Linux snickers at Microsoft's victory declaration • Hacker News Board

Re: Linux snickers at Microsoft's victory declaration

#51

Post by ajross » Wed, Aug 17, 2011, 3:48 PM UTC

comex wrote: post #49

ajross wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I'm saying is that by any complexity metric you want to pick (lines of code, whatever) Android and "Linux" are far, far more alike than different. The layer you are picking as "way more important" only seems more important to you because it's the layer you live in. The rest of the software is really important too (where would you be without the networking stack or video codecs, for example?) and to those people (…

> All I'm saying is that by any complexity metric you want to pick (lines of code, whatever) Android and "Linux" are far, far more alike than different. Citation needed. The Android-specific stuff makes up a lot of code.

A quick "du" over a fairly stale source tree shows the "external" tree as larger than the rest of the source trees added together. And that's not including the kernel, which is (by far) the largest single component.

Really: you need to get your head out of app space if you want to talk about platforms. There's an immense amount of code in a modern system that you never see. And Android (correctly) sucked it all in from linux instead of reimplementing it.

Re: Linux snickers at Microsoft's victory declaration

#52

Post by sdkmvx » Wed, Aug 17, 2011, 8:10 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #51

comex wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All I'm saying is that by any complexity metric you want to pick (lines of code, whatever) Android and "Linux" are far, far more alike than different. Citation needed. The Android-specific stuff makes up a lot of code.

A quick "du" over a fairly stale source tree shows the "external" tree as larger than the rest of the source trees added together. And that's not including the kernel, which is (by far) the largest single component. Really: you need to get your head out of app space if you want to talk about platforms. There's an immense amount of code in a modern system that you never see. And Android (correctly) sucked it all in fr…

> Really: you need to get your head out of app space if you want to talk about platforms.

Do you know that comex has written several jailbreaks for iOS? I think he's more qualified to talk about mobile platforms than either of us.

When we compare two systems, we should look at the code that is different. Everything about desktop Linux and Android is different except for the stuff that all computers need to do. Basic OS services are a solved problem, and that's why you don't see too many people writing OSes today.

Re: Linux snickers at Microsoft's victory declaration

#53

Post by dredmorbius » Fri, Aug 19, 2011, 6:08 AM UTC

tedunangst wrote: post #43

TheCondor wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll take a management change and some serious actions. Let's make no mistake, the company has been compeltely and 100% opposed to Linux for a very long time now. What exactly would it take to constitue a change of heart? Seriously? I would think they could extend patent amnesty to all Linux distributions. They could embrace the Mono project. They could acutally release some software on Linux. How about media player…

Just one example, but the asp.net mvc source/reference implementation is available under a liberal license and plays nice with mono.

Microsoft aren't opposed to _all_ free software licenses. They've been rather fond of BSD licensed software from the get-go (it was used and may still appear among copyright credits in Windows).

The GPL is another matter.

Though in recent kernels, Microsoft have contributed more than Google have.