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Head of Oracle Linux Moves to Microsoft

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Re: Head of Oracle Linux Moves to Microsoft

#131

Post by cyphar »

rdtsc wrote: post #123
deepnet wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TL;DR Microsoft tried to leverage its desktop monopoly to become a browser monopoly to a server monopoly and thus own and tax and sanitize the early web, we wuz saved by Firefox. The web freedoms we are losing today were hard won. Back when browser choice was NCSA Mosaic or Netscape , Microsoft was ignoring the web as a fad - Gates thought little of it then - sounds crazy now but in the early 90's, before access was…

Good summary. Thanks. Yeah, I often see on HN (what are presume are younger developers) who never lived in a world were OSes, languages, frameworks, toolkits were not free. Everything cost a pretty penny. Open source software en-large would have been such an alien concept telling people it was going to be the future, they'd think it was crazy talk. Now it is taken for granted ... too much for granted perhaps. And the…

> Good summary. Thanks.

> Yeah, I often see on HN (what are presume are younger developers) who never lived in a world were OSes, languages, frameworks, toolkits were not free. Everything cost a pretty penny. Open source software en-large would have been such an alien concept telling people it was going to be the future, they'd think it was crazy talk. Now it is taken for granted ... too much for granted perhaps. And they love to hate GPL and make fun of Stallman and how if someone releases GPLed software they are being anachronistic and hostile and it is hurting their Uber for Dogs startup and so on.

Not all young developers are like that. I definitely recognise how lucky we are to live in a world where software freedom exists. And considering the fact that Torvalds doesn't believe in software freedom, it's astonishing that we even have a GNU/Linux system (if Linux had been BSD licensed I doubt it would be as prevalent). The GPL was definitely one of the most brilliant legal hacks in software history.

Re: Head of Oracle Linux Moves to Microsoft

#132

Post by cyphar »

mappu wrote: post #116
zxcvcxz wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankenstein OS (Linux + Windows) is going to break every dev tool chain you can think of. I don't see how anyone in their right mind would think Frankenstein OS is a good dev platform. I guess if you don't mind having an unstable system and enjoy searching google for "how to get xyz to work in bash windows linux" and finding absolutely no answers on stackoverflow then Frankenstein OS is good for you. If you want to…

>Frankenstein OS (Linux + Windows) is going to break every dev tool chain you can think of. I don't see how anyone in their right mind would think Frankenstein OS is a good dev platform. It's a binary-identical linux userspace, and it (appears as if it) has the same linux kernel. There will be some rare edge cases (see: mounting a case-sensitive POSIX filesystem on top of the case-preserving NTFS) but aside from that…

> >Frankenstein OS (Linux + Windows) is going to break every dev tool chain you can think of. I don't see how anyone in their right mind would think Frankenstein OS is a good dev platform.

> It's a binary-identical linux userspace, and it (appears as if it) has the same linux kernel.

I don't think so (GPL is the main reason why I doubt it because everyone would consider that to be a derivative work of Linux). It looks like they're doing something FreeBSD has had for 10+ years and SmartOS has had for 5+ years. You emulate the syscalls. It's a very simple idea and devilishly hard to get right.

Re: Head of Oracle Linux Moves to Microsoft

#133

Post by cyphar »

edsiper2 wrote: post #109
e12e wrote: post #47

What I'm curious about: Isn't Oracle Linux mostly a joke of a copy-cat distribution? Apart from them acquiring Ksplice and possibly delaying ksplice-like functionality in SuSe and RedHat a couple of years, isn't Oracle Linux mostly just an excuse to drain Oracle users for OS license money for those that don't want to be constrained by limited hardware support in Solaris? I guess what I'm asking, why would Microsoft w…

my 5c as an ex-oracle employee (disclaimer: I worked in Linux Support and Ksplice tools dev): - Oracle Linux is a base copy of Redhat plus additional things to integrate better with Oracle products, it was a bad move against Redhat, but beneficial for Oracle purposes. - Ksplice: most of people misunderstood the real work of it. Don't blame Oracle for acquire it, somebody sell it and it was always a private technology…

> As of today I don't think Oracle truly supports Open Source, not sure what are the plans for Wim on that area at Microsoft.

Considering their frankly disgusting actions with OpenSolaris, they actively hate free software. In fact, they invented a new word: re-proprietrisation.

Re: Head of Oracle Linux Moves to Microsoft

#134

Post by cyphar »

bithush wrote: post #2

It would be amazing to see a Microsoft GNU/Linux distro in the future. To be honest it wouldn't exactly be hard for Microsoft to do. Take a Debian base, add whatever bits they need to make sure it works nicely in Azure, have an official Microsoft apt repo and they are done. I actually think it will happen. It makes sense for Microsoft to have an official Linux distro that they can offer true support for.

> It would be amazing to see a Microsoft GNU/Linux distro in the future.

Except it would almost certainly be proprietary and would take away your freedoms. I don't understand why everyone is suddenly giddy about the "new Microsoft". They haven't embraced free software, they've just released a few bits as free software while still keeping the conglomeration proprietary.

Re: Head of Oracle Linux Moves to Microsoft

#135

Post by cyphar »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #32
wslh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows [kernel] is a very advanced operating system with an incredible wide support for third party drivers. I think the prediction would be more oriented to running them side by side.

There's also a decent monoculture concern. Everyone running off Linux isn't necessarily really a good thing. We should strive to have multiple independently developed solutions to computing problems.

BSDs and Illumos. Both groups respect your freedom and are gratis.

Re: Head of Oracle Linux Moves to Microsoft

#136

Post by cyphar »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #93
zxcvcxz wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>can't pretend I wouldn't be super excited to run a Microsoft Linux on my dev machine Seeing as MS is basically a branch of the NSA I'm not excited about that at all. I might be slightly excited if MS went open source and allowed people to include their tools in other distros, but the NSA would never allow that.

Which is why http://github.com/microsoft (and dotnet, and azure) doesn't exist, right?

"X has liberated a small amount of proprietary software, therefore they are good". No, they're not.

Re: Head of Oracle Linux Moves to Microsoft

#137

Post by buzzrobot »

Corrado wrote: post #130
levemi wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but when you look at all the developers who were willing to hop on board the Go train with no supporting infrastructure I think that speaks more towards engineers that like shiny new things that do something in particular in a new way which then help drum up excitement and an ecosystem around it. C# is a very good language, but there's nothing new or shiny about it now. The tools and ecosystem around it are well es…

You know, people say that Windows is a fine operating system, but I find it constantly annoying and terribly inefficient. Maybe it because I know there are other, better things, or maybe it's because I use it "incorrectly". As a desktop OS the GUI constantly annoys me with tiny little cuts; you can't manipulate file names properly as it disallows names starting with a period (among other things), the UI is terribly i…

The Windows desktop comes in last in any reasonable comparison with OS X and a modern desktop-oriented linux like Ubuntu or Mint.

The focus on backwards compatibility means, among other things, Windows is carrying around multiple ways to render fonts. None of them deliver sufficient clarity. In Windows 10, Cleartype does not affect "Modern" apps.

All the applications I use 90% of the time are available for Windows and Linux. Text in each is more difficult to read in Windows.

I find, on a Dell 27-inch 2560x1440 display,that I can see individual pixels in normal fonts from my usual viewing distance. Bold fonts are often smeary, especially at smaller sizes. Segoe UI looks acceptable in parts of the Windows interface. But, in apps that use older font rendering approaches, it's poor.

If you spend your days reading and writing, as I do, this is an important issue.

Re: Head of Oracle Linux Moves to Microsoft

#138

Post by deepnet »

catnaroek wrote: post #127
deepnet wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web's survival was far from certain, other similar more proprietry instances didn't - many would argue freedom was the webs USP. Ubuntu & Debian improved my interfaces. I cannot in good conscience support a walled garden or advocate its use knowing how important freedom is. ;) In the UK the trains have never run on time.

> The web's survival was far from certain I didn't say it was certain in 2000. > Ubuntu & Debian improved my interfaces. Certainly, GNU/Linux has come a long way in terms of usability. I'm a very happy user of a GNU/Linux system nowadays (Arch Linux). But I wasn't really comparing Windows and GNU/Linux. I was comparing Windows and Web applications. IMO, Web applications in 2016 are still significantly less usable tha…

---

Agreed web applications also sidestep the GPL as a service running on GPLed code web apps didn't publish source code.

Re: Head of Oracle Linux Moves to Microsoft

#139

Post by Eridrus »

levemi wrote: post #113
Eridrus wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their fundamental problem is (which they realize pretty well i seems) that they have lost developer's mind share. .NET may be a fine ecosystem and C# may be a great language but in all practical senses it is Windows-only. All these Mono/open source CLR games are not even the slightest blip on the radar for a practical day-to-day backend operations running cross platform (which is mostly Linux, but Windows as well).…

> but when you look at all the developers who were willing to hop on board the Go train with no supporting infrastructure I think that speaks more towards engineers that like shiny new things that do something in particular in a new way which then help drum up excitement and an ecosystem around it. C# is a very good language, but there's nothing new or shiny about it now. The tools and ecosystem around it are well es…

Go is probably one of the least interesting languages released lately IMO, certainly when you compare it to Rust (and I don't know a whole lot about Julia), and yet the amount of attention it has gotten is pretty huge.

So I think MS is just as capable of throwing new shiny things at developers as anyone else. Typescript and free Xamarin are recent examples.

Re: Head of Oracle Linux Moves to Microsoft

#140

Post by based2 »

therein wrote: post #28
wslh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows [kernel] is a very advanced operating system with an incredible wide support for third party drivers. I think the prediction would be more oriented to running them side by side.

Yeah they wouldn't just toss away millions of lines of kernel code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_%28kernel%29
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