

Linux snickers at Microsoft's victory declaration - mindstab
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/linux-snickers-at-microsofts-victory-declaration/9405

======
iamelgringo
I've been interacting quite a bit with with Microsoft people in the last
couple of years.

I was shocked to meet a bunch of people within Microsoft that have recently
migrated there from Sun. Joel Franusic, the BizSpark evangelist for Silicon
Valley has roots as a php/perl/linux Admin, and has been a Super Happy Dev
House organizer since the early days.

They are working really hard to change Microsoft's attitude towards open
source and *nix in general. They are trying to change the attitude from one of
competition to that of cooperation. And, I believe that's why you see things
like Microsoft joining the Apache foundation, Microsoft contributing a lot of
patches to Linux, funding the port of Node.js to Windows, etc...

So, perhaps the change in wording is a hall mark of a change in attitude,
rather than a declaration of victory. I could be wrong.

The crew at BizSpark Silicon Valley have been the biggest supporters of our
Hackers & Founders tag line of the "Linux of Incubators."
<http://angel.co/hackers_and_founders>

<full disclosure> Microsoft BizSpark sponsors a number of Hackers & Founders
events in Silicon Valley[1]. I don't make any money from them, however. They
cover the costs for some of the events that we hold to help startups and
founders. </full disclosure>

ref:

[1] <http://hackersandfounders.tv>

~~~
dredmorbius
That's all well and good.

But.

But: I've been hearing this for well over a decade. "Microsoft's attitude
toward Linux is changing." Again and again and again and again.

And then some new instance of FUD emerges, or a legal attack on a Free
Software / open source advocate or company, some trumped-up performance
benchmark, chairs in low-earth orbit. Whatever. The behavior has _always_
failed to match the rhetoric.

I'm sure there are people at Microsoft who like Linux and respect it a bunch.
With a few tens of thousands of employees, I also suspect there are those who
dislike it, hate it, and/or misunderstand it badly.

As for the company as a whole, my read is that the overall attitude remains
negative.

I'll believe there's a lovefest for Linux after 5-10 years of non-idiotic
behavior from Microsoft.

As for caring: not so much anymore. Microsoft are increasingly irrelevant to
the tech landscape. Not that they don't have a huge presence, but it's simiply
not as significant to future development as it was ten or twenty years ago.
Apple have a bigger market cap and are dominating emerging consumer markets
(phones, tablets), Google are beating hard on Apple's heels and are pushing
traditional enterprise tools (desktop apps, mail, calendar) into the cloud.
Various cloud service providers are abstracting large server farms for many
organizations. You can get your job done while only touching on Microsoft
products very tangentially in more and more places.

It's no longer a world of "a PC on every desktop and Microsoft Windows on
every PC". Not by a long shot.

~~~
TheCondor
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 codecs? When
they come up with something like JPEG-XR or VC1, how about an MIT or BSD or
GPL licensed reference implementation?

Short of porting a major application to Linux (Office?) I think a sizable
contingent would never believe them. As others have mentioned, if you're
building web apps, how do they even matter other than having a crappy browser
that you have to code for?

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

~~~
Nelson69
Mono isn't exactly killing it as the go to development platform.

------
justinsb
I read Microsoft's original change of wording completely differently - it
wasn't that they had defeated Linux, it was that Windows had already lost
(largely because their competitors changed the game.) Competitors no longer
compete only with Internet Explorer, they now offer an alternative to the
entire Windows OS. Linux on the desktop (GNOME/KDE) didn't win per-se, but the
browser did win, and Windows isn't a necessary choice for a browser-first
system.

~~~
recoiledsnake
>it was that Windows had already lost (largely because their competitors
changed the game.) Competitors no longer compete only with Internet Explorer,
they now offer an alternative to the entire Windows OS. Linux on the desktop
(GNOME/KDE) didn't win per-se, but the browser did win, and Windows isn't a
necessary choice for a browser-first system.

Is that reflected in sales figures?

They do acknowledge competition from Apple(OS X and iPad) and
Google(Chromebook) and OS X has been offering a very big and popular
alternative to 'the entire Windows OS' since inception.

How can you say Windows already lost while they are shipping on 85% of the PCs
and laptops in the US and much higher worldwide?

~~~
justinsb
It's reflected in (my reading of) Microsoft's statement.

Sales figures are retrospective; this section of their 10-K is forward
looking.

Also, if you define the market to include smartphones and tablets, I'm pretty
sure Microsoft doesn't have 85% market share. The open question is whether
that broader definition represents the future of "the computer market" or
whether it should remain a separate category.

Of course, you're welcome to your own interpretation - lots of people read it
very differently than I did.

~~~
riffraff
would you care to share data sources for your confidence?

I am not arguing they are wrong, I am just unable to google concrete data for
PC and smarthphone + tablets usage in a recent time period.

~~~
justinsb
A few sources... I wouldn't put too much faith in the details, but in terms of
rough magnitude they're probably pretty accurate.

Gartner says PC sales in 2011 will be <400 million. I'm pretty sure that's
mostly Windows:
[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870330090457617...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703300904576178381437662352.html)

iPad sales looking like 40 million (or more) for 2011:
[http://blogs.computerworld.com/18550/apple_2011_ipad_sales_h...](http://blogs.computerworld.com/18550/apple_2011_ipad_sales_hit_40_million)

Smartphone sales were 100 million in Q2 alone; Windows share of that was 1.6%
(!):
[http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9219112/Gartner_Smart...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9219112/Gartner_Smartphones_boom_overall_mobile_sales_drop)

------
jff
"Supercomputers, the fastest of the fast, run Linux almost exclusively."

And it's so disappointing. Consider the Blue Gene series. Great new
architecture, custom networks, custom hardware. Initially, they put Linux on
the I/O nodes and a custom kernel on the compute nodes, because you want a
minimum of OS noise (see the FTQ benchmark for more info on this). But
everyone clamored for Linux on compute nodes--so now we boot this enormous
Linux kernel on each compute node. Plan 9 was ported (I did some of it), but
nobody wanted it because it wasn't Linux.

I'm of the opinion that no group in the world is as set-in-their-ways and
reactionary as the supercomputing application developers. If it can't run
Linux and Fortran 77, they don't want it.

~~~
rbanffy
Plan 9 was a very interesting OS, but it always gave me the impression to be
too desktop/workstation influenced. While you could have your heavy lifting
carried out on big processing nodes on the net, it depended on having the same
one-size-fits-all OS on all boxes. There was a time when we envisioned
powerful computers running powerful software on every desktop. That time has
more or less passed - most people now are very happy with the browser, the
modern equivalent of the 3270.

And I have to tell you that being able to sit down at any 3270 in any company
building and to have access to your stuff readily available was, in several
ways, a better (if uglier) experience than what desktop workstation provided.

Plan 9 also committed the cardinal sin of being different for the sake of
being different. You can build a better Unix without making "vi" a MIPS
emulator.

We invent things that are ahead of their time. It's a shame so much of the
technology is lost when that happens.

As for the Fortran 77 thing... Well... They have lots of code that has already
been written and tested. Do you really want to port it to something else?
Besides, legend says F77 compiles to very efficient code.

~~~
jff
Possibly the biggest motivation for porting Plan 9 was that it provides a very
light-weight yet featureful kernel. Linux is way too big, but the compute node
kernels IBM and Cray have been coming up with may be too simple. Plan 9
provides a rich environment but doesn't demand much of the environment.

And yes, Fortran 77 can be quite efficient... but on the other hand, we're
also seeing a lot of _new_ software being written in Python, which (at least
according to our process traces) tries to open thousands of non-existent files
on startup. So efficiency isn't _everything_ they care about... it's partly
that they were used to Fortran, and now they're used to Python, and something
scarily new like Plan 9 is, well, scary.

Oh, and good luck trying to convince people that MPI isn't necessarily the
only solution for parallel programming. If the community at large has its way,
we'll still be using Linux and MPI in 2040.

~~~
rbanffy
> and something scarily new like Plan 9 is, well, scary

Plan 9 would be more OK if it didn't try to be so not Unix.

That's too bad. It saddens me that, of the three more advanced widely used OS,
two are variations of the 70's Unix theme while the third is the bastard child
of VMS with lots of lipstick on it. :-( Plan 9 deserved better.

------
macco
As a great Ubuntu fan I must say: It's strange why mobile plattforms are
always a example for the success of Linux.

Android may be using a Linux kernel, but it has next to nothing to do with
traditionel Linux distros, that are developed in colaboration.

~~~
ajross
This is more a myth than reality.

It's definitely not a compatible environment, but I'd argue with "next to
nothing". Android shares the same kernel, is built with the same toolchain,
has the same underlying POSIX environment (albeit a reimplemented one, not the
GNU software itself), uses most of the same base library set (libjpeg, zlib,
etc...), uses most of the same middleware components (bluez, wpa_supplicant,
etc...).

The one big architectural difference is that they ripped out the X server and
replaced it with their own minimal window system. But even then the rendering
API (OpenGL ES) is an existing standard from the desktop world. And the only
hugely different component is the API: they wrote an app framework in Java and
run it on their own VM. But that's just the skin. Underneath it's all still
linux.

To someone who does nothing but write apps using top-level frameworks, Android
looks "next to nothing" like "Linux". To someone who actually knows linux,
it's all the same stuff.

~~~
sdkmvx
It's interesting that you say this. If POSIX was all that there is to it, then
isn't Apple iOS/Mac OS the same as Android and (insert-your-favorite-distro-
here) Linux? I think ultimately the differences between user-facing (and even
developer-facing, API-level stuff) components are way more important than the
fact that POSIX is so common. After all, we would't describe two computers as
basically the same because they both have a CPU/RAM/Storage unless we were
comparing them to say, a car.

~~~
ajross
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 (and
there are lot of us!) bringing up software on Android is more or less the same
as doing it on desktop linux.

~~~
comex
> 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.

~~~
ajross
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.

~~~
sdkmvx
> 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.

------
spydum
Did I miss something? Microsoft is not a small competitor in this field:
[http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/who-is-
win...](http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/who-is-winning-the-
u-s-smartphone-battle/)

Yes, Android is rocking it, and so is iOS.. but 10% of the mobile smartphone
market is nothing to sneeze at. And those are old numbers.

------
mindstab
I guess "the year of the Linux desktop" may never come, but it also may be
irrelevant :) Linux may still "win"

~~~
gvb
Mark Shuttleworth says Ubuntu is making inroads on desktops and is poised to
take off:

<http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/738>

FWIIW, IMHO there never will be a "year of the linux desktop." Linux on the
desktop is an infiltration, not a blitzkrieg. As such, it will only be
recognizable in retrospect.

~~~
movingahead
Even as a passionate Ubuntu follower, I don't see the possibility of Ubuntu
going main-stream. The OS may match or even exceed the capabilities of
Windows, but it is more important to have a diverse number of generally used
apps. I feel Chrome OS has a very good chance of getting mainstream
popularity. It does what it intends to do pretty well.

~~~
jff
But... Chrome OS is little more than Chrome, running on a Linux base. You can
run Chrome on Ubuntu, and still access all your files and such. There are even
tools to let you mount your Gmail storage space locally so you can use it for
a document store.

------
CurtHagenlocher
Microsoft declared victory? Was there a press release, or some kind of public
celebration? Somehow, I missed that. I work at Microsoft, and no one invited
me to the party.

Both the original article and this followup are the worst kind of link bait.

------
shriphani
Ed Bott's article + this one are the digital equivalent of penis-length-
measurement contests. Why is this cheap attempt at acting like Sherlock Holmes
on the front-page of HN ?

I am an intern @ MSFT. I use win @ work. Windows+Ubuntu on my home box and
load up FreeBSD in a VM (on my home machine) from time to time and used a Mac
till very recently (it died not very close to a refresh of the MBP lineup to
make it worth waiting and not too far from a refresh to buy the one on sale at
the time).

------
macdonald
I don't see why these types of articles have to focus on the notion of a
'victory' for either side. Microsoft isn't winning, but it's making a lot of
money in various areas, so it's not losing either.

Microsoft probably is concerned about declining market share, but to suggest
it was always targeting 100% of the market is misleading (there are people
that have always and will always run Linux, and there are other people --
particularly large enterprises -- that they are much more focused on).

------
recoiledsnake
It's strange that Linux was suddenly taken off the list in their stock filing
but I think the article comes with some caveats.

Android in the mobile would be listed as 'Android' in their SEC filing, since
it's not really a traditional Linux distro like RedHat/Ubuntu/Gentoo, SuSe etc
etc. Also, even Meego/Maemo, WebOS, Bada are based on the Linux kernel, but
there's no common ecosystem among these as there is in desktop/server Linux
distros.

While they may have only a 15% share in the Web server market, it's a VERY
lucrative 15%.

Just as people like to remind us that the iPhone captures half the profit in
the mobile market with a smaller marketshare, Windows Server/SQL
Server/Sharepoint/Exchange etc. are big money as reflected in the revenue
numbers, 4.5 billion USD last quarter or 17 billion last year just for the
Server and Tools division. It's really hard to calculate how much money is
directly made off LAMP/RoR/Python.

Maybe they don't see Linux as an immediate short term threat anymore, but that
is far from dismissing it completely, as the article projects.

