This looks to me like typical Microsoft strategy that they utilized a lot 25 years ago.
1. when not leader in given market, make your product fully compatible with competitor
2. start gaining momentum (e.g. why should I use Linux, when on Windows I can run both Linux and Windows applications)
3. once becoming leader break up compatibility
4. rinse and repeat
Happened with MS-DOS, Word, Excel, Internet Explorer, and others.
Gave this a long look and my main beef is that I couldn't possibly do anything on a Windows Machine in its' current state. Linux isn't just about running apps - there's a philosophy behind the system. Users first!
As long as Microsoft continues to disrespect the rights of users in regard to privacy, data-collection, data-sharing with unnamed sources, tracking, uncontrollable OS operations (updates, etc) - I will never go near it.
I find it especially offensive that ex-open source and ex-Linux users (working for Microsoft) have the audacity to come on here and try to sell this as a 'Linux on Windows' system when most of what makes Linux special (respect for the user) has been stripped away.
It's like giving a man who is dying of thirst sea water.
Most comments here appear to be positive and that's fine... whatever. To anyone reading this... please don't sell your souls and the future of software technology for ease of use and abusive business practices. /rant
I dual boot my laptop b/w Windows and Linux because the WiFi network at my school has issues with Linux...so I'm forced to use Windows, also for games, but it's such a pain. Today it updated forcefully while I was trying to study; I tried to postpone the update but the option was grayed out. The Windows philosophy through and through is to treat users as ignorant and incompetent idiots for whom even the most basic of tasks must be performed, and who cannot make important decisions. This, IMHO, is the epitome of disrespect, and the reason I look forward with great anticipation to the day when I am able to solely operate within computing environments that afford me the same dignity as the cars I drive.
The thing is, from an "open source" perspective, what they're doing is great and totally legit. From a free software perspective, it has a lot of potential to be suspicious and troubling. If all you care about is "the best technology; yay" rather than user freedoms, your concerns are moot.
Apple is just as proprietary, commercial and anti-competitive as Microsoft here.
FWIW, this excites me because it potentially means I can go from two machines to one, and always have IE/Edge at my fingertips. It will greatly improve my dev workflow if it pans out like people are hoping it does.
There's a stereotype that the open source people are practical but don't care about political issues and the free software people hate everything proprietary with a passion, but of course that's not always the case. Big companies like Microsoft aren't monocultures. They have some really amazing people, even if not everyone is perfectly enlightened. The path to more user freedom is allowing those good people to continue to push technology in the right direction. This is a step toward more freedom.
Many of us don't just use one computer. I use every OS on different desktops, laptops, tablets, phones, servers, and consoles. They might not all be equally free, but I only need one to be fully free to know that I have freedom that can't be taken away. Even for those who don't have a fully free system, the most important thing in my opinion is that the option always exists. If they aren't served by proprietary software, they have somewhere to go.
GNU won against all odds. It's here to stay, proliferating across so many devices. I'm happy to welcome people who might not have ventured outside Windows into the family!
You are mixing them all and that's how the debate gets stuck into some neckbeard-limbo that nobody cares about.
Society made a lot of progress when religion and state got decoupled from each other. There are some things that should be handled separately.
What I have to say about this is:
Technology-wise, GNU/Linux software is separate from that of Windows at the binary level as well as dependencies. For them to extend such software means that they would need to build on that. That would extend the GNU/Linux ecosystem.
Legally-wise, open source software is protected by open source licensing that requires derived software to also be licensed as open source. It is challenging to achieve the "extend" part of the "embrace/extend/extinguish" loop if open source licenses are in place.
In terms of values, they're a for-profit corporation trying to reach out to developers. Same as every other company. They have open sourced .NET, they've released some of their actually important software on Linux (SQL Server), they have embraced the Linux platform on their cloud environments... everything possible to appeal to developers. It doesn't appeal to me, though.
That said, for most development work I prefer Linux, and run a Linux home server as well as various VMs, so this announcement sounds great to me.
And as a final aside: basically all of the information gathering that people complain about with Windows can very easily be turned off. In fact, for the most part the installation wizard actually leads you through how to turn it off. For me that makes it a non-issue, although I understand that some feel differently.
I think this is the third time I'm writing this reply on HN. Seems to be a common misconception.
I respectfully disagree. The OSX kernel XNU is open source, as are a ton of its components. That's huge in a lot of situations. Some things - not a lot, granted, but some, like FreeBSD's C++ stack and compiler - are even upstreamed back to mainstream open source projects by Apple employees.
Like with their SMB support? When, given the choice of complying with the GPL or re-writing an SMB client from scratch, Apple chose the latter and subjected users to utterly broken SMB support for several releases just so they did not have to open source their pitiful collection of patches?
Are they? When did Microsoft's EEE strategy benefit the user and lead to the best technology? IE6? JScript? ActiveX? J/Direct? MSN Messenger?
They have identified the core of their business and they feel comfortable there. They get a 30% royalty for each App Store transaction, they make large profits selling iPhones and Macs. They monetize their software indirectly as a part of a larger end-to-end solution.
Microsoft during their monopolic era was much more beyond that, they were going for all.
Yeah I'm sure all those celebs that had all their nude photos stolen from icloud would totally agree that Apple takes great care with personal data.
Are you trying to justify needlessly spending 600$ on a phone every year? That's your prerogative, you don't have to convince strangers on the internet.
In my context as a software engineer or as a private individual I didn't find your argument convincing from the point of view that it would expose any specific problems that are of my concern. If I was responsible for confidential data my views might align more with yours.
"As long as Microsoft continues to disrespect the rights of users in regard to privacy, data-collection, data-sharing with unnamed sources..."
I'm already giving up most of my privacy in the general context when using an off-the-shelf cellphone (in the sense that I have no idea how much data leak my daily cell phone use causes and I'm fine with it since I have no time to implement a personal data safety plan).
If I wanted privacy I would stop using technology altogether. I just want things that a) work with b) minimal financial risk.
"when most of what makes Linux special (respect for the user) has been stripped away."
Sorry, for me it's the "Linux the technology stack", that make it special, not the "Linux the philosophy".
"please don't sell your souls and the future of software technology for ease of use"
For me personally, 'ease of use' is the single most important optimization parameter when choosing technology. Although, in my definition, this encompasses things not only directly related to daily use, but include license cost, security and data loss prevention. The most important thing I care very much for is retaining copy right to my own data.
Why 'ease of use'? Because the only thing that truly constrains me in this world, is time. As in, how long I have to live, and how much effort I need to reach my goals. When put in this context, I don't care of the philosophical implications of the way I solve problems and implement things - I just want them done.
I.e. if the product does what I want, I don't really care of the philosophy. Perhaps I have too much faith in market forces and jurisdiction prohibiting monopoly but I fail to see much personal benefit in an all encompassing "platform philosophy" as to me, technology platforms should focus on solving real life problems.
"please don't sell your souls"
I don't pour my soul into the technology platform I use. I pour my soul on the design itself - the implementation on the platform is just the implementation of the design that could very well live in an abstract turing machine. Although the implementation running in live hardware is much, much more fun (and exposes the bugs).
All systems have had and still have security flaws. There is a world of difference between having a unknown vulnerability (which affects and will affect all platforms) and intentionally spying on users and stealing their information.
This is true for a certain type of users (developers deploying on Linux).
For a different class of users (desktop/laptop users, or developers developing on Linux), Linux has a documented history of "Fuck you very much".
Microsoft has recognized that there is a large overlap between these two classes.
And also the requirement of specialist tools to do non-specialist jobs like set the engine timing, and then charging a lot for purchase of the tool. It will be interesting to see how serviceable electric cars become once they are old enough to start being parted out and the used market expands to those who 'just need something to go from A to B'.
Yes, absolutely. Bill Gates was not a "nice" man. These days many people fawn over him "oh he's so lovey dovey, he's going to save the world with all his money as a philanthropist". LOL -- how many have actually sat at the same table (behind closed doors) with Billy boy pounding the table telling everyone attending (ISPs, major telecoms) how Microsoft was going to run the show, run the world. Microsoft is a ruthless company. Satya Nadella was part of this ruthless culture when he first joined MSFT 25 years ago. Why would the ruthless culture of Microsoft suddenly change because they've figured out how to peg Ubuntu Linux to the kernel? Ever hear of a Trojan Horse? This announcement today sure smells like horse manure.
It isn't just about the philosophy either. Not to me.
Linux offers a stellar scheduler, phenomenal file systems such as ext4 and XFS (soon ZFS!), cgroups… the list goes on.
RMS was foresighted enough to make licensing a core part of open source. I have a deep respect for the man.
The Achilles heel for open source software remains to be patents. In that regard I think many proprietary players still have the upper hand.
That's a good point. Its all about having real options (freedom to move) and minimal switching costs. That said, I'm still concerned about a possible Trojan Horse scenario here whereby Linux on Windows is the hook to try and get people into the proprietary Windows dev tools (Visual Studio etc.) and checked into the Azure "roach motel" cloud (easy to check into, hard to check out).
> Big companies like Microsoft aren't monocultures. They have some really amazing people, even if not everyone is perfectly enlightened.
Microsoft most definitely has some amazing and talented people, but I disagree with you about culture: the culture of any company is undoubtedly set from the top down (the founders or directors). Please do not be so naive to think Satya Nadella does not set the culture at Microsoft, (hierarchical in nature). This isn't to say there may not be some fiefdoms within a company as large as Microsoft, but there is an overarching culture and it comes from the top.
> Many of us don't just use one computer.
This is probably true for some, but some people might only be able to afford one computer. One scenario I can see which might be appealing to a developer, as of this announcement yesterday, is using a MacBook with Apple's Boot Camp to partition the internal drive such that one could have as many options as possible (OS X on one partition, and Windows 10 with Linux on the other).
> GNU won against all odds. It's here to stay, proliferating across so many devices. I'm happy to welcome people who might not have ventured outside Windows into the family!
It would be really cool to hear what RMS (Richard Stallman) thinks about this. I wonder if he's be up for an AMA on Reddit to address this seemingly earth shaking announcement by MSFT?
I think he would say what he has always said about secret software. He's fairly consistent in that regard.
It's absolutely not a non-issue when I was helping my mother set up her new Win10 laptop.
She doesn't want to be tracked, I don't want her to be tracked.
But currently she is being tracked by Microsoft very much.
As are millions of other people that REALLY do not want to, if they had the choice.
There was no wizard when I got there to help her. Obviously she had set up most of the laptop herself because she's not intimidated by computers and really pretty good with them (at age 66). Except she couldn't get email to work.
And neither could I, btw. She wanted two accounts in the windows 10 default mail client, one from the ISP and a very old hotmail account. Somehow this just wouldn't work and the stupid mail client was actively hiding the information I (or she) needed to troubleshoot the problem (not just a bit, I got like zero information. and a numerical error code. it's beyond me why MS would want to translate standard error messages from IMAP and SMTP into something even more cryptic). I ended up installing Thunderbird, which works.
But I digress. My mom is not a HN-reader, so she hadn't quite heard about Win10's totalitarian surveillance features, and when first setting up her laptop she wasn't quite sitting there in the adversarial position of "I'd rather brick my system than let it spy on me" that any of us would need to assume in order to later claim "the information gathering that people complain about with Windows can very easily be turned off". She doesn't want to be tracked, so I'm sure she ticked off a couple of the checkboxes that were clear about it.
But maybe not the ones that popped up warnings about your system. Or the ones that were misleadingly worded as if they are something beneficial ("just like the US government does" is not really a bar for good intentions) that you need to Google to figure out what they really mean. Or the tiny checkboxed that only explain their maliciousness in a very tiny font next to the big friendly letters that just want to steam you through the wizard. (I didn't see any wizard, but this is the deliberately misleading I remember from win8, obviously intending to grab as much private info from users while pretending to give them a choice).
During the afternoon I helped her, I only had time to set up the email and do a few other things. In addition of having to wait through 45 minutes of some giant update, which upset her a bit because it was a brand-new laptop, high-end thingy, why did we have to wait for things to happen? Damn right. The longer I'm on Linux, the more and more ridiculous it seems to have the OS yank control from you at what are probably the most inopportune moments (boot-up and shutdown ... really?!)
So I didn't have time to help her, Google for all the privacy options in Win10 and disable them.
What you probably don't know, because you "easily" disabled them right away, is that after this initial setup phase, Win10's remote surveillance features are as quiet as they can possibly be. (until you try to disable them of course at which point they'll scream bloody modal murder)
And with her, that situation is by no means unique. There are millions upon millions of sufficiently able people running Windows that are currently being tracked, against their wishes, because the options are misleading and/or hidden. And they even pay Microsoft for the privilege ...
So yeah no. Just like computer security in general isn't about you being safe and protected from criminals, that's easy enough, unless you're being targeted, if you are clever and paying attention, don't click the shady popups/emails and you're mostly fine.
Criminal phishers or ransomware peddlers would be out of a job (or be more clever) if everybody has the knowledge like that.
Just like Microsoft wouldn't have even bothered doing all that work on their surveillance tracking systems if the features would have been as "easily turned off" for everyone that doesn't want to be tracked.
Just like any whitehat hackers, on the rare occasions I hear them about the fundamental moral reasons why they do what they do, in addition to "hacking is fun" (also goes for grey/blackhat), is every time not because they and their tech-savvy friends need their protection, no we're catching the bad guys and fixing the vulnerabilities because our mother, grandfather, neighbour, partner, nephew and that friendly man at the cigar/magazine cornershop need the protection because they don't want to be hacked just as much as we don't, but not everyone has the time to dig into computers as deeply as us to protect ourselves.
And you know, those very same people also don't want to be tracked, given the choice. At the very most they'll shrug and admit defeatedly "well, yeah, ... I don't mind so much, I guess" -- because to them it seems to be price to pay for not having to really dig deep into their system and just be able to use that laptop for email and web-browsing.
But no, they don't really want to be tracked. It's NOT a choice, for them, it factors as an additional cost of being able to use a computer.
Source: I teach people (of all ages, but mostly children 8-18y) general computer usage. None of them want to be tracked. None. The ones that even claim they do, I haven't met a single one that, after sitting down and talking for a while, didn't just boast "oh, I don't care" because the alternative would be admitting that they don't have the skill/knowledge to fix the situation, or because simply not using Facebook because it's creepy as fuck, would be social suicide. That's not a choice. It's not a choice!
Just because we (hackernewserpeoples) are clever enough to opt to not pay that cost because it's technically optional, doesn't make it a "non-issue".
There's also a logical fallacy that because Nadella worked for MS for the past twenty five years, he's as power hungry as Gates. This reeks of the type of elitist nonsense the keeps people from wanting to adopt Linux.
EDIT: Removed insult, came with arguments instead.
You've taken the words right out of my mouth. At first blush, Linux interop on Windows seems like the best of both worlds, but in reality you're giving up a lot more than you gain.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp_v_Commission#Si...
It falls on Developers - moreso than any other group - to be aware of the dangers the work they perform produces and for whom their work benefits. They must all be aware of the abuses of our basic rights and human dignity modern Private Enterprise engage in.
When these same Enterprises pull developers from a system (or systems) that value our individual rights to one that tramples all over them... it angers me. It begins to limit the Philosophically, user-empowering, alternatives we have. When developers rejoice over the actions of an abusive Enterprise, it disheartens me. It feels like the bigger picture is somehow being missed.
To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin: 'Those who give up their freedoms for temporary ease of use deserve neither and will lose both.'
I do not mean this to sound harsh. You can both work within the current technological framework (as we all do) and, at the same time, rail against a future that runs counter to our core beliefs. It's ok to do both. It's ok to work within a Microsoft-produced framework and at the same time let them know that some of what they're doing is counter to your belief system as a private, law-abiding individual.
What we must not do is defend the Police State we're currently building. It runs counter to everything we hold dear as a democratic and free society. Counter to the best kind of future we can envision for ourselves and future generations.
The chasm between the 'haves'' and the 'have-nots'* is only getting wider. The very concept of a fair society where all men are created equal diminishes. Enterprise OSes produced by Microsoft, for example, have privacy-enabled features the common man does not have access to. The common man - you and I - are now constant targets whereas Corporations, those in Government, those in law enforcement and many others accustomed to living above the law continue live under a different set of rules. This is the emerging new standard.
China will soon get a special build of Windows 10 without telemetry, without "phoning home". I am certain that this special build will contain the same kind of malware and abusive spyware that benefits the Chinese Government over it's own citizens. So... we, possibly have, an American software company building and deploying tools for repressive regimes. Yet we have become so complacent, there isn't even a discussion about it. That's how bad things have gotten.
We shouldn't pretend that this philosophical disconnect is not the biggest change in development. It is essentially the only real difference between Operating Systems/Working Frameworks. As good people... I'm saying that we should never, ever defend it, accept it and be complacent about it.
The few hours of recreational computing I perform daily have no effect on how the world works. To imagine otherwise would be hubris verging on insanity.
The software I write at work cannot be used to invade anyone's privacy.
I see what your point is but totally fail to connect it to my personal daily reality.
But as to your point, not all free software licenses are copyleft. The MIT and BSD and Apache licenses are all proprietary-friendly licenses.
And as for requiring to extend the GNU/Linux ecosystem, I don't think that's true. It just looks like they've implemented syscall compatibility with Linux (something that FreeBSD has had for donkey's years and SmartOS has been working on for the past few years). Neither of those technologies resulted in more software specifically for GNU/Linux.
> RMS was foresighted enough to make licensing a core part of open source. I have a deep respect for the man.
He founded the free software movement. The open source movement is based on different values (convenience above ethics) which Stallman doesn't agree with.
> The Achilles heel for open source software remains to be patents. In that regard I think many proprietary players still have the upper hand.
Both the GPLv3 and Apache solve this problem. The issue is that too many people are using permissive licenses where it's not appropriate.
Ignoring your insults toward RMS, you can always send him an email at rms@gnu.org. He responds within a few days most of the time.