Microsoft's “Love” of Linux • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#121

Post by garganzol » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:16 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #19

de_watcher wrote: post #3

Can add Visual Studio to the Office/DirectX/Outlook/ActiveDirectory section.

They're sort of heading in this direction with VSCode. I can imagine that VS itself is a non-portable COM-infested disaster area.

COM is good and it is anything except disaster. It its raw form, COM is just a small and natural abstraction over plain C interface.

Just like a C interface is a small and nice abstraction over plain registers/stack call models of the past.

The advent of calling conventions like C was a huge step forward in 1970s. Before that, there was a mad zoo of passing parameters via random CPU registers and praying that you made no mistake and it would work without a crash.

COM is no different. IUnknown is just 3 methods (QueryInterface, AddRef, RemoveRef) over a plain C. It immediately brings an ability to use service model design in APIs.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#122

Post by tracker1 » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:16 PM UTC

ShinTakuya wrote: post #77

raesene9 wrote: post #13

From what I see in general MS like Linux on the server, not so much the desktop. The reason for that is pretty obvious. They want as many organizations as possible to use their cloud platform, for that to work, they need first class Linux server support. On the desktop, they'd prefer people to be using Windows, but they want to ensure that developers who deploy to Linux have a great experience, thus WSL, VS Code et a…

According to a friend within Microsoft, what you described is basically how it works. More so than other large corps, Microsoft seems to be a disorganised mess. Some groups fight the good fight, some groups do bad things to get ahead, some groups don't know what they're doing or are pressured by bad management, other groups operate extremely well but are assigned to the wrong tasks.

That's how large corporations work... you have different business units managed by different people, sometimes with dramatically different cultures. The problem is, people like to personify companies, most of that comes from executive leadership and in the case of MS, it's effectively a different 'person' today as a couple decades ago.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#123

Post by gowld » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:16 PM UTC

dleslie wrote: post #15

guardian5x wrote: post #5

This article makes it sound like Embracing is a bad thing, because necessarily Extend, and Extinguish will follow. But it doesn't really work that way with Open Source.

Google proved the model for embracing, extending and controlling open source by way of Android and the shift to Google Play Services. Start open and let the walled garden grow within.

How does a not-open-source product control open-source?

Anyone can try to build an open source alternative to GPS on whatever hardware they can obtain, using Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Without Google open source, they've have to replicate it's functionality from scratch.

If AOSP never existed, Android would still be Android (GPL allows proprietary Android) and would still be as popular as it is. iOS was never open source, and did fine.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#124

Post by tracker1 » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:19 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #34

stevbov wrote: post #29

Why would any Linux shop use SQL Server anyways? Why would they use .NET Core? The only people I know pushing .NET Core are .NET people, not Linux people. My general rule is to never use a technology where your primary platform is a second class citizen. It just makes things a pain: not only could support be dropped in the future because there's no profit in it, its also harder to find answers to problems on the inte…

How is Linux a second class citizen for .Net Core? Have you ever had a problem with .Net Core on Linux that you couldn't find an answer to?

I've actually had more issues with it in Windows than on Linux/Mac. Though I will say VS proper is much nicer than VS Code for C# development. It will improve. I'd still prefer to use mostly node, which gets its' own ire from the developer community.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#125

Post by tracker1 » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:20 PM UTC

Nullabillity wrote: post #90

Quarrelsome wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

isn't Postgres an equivalent?

Not really, Postgres actually works.

Except for in-the-box replication and failover options.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#126

Post by neilobremski » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:22 PM UTC

petilon wrote: post #110

juliangoldsmith wrote: post #17

Microsoft loves Linux because it makes them money. I'm not sure why anyone would expect differently. They won't release products like Office for Linux (though a web interface is possible), and they won't move away from Windows-only APIs. Neither of those actions would have any tangible benefit for the primary users of those produts (Windows users and Windows developers, respectively). Active Directory is so deeply in…

> they won't move away from Windows-only APIs Office already runs on MacOS and iOS

Runs ... but not well. It may be different now but I knew an engineer on the Office for Mac team some years back and it did not sound like a pretty port. I have both a Mac and a Windows machine at work and Excel on the latter is lightning fast compared to the former.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#127

Post by sverhagen » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:23 PM UTC

pytester wrote: post #102

juliangoldsmith wrote: post #17

Microsoft loves Linux because it makes them money. I'm not sure why anyone would expect differently. They won't release products like Office for Linux (though a web interface is possible), and they won't move away from Windows-only APIs. Neither of those actions would have any tangible benefit for the primary users of those produts (Windows users and Windows developers, respectively). Active Directory is so deeply in…

>Microsoft loves Linux because it makes them money. I'm not sure why anyone would expect differently. I rather thought the point of the article was that Microsoft didn't actually love linux but pretended that it did to stave off irrelevance in markets where linux is kicking their ass (i.e. server). As he said, if they really loved linux and this isn't just another "embrace, extend, extinguish" ploy sugarcoated in PR…

You're using "love" in different ways. I also love cookies, but I'm not in a committed, lifelong romance with them. (Well, maybe I am. Bad example.)

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#128

Post by oblio » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:23 PM UTC

The author is partly right. You shouldn't trust Microsoft. But the landscape has changed. Focusing too much on Microsoft as the sole, main rival of OSS and Linux keeps you tunnel visioning like it's the 90's. And back then Microsoft was huge and overbearing. Now there's many, many other threats to OSS and Linux, several of them bigger than Microsoft.

Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook.

They're keen OSS contributors, where it doesn't matter for them and keen closed source proponents, where it does matter.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#129

Post by tracker1 » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:23 PM UTC

eternalny1 wrote: post #51

stevbov wrote: post #29

Why would any Linux shop use SQL Server anyways? Why would they use .NET Core? The only people I know pushing .NET Core are .NET people, not Linux people. My general rule is to never use a technology where your primary platform is a second class citizen. It just makes things a pain: not only could support be dropped in the future because there's no profit in it, its also harder to find answers to problems on the inte…

Our Angular web app runs .Net Core on Linux. .Net Core is fantastic, C# is a great language, I don't see any downsides with our stack.

Biggest down side for me, is .Net Core 3 had some dramatic breaks, it's better than 2 and before, but still been burdensome.

There's two decades of answers and examples out there, many of which don't work. Not to mention many third party libraries that do stuff that's now in the box.

Biggest gripe to me, is lack of in the box support for PEM files in the crypto library. There are others, Core 3 breaks DI for logging in the Startup is another big one.

In the end, it's decent... I'd still largely rather use Node, or if I need more performance Rust of even Go. I will say I don't hate it, it's just frustrating finding examples and answers.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#130

Post by stiray » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 5:24 PM UTC

juliangoldsmith wrote: post #17

Microsoft loves Linux because it makes them money. I'm not sure why anyone would expect differently. They won't release products like Office for Linux (though a web interface is possible), and they won't move away from Windows-only APIs. Neither of those actions would have any tangible benefit for the primary users of those produts (Windows users and Windows developers, respectively). Active Directory is so deeply in…

I have dumped windows completely after spending some time on windows 8 (fyi: system level developer, but... Well i did my share on aix, hpux, solaris, linux, vms too, but I did love windows... Before the age of manifests, putting com interfaces into kernel32.dll,...)

What troubles me THE most on linux is interoperability of applications, there is literally nothing replacing microsoft "office" (not a product Office) stack, it is not a problem for my expertise, but for ordinary John Doe (or lets call him "the manager"), Exchange, Outlook, Sharepoint, Lync (Skype for business) integrated into Office mesh... They have great product. This is the target that linux must pursue. But it is not there. Still struggling to reinvent hot water (systemd, dbus,...), as it is more fun. But not more usable. Anyway, i am satisfied with my shell...