This was a funny era. A few years later (early 2000s), I somehow got sent to the Microsoft developer conference because I was the closest,
geographically. There were so many sessions focused on open source and inter working with Linux. It was shocking that Microsoft had so quickly embraced this world.
Then in the closing keynote, Gates spoke passionately about how Microsoft would eradicate Linux and crush open source. It was hilarious how out of touch the left hand was from the right hand.
I also made a bit of a splash because I came to the conference with a MacBook. A journalist even wanted to interview me because it was so unusual. I declined.
The best part of the conference was the passes to company store, buying a lot of shwag for dirt cheap and a bunch of OS licenses, which they practically gave away in the store (to run in Parallels of course) lol.
> I also made a bit of a splash because I came to the conference with a MacBook
That reminds me of going to a .NET meetup kind of thing at the Microsoft office in Dallas once many years ago, and I came in my Mono t-shirt and my Thinkpad with GNOME and Mono stickers on it. Joseph Hill spots me and comes over to introduce himself. His first words were, "You look like a man on a mission!" :)
Joseph was so cool. There was some guy at Microsoft who was hosting the event, and he was kind of a dick. He kept trying to make jokes about Mono, but most of the people at the event didn't have any idea what Mono was so the only people who knew what he was talking about were me and Joseph.
I remember being a at MS/.Net event a couple of years after Apple released Bootcamp, and Macs was the single most popular brand of laptop I saw at that event.
Completely random comment. I was in a meeting probably about 20 years ago in the 2000s. I forget with what company. Anyone, one of the folks introduced himself as Vinod. I looked at his last name. Valloppillil. I was like "Oh hey - are you the halloween documents guy?". He was completely spooked - looked like a cat had walked over his grave. Seemed like something in his past he wanted to forget. But I thought it was pretty awesome - like having a minor celebrity to talk to when I was a fairly junior engineer. Not quite as awesome as having my copy of Applied Cryptography autographed by Bruce Schnier, but still kinda cool.
Anyway - if you are still out there working in Tech Vinod - hope everything is going well.
If you install LLM stuff or the relatively stable atom clone vscode. You are seeing dependencies that are also maintained by Microsoft.
No issue so far, except when you run a bleeding edge system and realize that all required M$ libs are outdated and either you downgrade or can't use that tool that has that single M$ made python dependency that won't build on a modern system...
More often than not the dependency issue was already reported months ago on their issue tracker, many people put their thumbs up and someone already wrote a patch. No active maintainer to comment, merge and release tho. This is exactly how we don't want our libs managed.
You can run linux on Windows but still can't install a dual boot system with Linux first. IMO that says it all
MS only warmed up to Linux/Open Source, cause they were getting obliterated by Google on search and Apple with smart phones. If they don't do anything to warm up to the open source developers community, they would be obsolete.
Personally I still don't trust any open source or close source products from MS or any corporation. There is ALWAYS some strings attached. However, good thing about open sourcing software, is that you can always find alternative version that is compiled by the community or CE edition.
e.g:
Use VSCodium instead of VSCode.
Use ungoogled-chromium instead of Chrome.
Use WebKit instead of Safari
Just look how often the vscode extensions break for the open-source variants of the IDE.
I basically have to sit down every few months and rejig my settings.json file to match the latest syntax used by the IDE.
Microsoft hasn't changed its character, only how it presents itself.
Your annual reminder that globally, it is Android that dominates the phone market, not iOS. I know that isn't the case in the USA, but that's not the global marketplace.
MS lost (or rather, made essentially zero head way in) everything except desktop computers.
> MS lost (or rather, made essentially zero head way in) everything except desktop computers.
Microsoft's booming business numbers would like to have a discussion.
$26 billion in quarterly operating income, about to overtake Apple in profit, and practically none of their growth over the past decade has come from desktop computers.
They have an extremely lucrative business across cloud everything these days and it has very little to do with Windows on the desktop.
Over the past decade that Windows desktop has largely been stagnant as a business, their total sales have gone from $78 billion to $218 billion. Operating income was stuck for 6-7 years in the ~$14-$22 billion range (the later Ballmer stagnation years), until after 2015. They'll cross $100+ billion in operating income over the next four quarters. All of that leap has happened from 2016 to now and basically none of it has to do with consumer Windows.
> Microsoft's booming business numbers would like to have a discussion.
My gut feeling is Microsoft is making money by moving old Active Directory servers into their own cloud offering, Azure. Their revenue is booming because they make more money from hosting a server than selling a Windows / MSSQL / Exchange licence that runs on someone elses hardware. To give them their due, they do it well, facilitating a smooth transition that allows you to move one machine at a time into the cloud, while the patient is still going about their normal business.
That's all well and good, but it doesn't mean the proportion of people / businesses out there running Microsoft software is growing. Maybe it's dropping? I don't know. But if it is dropping, it's going to come to an ugly end in a few decades time.
Fair enough. They got in to the cloud business. Substantially behind AWS but ahead of Google Cloud. So I'll grant them that, which is good since "consumer Windows" is probably the fastest shrinking market in computing.
yeah with the Jedi defence contract who knows how MS is actually making money. MS making money is NOT necessarily a good thing for users or their own share holders.
And thanks to the Steam Deck and the damage that is doing to the last bastion of Window supremacy in gaming, they may not have that much longer either.
I mean, would you rather have an OS that turns your computer into a personal space invasion device that helps a multi-trillion dollar megalith monetize your every breath while consuming a huge portion of the performance of your $1,000 personal computer, or would you rather have a lightweight customizable OS that only does what you tell it to do, doesn't cost you anything, and can do almost everything that the other guy can do just as well for free with no tracking?
Sadly a lot of people "rather" have the former. Of course MS does everything in their power that these people don't know better or don't have the option to select the latter.
MS has always been about forcing subpar tech with shady tactics, and they are very good at it.
Regarding your last point: I've (finally!) switched from Windows to Linux last year. I have, however, decided to set up a dual boot system, and have installed Linux first. Worked just fine.
Just remember to install Linux AFTER Windows, or unplug your Linux drive when installing Windows, because MS does not play nice with including other OSes in their bootloader; you're gonna have to mess with your UEFI boot order or add the Windows boot to GRUB after the fact.
I agree that it should be enough. On my setup using the UEFI boot manager is much more annoying than it should be, though.
I have configured password protection for my UEFI settings (so that a potential attacker could not easily disable Secure Boot, for example) and GIGABYTE's UEFI implementation requires that password for the boot manager as well. In other words, when booting using this setup, I need up to three passwords: 1. UEFI password, 2. Disk encryption password, 3. User password.
Hence I use systemd-boot to set BootNext and reboot into the Windows boot loader.
Another reason for having a bootloader is that you may have more entries than the built-in manager can handle, for example if you can boot into automatic snapshots.
I think parents point still stand. Windows overwrites any boot related stuff to use it's own. You need to either install X after Windows, or disconnect the proper boot drive when installing Windows, otherwise your system will just boot Windows directly.
All Windows does it set itself first in the boot order whenever you start it. What happened to pressing F9 during POST to open the boot menu? Is that too advanced for people that are dual-booting different operating systems?
Each operating system has its files in their respective directories on ESP, and each operating system registers its own boot entries pointing to bootloader in these directories. With UEFI, there's nothing to overwrite, except setting the default entry.
That's not an issue, since you can both easily boot non-default entries and change, what the default entry is.
No it doesn't REMOVE the Linux's UEFI partition or files on the drive, but it sets itself to #1 in your UEFI boot list. And since their installer does not add other OSes to the Windows bootloader automatically, you have to either change your UEFI settings or your Windows BOOT.INI (for Windows MBR setups)
Depending on your hardware UEFI boot manager can be a PITA. I have a Dell one where a normal boot to grub/sd-boot takes 5s. But if I want to go to the uefi boot menu for some reason it takes 30+ seconds and from what I can observe, an intermediary reboot. And I end up in some monstrous UEFI GUI with an abysmal mouse cursor behaviour.
Because GRUB still ships with the vast majority of Linux distros, and not every UEFI implementation is good about asking which image you want to load every time you boot.
Nitpicking on dual boot. I just went ahead and got myself a system76 laptop. All Linux, no whiff of msft on it. Works awesome.
You don’t need a dual boot. You don’t need windows today. In a sense that’s what the Halloween papers predicted. I don’t have a single windows device. Apple for phones and work laptop, system76 for home laptop.
I haven't used windows or even came in contact with it for a long while :)
IMO the dual boot example just shows how little they actually care and always cared.
However my whole family is on linux only and on the rare occasion where they need to run some weird software they prefer dual boot to VM, because easier or because old machine.
I have both GRUB and Windows Boot Loader available on my PC, installed Linux first, GRUB even auto-detected the Windows partition without any additional setup
That doesn't make any sense. If you installed Linux first, there would be no Windows partition for GRUB to autodetect when it was set up. And GRUB doesn't probe for operating systems automatically on boot, only when you run "update-grub" from inside a running Linux OS, so it wouldn't magically fix itself once you did install Windows. And besides, the fact that we are talking about GRUB autodetecting things, not Windows Boot Loader, only proves the parent's point.
This is what worked on my laptop with one drive: I installed Fedora. Before rebooting I used GParted to resize the disk creating space for a Windows partition. After that I rebooted and installed Windows on the new empty partition. Done.
With MBR (master boot record) partitioning, Windows had to be on a primary partition, and it was only possible to have four of them. Linux could be installed to a primary or extended partition, of which there could be more.
As far as I know the order never actually mattered as long as Windows could have a primary partition. The newer GPT system doesn't have such a distinction or low limits (Windows is limited to 128 partitions per disk; I think Linux can handle more).
With UEFI, it is easy; each operating system has it's own bootloader in its own directory in ESP, and the UEFI itself contains boot manager, so you can boot whatever you want. It just doesn't show menu by default like grub does, you have to press a key to show the menu. That's about the difference.
The scariest thing is that this happened a quarter of a century ago. Wow, I feel old!
It was such a big deal back then, when everybody questioned Linux' viability.
Oh yes, and the pressure it imposed on Linux use in industry.
IBM would not own Red Hat today if not for this memo. The fear and uncertainty that rippled the industry, right up through vendor selection made it harder, riskier and more frustrating to choose and make use of Linux than it should have been. Take notes.
I was among a group of enthusiasts in a local Linux User Group who were contacted by IBM in about 1997 or 98 to give some talks in their local HQ; the experience was quite satisfying, they were genuinely interested. According to some of them, word was that Lou Gerstner, then IBM CEO, had been told by one of his closest advisors something along "if we don't take Linux seriously we're going to make our biggest mistake in history", and that started it all.
IBM had had a "Linux/open source friendly" strategy since the early 2000s. Remember that ad with the Eminem-looking kid they named "Linux", and they were like "he's learning"? That's how they came to acquire Red Hat, by leaning into the "we're totally besties with open source" narrative.
I think IBM saw Linux, and Java, etc. as a way to offer a sort of common software platform on top of its' various server platforms. X86 (when they still made them), NumaQ, POWER, Mainframes, sort of like Workplace OS, but for free.
This was before commercial software companies realized that they had a moat against open source: making software easy to use is often profoundly more difficult than just making software and requires tons of precisely the kind of work developers hate. Since they hate it, they must be paid to do it. No economic model, no good UX, no widespread adoption.
Open source today is basically a bone yard for building commercial apps and SaaS, and a hobby shop for advanced technical users who can DIY.
The time that MS was spooked by Linux may be over, but what's still ongoing is the way that Microsoft still spooks Linux, to this day.
Just read the comments on any Linux news site about systemd. I promise it will be hilarious. "Microsoft trying to take over Linux", "Pottering is a secret MS agent to undermine Linux", "Microsoft infesting Linux with BSODs", ... it goes on and on and on
Honestly, even if Microsoft had tried, it couldn't have done a better job at enraging the Linux folks than systemd did :-D
I won't lie, if I had taken as much flack as Peottering did from the community[1], I'd take a job with MS just to troll them.
1: I'm personally not a fan of Pulse Audio, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't his decision to enable it in Ubuntu by default when it was still pretty broken, and holy shit I had like 12 backups of my working asoundrc at the time because configuring ALSA was such a pain, so PA was not in any sense gratuitous; it solved real problems.
Just want to add that even if he just took the job to troll with us, it still shows that his principles were never far from theirs anyway, even if he was genuine at first.
I is so apropos that the article links to Slashdot which has the exact same portal for the last 20 years :).
I was in the University of Texas back then CS dept (1996). We had some presentations from Red Hat and Microsoft. Microsoft pitch was that Linux was like a doggie under the Christmas Tree. Fun present that will pee all over the place.
I can mention a few things that were publicly obvious:
* The Halloween Documents didn't seem to be a fluke of behavior, but a bit of leaked evidence of an established executive culture of ruthlessness, paired with forward-looking strategic thinking (or "long cons"). This leaked bit of internal thinking is also consistent with the public history of brazen behavior, like backstabbing partners.
* Does anyone think that apparent corporate culture changed dramatically due to the brief fuss over the leaked Halloween Documents? Or would we normally assume that they kept devising and executing on other underhanded tactics? And have never been given a reason to change that culture?
* Plot twist: Early on in Linux popularity rise, MS's public behavior looked like they wanted to point to Linux and some kinds of open source as competition. And then, later, MS publicly appeared to be promoting some open source, to claim that some new MS proprietary moves (which some MS customer shops were concerned about, having been bitten before) weren't as proprietary lock-in as they'd otherwise look. So, multiple times, it publicly appeared that MS was doing a delicate dance of promoting open source. (More recent moves that might be related seem less clear, or haven't played out yet.)
* Everyone heard about FUD and EEE, as well as using legal proceedings to sabotage threats, but it would be reasonable to assume that any company that practiced these might also have additional tactics in their toolbox.
I miss tags such as "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" and "suddenoutbreakofcommonsense", there have been articles on HN where these tags could have applied as well
I think requiring a reason/explanation probably discourages voting simply based on agreement and disagreement and improves the signal a numeric score provides. I find that missing from Reddit-alikes now.
I'm sometimes wondering whether Microsoft wants to tank their Windows Server or what? A great OS overall, but speaking as a service provider - the licensing makes so much effort on provider part to even offer a VM with Microsoft OS. Only recently (due to EU pressure?) provided License mobility where customer himself is responsible for software licences and can BYOL.
Otherwise it was on service provider to collect whatever software the customer is using and charge for it. And if you don't, prepare for a hefty fine. Windows of course provides SIL infrastructure to do just that, but all that implies server has to be configured in some way.
And then the price for the licence ofcourse...
I really like Windows Server OS, but the effort it puts on part of service provider - no wonders everyone wants and offers to deploy Linux.
I suspect that those working on Windows are a different department entirely from those who handle Azure stuff. So while they're maybe encouraged to use Windows, they tend to favour what works best for them - which in many cases is Linux.
I meant that Linux is basically a first-class citizen across Azure. I don't know what powers all of Azure, and I'd be surprised if it was Windows across the board. Probably a combination of both, really, I imagine they're quite pragmatic about these things as long as the money keeps rolling in.
And I would assert it is Linux based instead of another firmware RTOS, because of licensing and yeah, if you want to be pedantic Windows was never designed to fit into the firmware of a network card.
Linux kernel by its nature was designed to be taken away, source code ripped off and massaged into anything with a CPU to run a custom modification of it.
There are lots of stuff running a "Linux kernel" that have little to no resemblance to a default build from upstream.
Yes but all this is not because it was designed for it. It wasn't. It is just the open nature of its license that made it possible as a consequence through external contributions.
The financial performance looks quite alright to me, specially when looking at GCP 3rd place, and regular issues to stay relevant to big enterprises.
When not AWS, it is Azure, so the performance isn't that bad to start with.
Also AWS and GCP aren't running cloud instances of game consoles (which also use a variation of Windows), GCP one (Stadia) powered by Linux was a failure, nor are they running an AI service being used by millions of folks around the globe.
Haha I felt the same way after I hit reply. I guess "focused on desktop" would be more apt. Either way it's not at all suitable for cloud native stuff.
Microsoft neither focus their OS on desktop nor user. They focus on selling users tool spies on users. Almost any progress on Windows is microsoft centric.
> The memo warns that the quality of free software can meet or exceed that of commercial programs and describes it as a potentially serious threat to Microsoft.
Every industry seems to have gone through a similar cycles where the free has been a threat to the commercial products.
> Every industry seems to have gone through a similar cycle where the free has been a threat to the commercial products.
This is hilariously out of touch. Software is one of the very few industries where marginal costs of production are essentially zero. Almost everything else besides oft-derided ‘content’ requires the expenditure of variable costs (materials, energy, labour) to produce. It’s well-known that in the limit of a perfect competition environment (think scissors, white t-shirts, socks, pencils, plate glass, & cetera) sales price is driven down towards the marginal cost (variable costs) of the most efficient producer, eliminating profit.
Very few other categories of things have seen their sales prices be driven towards actual zero. In fact I’m hard-pressed to think of any.
Thats the whole china buisness model?
No IP costs, subsidize production to market dominance, repeat. Which again the VCs copy by subsidizing that take-over money with shareholder money
Free is a temporary attack vector, but with open source its a permanent attack vector.
So open source for VC take-over endavours functions like a tax. Eventually the money for bribery/free_stuff runs out, the old buisness patterns return, open source reconquers the niche. Nature is healing..
> Every industry seems to have gone through a similar cycles where the free has been a threat to the commercial products.
I’m very doubtfull of that. How would a free car manufacturer work? Which free watch offering threatened the commercial industry? When did free construction threaten commercial offerings?
Cars are a good example because "free" car manufacture is what caused the downfall of Detroit in the US and Coventry in the UK. Suddenly there was an influx of these cheaper cars, and at least in the US there were measures introduced to decrease the viability of imported cars.
Free construction has a similar fate, which is why planning permission is more difficult than it has ever been.
Cheaper cars are not free. They are not even “free”.
> Free construction has a similar fate, which is why planning permission is more difficult than it has ever been.
This is new to me. Planning permissions are difficult because the rulling class makes their money from owning property, and thus they prefer to keep the housing supply thight, and their wallets thick. They would do this even if the cost of construction would have increased. (Which it often did.)
Plenty of places where large developers sit on and let planning permissions expire and apply again because it's better return on investment to hoard land and first build and sell finished properties when an investor wants to exit. I live in London, and there are buildings approved with an aggregate of many thousands of flats immediately surrounding my local station alone where nothing has happened for years, because why would they, when delaying the actual construction means they effectively get extra leverage on their investment.
As long as house prices rise fairly consistently, if you can raise additional capital chances are good it will give you better return to keep accumulating more land than use the capital to finance construction on land you already own.
I'd really like to see heavy taxation on underutilized land (insufficient to only go after unused land because then they'll just plonk down something cheap and low-density and rent it out until the time is right for something bigger.
Japanese companies were making objectively better cars than the US and UK from the 1970s until pretty recently. I'm not sure how much sharing of designs between companies had to do with that; they were using better quality materials and manufacturing as well as iterating faster.
Then in the closing keynote, Gates spoke passionately about how Microsoft would eradicate Linux and crush open source. It was hilarious how out of touch the left hand was from the right hand.
I also made a bit of a splash because I came to the conference with a MacBook. A journalist even wanted to interview me because it was so unusual. I declined.
The best part of the conference was the passes to company store, buying a lot of shwag for dirt cheap and a bunch of OS licenses, which they practically gave away in the store (to run in Parallels of course) lol.