardware. And Intel is claiming that Windows desktop screwups are in part costing it a billion dollars in 1Q15, people aren't upgrading from XP.

Nadella I'm very uncertain about. To the extent he can terminate with extreme prejudice stack ranking and the poison it has suffused throughout Microsoft, he'll have much more people capital, including much less internal sabotage (part of why Kin failed). And he's completely changed how QA is done, although I don't know if for the better. On the other hand, he doesn't ... "feel" like the sort of person who can sufficiently directly change the culture for the better.

We'll see.

Ah, here's a bigger question: can Nedella change the perception of Microsoft's trustworthiness? That was bad under Gates, became catastrophic and frankly insane under Ballmer, and after so many have been burned by Microsoft has got to have an incalculable cost.

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

#142

Post by throwawaykf05 »

WorldWideWayne wrote: post #111
ChrisArgyle wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't disargee more about Microsoft's current place in tech markets. They've lost quite a lot of weight since their 800lb gorilla days in the 90s. They used to exploit their dominant market position to replace de-facto standards with their own: kerberos "extensions", creating ActiveX instead of just implementing NPAPI, removing JNI from the MS JVM. But they can't do that any more. They lost too much ground under…

Yeah, it's so surprising that Microsoft didn't implement the "Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface" (which was just for web browses) or other interfaces that weren't build for Windows.

Not only was NPAPI developed by a rival company, it was specific to browsers. ActiveX allowed features from any (Windows) application to be embedded into any other (Windows) application, not just browsers. It was a strictly more general framework and thus a better option for Microsoft. What really screwed things up was, security was not one of the foremost considerations when designing ActiveX because it was conceived for the desktop world. So it was horribly insecure when applied to arbitrary content downloaded over the web.

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

#143

Post by donatj »

caskance wrote: post #64
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…

GPL is cancer, but in a good way.

I have misgivings about GPL. It's given me a lot, and I appreciate that, but while developing I won't use GPL libraries because I simply don't like being told what to do, and per the golden rule, I don't like telling people what to do, so I cannot with good moral standing release GPL code.

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

#144

Post by throwawaykf05 »

robotresearcher wrote: post #125
debacle wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Way to quote selectively there. "It sometimes sucks" occurs more frequently for many people than many would like to admit. I work for a company that uses a ton of open source and open sources a ton of its own technology. Even for us, the GPL is poison. We're not allowed to touch GPL code. And we're not alone in this sentiment. A large number of open source enthusiasts decry the viral nature of the GPL, precisely because it has unpleasant properties common with cancer.

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

#145

Post by Zach_the_Lizard »

frik wrote: post #123
buffoon wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alternati…

>I wonder why there is no open source SharePoint alternative e.g. coded in PHP.

I think it's because SharePoint's strengths lie mainly in integration with Office and other Microsoft products. Lists, workflows, wikis, etc. in SharePoint aren't great. Basically everything it does can be done in a better way with another tool.

However, due to AD integration, Office integration, the ease of connecting to MS SQL Server, the product can do things that would be difficult to do in any third party product. You can upload Word documents, run a workflow on them, have users edit list data directly in Office products, bulk edit lists in Excel, and use InfoPath forms (basically dead now though from what I recall -- thankfully I no longer have to work with SharePoint).

I think SharePoint won't ever have a competitor that can offer all of its integration.

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

#146

Post by tluyben2 »

r3bl wrote: post #119
frik wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a proper open source Web based Office alternative, MS Office would loose a lot of customers.

From my own perspective, both LibreOffice and Google Docs are both more then capable enough. I know that LibreOffice is primarily a desktop application, but it has a not-so-perfect remote web interface since version 3.5. But, for filling out forms and keeping the design as it is, I'm currently using a web interface of Office 365. It's a bit annoying to use it at the moment (you can't get rid of the constant "Install…

The problem is that other solutions are just not good enough to deliver the exact end product to send to clients or partners or management. We do everything in Google docs because it is just really nice and convenient but when it needs to be finalised for sending off we send it to the one person with a MS Office license who fixes it. I would never condone paying more licenses though because when we all had MS Office licenses exactly the same thing happened... People writing content are usually not the people doing layout and design.

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

#147

Post by gaigepr »

drnewman wrote: post #24

Don't know anyone's ages here, but is anyone fascinated by the historical implications of this? I started using Linux in the 90's and the talk in the community at the time was "world domination". It seems to me that's happened--more or less behind the scenes, but it's happened.

22. My first distro was Ubuntu 8.04. I remember struggling to get various windows games to work through the use of wine.

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

#148

Post by Spivak »

donatj wrote: post #143
caskance wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPL is cancer, but in a good way.

I have misgivings about GPL. It's given me a lot, and I appreciate that, but while developing I won't use GPL libraries because I simply don't like being told what to do, and per the golden rule, I don't like telling people what to do, so I cannot with good moral standing release GPL code.

Libraries? Most of those are licensed under the LGPL precisely that reason.

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

#149

Post by Spivak »

Touche wrote: post #134
debacle wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GPL is a cancerous license, and Ballmer had to trash open source. That was their business model and they were using the OSS association against Novell. Edit: For those of you downmodding me for saying that the GPL is a cancerous license, please understand that this isn't a negative connotation - it's simply an aspect of the requirements of the license. It's very likely a good thing, and part of the reason that Li…

> It's very likely a good thing, and part of the reason that Linux is doing well while BSDs have languished. You're mistaken if you believe that.

Hey, you're not wrong. Linus used the GPLv2 only because it allowed him to get patches back into the kernel. He's neither a fan of the FSF nor the GPLv3 because of their philosophy on software freedom.

Linux is by far more popular for developers, tinkerers, and cool software projects but BSD is still massive in the server and embedded devices space.

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

#150

Post by gillianseed »

pjmlp wrote: post #25
gillianseed wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As an hybrid kernel I must ask, what exactly makes the current NT kernel a 'hybrid' kernel ?

It still makes use of the original micro-kernel design,with kernel level RPC to separate modules. Thus still offering a micro-kernel cleanness in a monolithic space. Also since Windows Vista many drivers are now implemented in user space, with minimal kernel primitives.

>with kernel level RPC to separate modules.

Is this what is described as LPC ? Could you elaborate on how it separates the modules (as opposed to unix subsystems) ?

>Thus still offering a micro-kernel cleanness in a monolithic space.

What does this 'cleanness' provide, and how ? It's all in kernel space so if one module crashes the whole kernel crashes ?

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