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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

#181

Post by scholia »

hga wrote: post #180
scholia wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good points. Microsoft, of course, had a major problem, which was how to get the market to move from DOS-based Windows to NT. Not even offering OEMs 75% off the price of NT managed to shift them. Ultimately, Microsoft had to do whatever it took, and not all of it was nice. It didn't manage to do it until XP in 2001. Re Unix, you have missed out the COSE/Hamilton group development of OSF/1, first released in 1991. Thi…

"Oppose Sun Forever", heh. Yes, indeed, I used it in 1996-7 on the Alpha, just after it was renamed Digital Unix from DEC OSF/1 AXP. It was very nice, ran everything we wanted well, plus had a great High Availability capability. But I didn't view it as a major contender, back then at least, Sun provided the systems of choice. Assuming you could manage to buy them. As for Win 16 -> Win 98 -> XP ... I don't know, I wen…

Yes, NT was much more stable than Windows 95/98/98SE, and technically superior. Unfortunately it wouldn't run quite a lot of Windows programs, and one of them was whatever we used for AOL access, which was quite important at the time.

I dual-booted the two types of Windows way back then, and it was just too hard to stay on the NT side....

To some extent (possibly a large extent), OSF/1 was a push against the AT&T/Sun effort to unify Unix with SVR4. It just ended up more fractured than ever, which was a shame.

There was a brief window when Unix could perhaps have been more successful. That was between DOS and the Windows vs OS/2 war, when Microsoft Xenix was relatively successful. However, IBM was dead against Unix at the time, and OS/2 EE was meant to be the IBM-owned cornerstone of its Systems Application Architecture.

Unix could run on everything from PCs to Amdahl mainframes and supercomputers, whereas IBM had two major mainframe operating systems, at least five on minicomputers, plus workstations and desktops. No wonder IBM saw Unix as a massive threat to its account control.

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

#182

Post by scholia »

yuhong wrote: post #179
scholia wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Microsoft did go with "NT OS/2" -- it just quickly replaced intended OS/2 compatablility with Windows compatibility. Otherwise, IBM claimed Workplace OS was new code. NT, of course, wasn't written for x86 in the first place. It was intended to be cross-platform. It was also sold on PCs with DEC Alpha chips.

Of course, the problems with this plan wasn't the WinNT part, it was the Win95/Chicago part. My favorite technical problem is how it's dependence on DOS led Caldera to continue their DR-DOS lawsuit. But it wasn't just the technical problems, there was also the tactics MS used to attack OS/2 2.x and later.

Win95 was cheap, easy to install (no reformat needed), had masses of software support, and sold well. Microsoft would have preferred to sell NT but the market voted with its wallet. (By the way, Win95 mainly used DOS as a loader.)

Otherwise, which tactics were unacceptable in the context of a small company being attacked by a giant monopolist that wanted to drive it out of business?

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

#183

Post by yuhong »

scholia wrote: post #182
yuhong wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, the problems with this plan wasn't the WinNT part, it was the Win95/Chicago part. My favorite technical problem is how it's dependence on DOS led Caldera to continue their DR-DOS lawsuit. But it wasn't just the technical problems, there was also the tactics MS used to attack OS/2 2.x and later.

Win95 was cheap, easy to install (no reformat needed), had masses of software support, and sold well. Microsoft would have preferred to sell NT but the market voted with its wallet. (By the way, Win95 mainly used DOS as a loader.) Otherwise, which tactics were unacceptable in the context of a small company being attacked by a giant monopolist that wanted to drive it out of business?

I am comparing it with OS/2 2.x not NT.

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

#184

Post by scholia »

yuhong wrote: post #183
scholia wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Win95 was cheap, easy to install (no reformat needed), had masses of software support, and sold well. Microsoft would have preferred to sell NT but the market voted with its wallet. (By the way, Win95 mainly used DOS as a loader.) Otherwise, which tactics were unacceptable in the context of a small company being attacked by a giant monopolist that wanted to drive it out of business?

I am comparing it with OS/2 2.x not NT.

As I pointed out above: "there were only three problems with it: (1) you couldn't sell PCs running OS/2 -- IBM tried; (2) you couldn't get software houses to write programs for OS/2 -- except maybe Lotus; and (3) you couldn't get end users to install it. You had to install a whole OS to run OS/2, but Windows installed just like any other DOS program, and you could delete it if you decided you didn't like it."

Microsoft realized that you couldn't force people to buy something they (rightly or wrongly) didn't want, and decided to sell them something they did want. Small companies are like that. Being a global giant with a long history of monopoly power (going back to the 1930s), IBM didn't think like that.

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

#185

Post by valarauca1 »

hga wrote: post #108
valarauca1 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Microsoft sold the Xenix license to SCO it took its payment in stock. Mircosoft owned ~25% of SCO during these legal battles.

Huh, I don't remember that, especially if those were the two different SCOs. The first, the Santa Cruz Operation, was OK ignoring some quality issues, and they are the organization that Microsoft got 25% of through that transaction in 1987. Much later, in 2001, this happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation#Asset_sal... And Caldera, which renamed itself in the next year to The SCO Group, got all of…

To fill in your missing memory

In 1987 Microsoft sold Xenix to Santa Cruise Operations Group for a 25% ownership shared of Santa Cruise Operations Group.

In 1993 Caldera purchases Santa Cruise Operations Group, and renamed their collective company to SCO Group. Caldrea was part of Canopy Group which has a lot of subsidiaries.

Round about 2003 the SCO vs. Linux fight started. Microsoft still owned Caldrea stock, and provided them financial assistance as they attempted to sue the entire world.

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

#186

Post by hga »

valarauca1 wrote: post #185
hga wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, I don't remember that, especially if those were the two different SCOs. The first, the Santa Cruz Operation, was OK ignoring some quality issues, and they are the organization that Microsoft got 25% of through that transaction in 1987. Much later, in 2001, this happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation#Asset_sal... And Caldera, which renamed itself in the next year to The SCO Group, got all of…

To fill in your missing memory In 1987 Microsoft sold Xenix to Santa Cruise Operations Group for a 25% ownership shared of Santa Cruise Operations Group. In 1993 Caldera purchases Santa Cruise Operations Group, and renamed their collective company to SCO Group. Caldrea was part of Canopy Group which has a lot of subsidiaries. Round about 2003 the SCO vs. Linux fight started. Microsoft still owned Caldrea stock, and p…

In 1993 Caldera purchases Santa Cruise Operations Group, and renamed their collective company to SCO Group.

As noted in my posting replying to you, that doesn't match my memory or Wikipedia, can you provide any citations to support it?

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

#187

Post by [deleted] »

throwawaykf05 wrote: post #144
robotresearcher wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 beca…

[deleted]

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

#188

Post by valarauca1 »

hga wrote: post #186
valarauca1 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To fill in your missing memory In 1987 Microsoft sold Xenix to Santa Cruise Operations Group for a 25% ownership shared of Santa Cruise Operations Group. In 1993 Caldera purchases Santa Cruise Operations Group, and renamed their collective company to SCO Group. Caldrea was part of Canopy Group which has a lot of subsidiaries. Round about 2003 the SCO vs. Linux fight started. Microsoft still owned Caldrea stock, and p…

In 1993 Caldera purchases Santa Cruise Operations Group, and renamed their collective company to SCO Group. As noted in my posting replying to you, that doesn't match my memory or Wikipedia, can you provide any citations to support it?

Sorry in 2001 Caldrea didn't purchase Santa Cruise Operations Group outright. It just purchased everything relating to Unix.

After this sale Santa Cruise Operations Group changed its named to TARANTELLA inc. While concurrently Caldrea founded SCO Group, which was built on the purchased Santa Cruise Operations Group software.

Agreement and Plan of Reorganization:

http://sec.edgar-online.com/tarantella-inc/8-k-current-repor...

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

#189

Post by thwarted »

ChrisArgyle wrote: post #70
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.

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…

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.

You are aware that the "World Domination" being referred to was talk of Linux's World Domination, right? So you're not disagreeing, you're supporting the observation that Linux eventually dethroned the 800 lb gorilla and that the 800 lb gorilla is a shadow of what it once was.

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

#190

Post by thwarted »

dunham wrote: post #155
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…

I downloaded and played with IE for Solaris, but I didn't use it for day to day browsing. One interesting thing that I recall from it was that it had .so files that corresponded to each of the windows DLLs. So it looked like they had some sort of framework for porting windows code to Unix.

There used to be a page from the IE for UNIX porting team[0] that talked about the challenges of a direct port. Last I checked, only a copy of the content could be found on a mailing list post[1].

There's some interesting stuff in there. This one always seemed like a weird problem:

    Global variables in Win32 dynamic-link libraries (DLLs) are visible across
    processes, so it is important that developers are careful that these globals
    do not conflict with any variables within the Unix shared libraries.
At least in the way it is presented. What does variables in DLLs being visible across processes on Windows have to do with variables in other libraries? Of course they need to be uniquely referenced.

[0] http://tech.slashdot.org/story/98/11/17/1624254/microsoft-pr...

[1] http://www.linux.cz/pipermail/linux/1999-September/051669.ht...

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