I'm 35, started using Linux in '97 so I've been around for most of the history.
It's quite amazing how Microsoft has changed in that time tbh from "Embrace, Extinguish, Extend" and all the shenanigans they pulled with comparing Win2k vs Linux/Samba and the halloween memo through to submitting code to the kernel, using Linux as a guest in their VM stuff and now using it internally not to mention making .Net a first class citizen (which when it's done will be incredible, I love C# as a language but in Linux land it's not quite their yet compared to on Windows).
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 possibly other stuff. The EULA used to refer to the regents of Berkley.)
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.
I have misgivings about GPL. It's given me a lot, and I appreciate that, but while developing I won't use GPL libraries because I simply don't like being told what to do, and per the golden rule, I don't like telling people what to do, so I cannot with good moral standing release GPL code.
Well in the case of GPL, what you are not allowed to do is to use GPL licensed code with yours and decide not to give recipients of the resulting code the same rights that you were given.
I personally think that makes for a decent 'moral standing'.
Basically GPL only a problem if you want to create proprietary software, which in turn is typically very much a 'being told what you can do with said software' type of situation, with no code and often incorporating DRM mechanisms to prevent copying.
The vast majority of my code is either in scripted uncompiled form, or statically linked. Wordpress implied a while back that using uncompiled GPL libraries made your code GPL. I'm no license expert, I'd rather just not risk it.
The more commonly used term is viral, which these days, I think captures the can-be-the-right-choice/can-be-the-wrong-choice nature, while still saying it spreads to most things it touches.
The GPL is a cancerous license, and Ballmer had to trash open source. That was their business model and they were using the OSS association against Novell.
Edit: For those of you downmodding me for saying that the GPL is a cancerous license, please understand that this isn't a negative connotation - it's simply an aspect of the requirements of the license. It's very likely a good thing, and part of the reason that Linux is doing well while BSDs have languished.
It is not cancerous, it is just infectious. And not by accident, it is by design.
I used to like GPL, so nobody would "steal" my code adding it to a closed source product. I don't care anymore, just use BSD or other credit-where-credit-is-due license: my code was included in a high profile closed source product? Lots of bragging points and free publicity!
Hey, you're not wrong. Linus used the GPLv2 only because it allowed him to get patches back into the kernel. He's neither a fan of the FSF nor the GPLv3 because of their philosophy on software freedom.
Linux is by far more popular for developers, tinkerers, and cool software projects but BSD is still massive in the server and embedded devices space.
BSD is a minority in servers, which also reflect my own experience talking with other sysadmins in conferences. Debian and Redhat are huge in the server market, outside of windows shops. Some older system might have novel or a BSD system running together with massive amount of legacy perl scripts, but those companies also complain that they have a hard time finding new employees that can support the old systems.
The GPL is not a cancerous license, if I would use a negative adjective to describe it, it would be: misused.
I understand when people wants to keep making FOSS better by releasing entire projects with a GPL license, but I don't understand when people release simple stuff such as a code example with a GPL license...
The GPL is a cancerous license. If you use GPLed code, your code must (almost always) become GPLed, thus the GPLed codebase grows. If a GPLed project use other OSS code, it tends to be able to keep those changes, but the opposite can't generally be reciprocated (You can't take GPLed aspects of Linux and port them to a project under the BSD license without changing the license of that software).
This is not a bad thing. It sometimes sucks, but overall it's helped preserve the ecosystem and it has been integral, IMHO, in making sure companies stay honest with their upstream OSS meal tickets.
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 because it has unpleasant properties common with cancer.
If GPL is cancer for a company, then what then is proprietary licenses? nuclear bombs? Toxic waste? Ticking time bombs?
I don't think such language is nice. It is damaging to civil conversation and can only alienate people more. No one likes hearing that what they create is like toxic waste.
How are proprietary licenses any better or worse than the GPL? It totally depends on what the terms of the license demand.
Note that it is not the code that these people produce that is toxic, it is what they demand in return (via the terms of the license) that is. The language may not be nice, but it is descriptive of the situation the GPL puts many people into. The GPL essentially seeks to impose the ideology adopted by a subset of folks onto the rest of the world. "We believe code should be free, so if you want to use our stuff, your code must be free too, regardless of what you believe or what your business needs are or what is practical." That is not a very nice stance to have, and so many people do not say nice things about it.
Think of it like someone saying, "Here, I'll do you a favor, but you must change your religion". Having different ideologies is perfectly fine, but enforcing them on others is not.
Don't forget Halloween Memo X, along with as I remember stuff from GrokLaw, which revealed that Microsoft funneled 86 million to SCO when it was litigating SCO v. The Open Source World.
(Especially bogus because SCO knew in advance they didn't have the rights to UNIX(TM), but I doubt Microsoft knew that.)
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 the original SCO's assets but Tarantella. Not sure what happened with Microsoft's ownership of the original SCO, but I don't remember through the years of SCO v. The World that Microsoft had a large ownership stake ... which would have been major.
There you have it. At least a third of SCO's entire market capitalization, and their entire current cash reserves, is payoffs funnelled from Microsoft. Their 10Qs reveal that every other line of cash inflow is statistical noise by comparison. The brave new SCOsource business model is now clear: sue your customers, shill for Microsoft, kite your stock, and pray you stay out of jail.
I also seem to remember some Microsoft related deal involving the purchase of Novell SUSE? licenses, although now I can't remember if The SCO Group directly benefited from it.
Microsoft earned this part of its bad reputation, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's purchases from the company in part ended with Windows XP prior to that (of course, it helped that Vista was long delayed and awful). Supporting Microsoft back then was unconscionable.
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.
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.
They don't have a choice. Linux has already won. Heard of Android? Yeah that's the Linux kernel right there, over a billion mobile devices. Heard of Mac OS? That's a Unix kernel right there. Microsoft makes a proprietary operating system with cumbersome licensing restrictions. Microsoft is 10 years from death if it does not embrace Linux.
The IBM comparison is really apt. IBM hasn't died, they used to dominate like Microsoft, with all the same underhanded tactics, and they eventually came around.
There's also the "culture wars" to consider, where many (myself included) revered IBM for superior alternatives (OS/2), while old timers would just shake their head at anyone trusting them. Now, I shake my head at anyone trusting Microsoft, although they've tamped down their rabid attacks on open source and Linux, and they do offer some things that aren't complete garbage.
IBM at its peak was much more dominant than Microsoft ever was. Microsoft -- thanks to IBM (via PC DOS and Basic) -- eventually became the IBM of software. But Intel became the IBM of processors, Cisco the IBM of routers, Google the IBM of the web, and so on. IBM was the IBM of everything.
Incidentally, Microsoft co-developed OS/2 and 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.
Windows was selling well while OS/2 sales were, to quote Gates, "dismal", and Microsoft couldn't afford to support a failing project. (IBM may have had more programmers on OS/2 than Microsoft had programmers.)
Thanks to hiring Dave Cutler and staff from DEC, Microsoft could see a way out. However, IBM rejected the plan to move to NT as OS/2 3.0, and the two companies formally divorced. After that, IBM did its best to kill Microsoft. (One IBM senior manager told me: "We're going to burn Bill's butt.")
Bear in mind that in 1990, when Windows 3 came out, IBM had an annual turnover of $69 billion and Microsoft's turnover was $0.8 billion. It was a giant monopolist against a tiny start-up.
So, given the context, what was underhand about Microsoft's behavior, and what should it have done?
How did IBM's 1991 development of Workplace OS for PowerPC -- intended to cut both Microsoft and Intel out of the PC market -- fit into the strategy?
A period when IBM was spending more than $1 billion a year on OS/2 and WorkPlace OS to try to kill Microsoft? A period when IBM formed an alliance with Apple and Motorola to create a PC Reference Platform to try to kill both Microsoft and Intel? Up to the point in 1995 where IBM spent $3.5 billion on Lotus and used SmartSuite bundling to try to kill Microsoft Office?
Microsoft's turnover had grown to $5.3 billion in 1995, but IBM's turnover was $72 billion, and it was still a brutal monopolist targeting a much smaller company.
Indeed, people like me were cheering Microsoft back in that period.
I started programming in 1978, on IBM systems, and they were indeed "a brutal monopolist", probably feared more than Microsoft has ever been.
Sure, during the early-mid '90s Microsoft had sharp elbows and was looking out for its own interests, but those also just happened to coincide with ours. IBM was big, stupid and much more dangerous, UNIX(TM) was horribly fragmented (one of the core competencies I developed in the early '80s was porting software between different versions of it, and see The Unix Haters Handbook publishing in 1994: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix-Haters_Handbook (disclaimer, Simson is a friend)).
GNU/the FSF was doing worthwhile stuff, but was and still is hanging fire on a kernel, the BSD porting efforts had been crippled by the '92-3 AT&T lawsuit, Linux was started from scratch in 1991 and immature, while NT was developed by well funded top notch experienced people (at least back then it was very rare if not unheard of for someone to develop more than one operating system, the process was so onerous) and was a great hope for a lot of us. In the mid '90s I developed or took part in developing several very solid systems using it, and I believe it's TCO and maintainability exceeded UNIX(TM) during that period.
Unfortunately, Microsoft started fumbling the ball about 3-4 years after NT's release (on or after the first Service Pack of NT 3.5 or more likely 3.51 as I recall), NT 4 was conceptually hopeless by moving graphics into the kernel, "and the rest is history".
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. This was supposed to unify most of the major players -- DEC, HP, IBM etc -- except Sun* behind a single Unix to prevent Microsoft from getting into corporate computing with NT.
Presumably you would have come across it....
* OSF = "Oppose Sun Forever" according to Scott McNealy
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 went from Windows 3.1 to NT, and as far as I could tell NT was better and more stable than the legacy non-memory protected stuff; hmmm, but I'll bet not for games (and NT4 putting graphics in the kernel was ugly). XP was great, and due to things mentioned elsewhere, I and then my parents used it for more than a decade.
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.
If MS went with "NT OS/2" I doubt "OS/2 for PowerPC" would exist, which was a stripped down version of the "Workplace OS" you mentioned BTW. Interestingly, Windows NT themselves was ported to PowerPC too, and it was one of the main focus for NT 3.51 back in 1995.
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?
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.
I used to work with a guy who used to be the DP VP [what's called CIO these days] at the only Fortune 100 firm that didn't have a corporate IBM mainframe (although a subsidiary or two did, IIRC). IBM tried a number of times to get him fired (such tactics as golfing partners of the CEO saying that he was really incompetent, etc.). They played hardball, and probably still do, when they can.
Microsoft is not going to die if it doesn't embrace Linux... that said, they are much more open today than a decade and a half ago. .Net Core is making a lot of progress and has respawned interest in C# cross platform. I think a lot of this is in the light of what happened with Oracle v Google.
There's also, XBox itself and Azure, which are key points to the future of MS along with Office, which will now grow to other platforms, as it should have some time ago.
This assumes tomorrow MS doesn't drop a BSD licensed Android clone of their own and clean up in that market.
I thought Facebook was going to die out too then they became defacto telecoms in the developing world through WhatsApp/Internet.Org, and now have a billion users.
It's quite amazing how Microsoft has changed in that time tbh from "Embrace, Extinguish, Extend" and all the shenanigans they pulled with comparing Win2k vs Linux/Samba and the halloween memo through to submitting code to the kernel, using Linux as a guest in their VM stuff and now using it internally not to mention making .Net a first class citizen (which when it's done will be incredible, I love C# as a language but in Linux land it's not quite their yet compared to on Windows).