[supernovae]

I find these kind of comments depressing mostly because they scream "group think". (my inner circle says this, so I repeat it) The new MS is much different than the MS I grew up with in the 90s. It's time for the community to recognize this and just let people bask in positive news that is worthy the bask in.

I love my Surface Pro 4, I love the fact .net is cross platform, I love that Azure is fast and easy to use, I love that Office on my mac is current and that Microsoft's mobile strategy is 100% cross platform unlike that of Apple and Google.. I love that MS is honest these days and its disappointing the community is largely dishonest in return.. often snarky.

[DoofusOfDeath]

I don't know if Microsoft's leadership is being honest or not these days. But they're also far from transparent, and definitely working against my interests:

(1) AFAIK, Microsoft continues to assert patents against Linux without giving the broader community enough information to resolve the supposed violations. (I'm not positive about this one.)

(2) AFAIK, Microsoft continues to apply for more software patents, without joining the Patent Commons.

(3) Microsoft seems to intentionally subvert its OS's users' attempts to disable snooping. AFAIK, Microsoft not only refuses to say what data are gathered, but also phone home to so many different IP names/numbers that it looks like they're trying to hide the activity from the OS user.

(4) Microsoft is now "embracing" Linux. Microsoft became famous for "embrace, extend, extinguish". People outside of the CEO's inner circle can't know if that's the plan here as well.

[Aldo_MX]

In case you hadn't noticed, "Embrace, extend and extinguish" is from 1995, 21 years ago.

[treebeard901]

The "embrace, extend, extinguish" meme is largely overused these days in reference to Microsoft. If the trend towards using the cloud continues and the desktop OS becomes more of a terminal to cloud services then we could be looking at a modern version of "EEE". Embrace linux for the customers, extend Windows software to Linux for those customers, and let market trends extinguish the desktop OS.

[pjmlp]

The interesting bit is that FOSS movement that created the modern mainframe, aka browser + cloud, just made it even easier for companies to leech on free software and user data.

[DoofusOfDeath]

That's a good point. I guess the question is, in a case like this, what are the odds that the company's executive-level culture has changed? I don't know.

The manner in which Microsoft pushed Windows 10 may be a data point.

[mynameisvlad]

A big part of the current senior leadership wasn't even at the company in 1995.

[michaelmrose]

The sco scam was in 2003 and the recent move towards arm devices that use treacherous computing to lock the user out of modifying their machine was recently who cares about 1995.

[mynameisvlad]

This whole thread is about EEE, which is a concept coined in 1995 and my reply was addressing

>what are the odds that the company's executive-level culture has changed?

So, quite relevant.

[jotato]

> In case you hadn't noticed, "Embrace, extend and extinguish" is from 1995, 21 years ago.

You jut made me feel old :(

[delecti]

Additionally, it seems it's pretty much the standard way to do business in the tech world these days.

[supernovae]

1) This is the entire industry, but much less so today than in 2007.. 2) Microsoft is listed as the highest level of foundation support for the Linux foundation and a member of patent ocmmons. 3) true.. but people seemingly don't care that everyone does this.. have a chrome book? you're being snooped, use a mobile device and mobile apps? you're being snooped.. 4) That was said 21 years ago.. see #2

[TheRealDunkirk]

I actually suffered through corporate pressure against my use of Linux for applications I developed (and users LOVED), because of the press onslaught in the trade magazines about the ridiculous SCO trial. (And then I see from a comment above that this is being appealed. Still. 13 years later. OMG.) So, my cynicism may be intractable.

You may see a "new" Microsoft, but all I see is a Microsoft which is making moves they HAVE to in order to survive. In this world of "the cloud" and the utter dominance of Linux in everything with a CPU that ISN'T a desktop computer, what else can they do but the things they're doing?

That Microsoft is executing WELL is a byproduct. If they didn't, they'd have become the IBM they defeated 20 years ago, and we wouldn't be having this discussion. (They'd offer legacy support for Windows XP, and we'd all wish we could cut them out of the budget, along with the mainframe.) I credit Nadella for this, but none of this is due to some sort of newfound egalitarianism or philanthropy. It's just business.

I find the bright and cheerful comments like yours depressing. They seem to belie a belief that the upper management of Microsoft has somehow been knighted with a sense of civic duty. I see it as the same business shrewdness they've always shown. They no longer have the power to dictate absolute terms to corporations, and must play nice with the rest of the IT world.

And I bet it chaps some of the old guards' asses.

[quanticle]

I credit Nadella for this, but none of this is due to some sort of newfound egalitarianism or philanthropy. It's just business.

So, how does that make the outcome any worse? RedHat isn't contributing to the Linux kernel out of a sense of charity. IBM isn't contributing to OpenStack as a philanthropic endeavor. Facebook isn't improving PHP because it's a fun hobby project. They're all doing the things that they're doing because it's good for business. Why is it any worse when Microsoft does it?

[TheRealDunkirk]

No, they're not different from anyone else for having a profit motive, but Microsoft, on the other hand, had a very long stretch of using underhanded and illegal tactics to stifle competition. I would argue that they're STILL abusing their monopoly position on the desktop. THAT is what makes them different than the rest, and that, to me, is what tempers my attitude about these recent announcements.

Another difference is that the other examples you've listed here are all free software. Of all the glowing coverage Microsoft has been getting of late, only .NET on Linux is comparable. But you're never going to get Windows-forms-like applications on Windows (which a surprising number of people seem to think will happen). It's only the web stack. Does ASP.NET really stack up well against Rails or Node.js as a web application stack on Linux? I don't know, but at the least, they have some catching up to do.

But, really, I think it's another example of my main point. Microsoft could have used some pre-existing open source project and built on top of that, but they chose to create another language for the future. It's even pretty good, by all accounts. It's just that, in a world of PHP, Javascript, C++, Ruby, Python, Erlang, and all the rest, what place does a closed-source language and compiler have? They had to make it open source.

[benaadams]

> Does ASP.NET really stack up well against Rails or Node.js as a web application stack on Linux?

Yes; have a look at the language column one this page:

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r13&hw=...

[TheRealDunkirk]

I wasn't thinking about speed benchmarks. I was referring to the whole "ecosystem" of the work, from language to plugins to the editors commonly used to community activity around it, etc.

[quanticle]

But you're never going to get Windows-forms-like applications on Windows

You absolutely will be able to get Windows-forms like applications. You just won't be using WinForms or WPF. Instead, you'll use Mono and its bindings to GTK or QT. This is exactly how it should be. WPF is an OS specific GUI library. Using WPF on Linux makes about as much sense as using Cocoa on Windows.

But, really, I think it's another example of my main point. Microsoft could have used some pre-existing open source project and built on top of that, but they chose to create another language for the future.

I think you're misremembering history. C# was created because Sun specifically cut Microsoft off from using Java. Microsoft had a project to write its own Java compiler. Sun took legal action to prevent Microsoft from doing so. And this was during the early 2000s. Python, Ruby, etc. were nowhere near mature enough to serve as the primary systems programming language for something like Windows.

Moreover, Microsoft gets a lot of criticism for making C#, but Google gets no criticism for making Go? Isn't that just slightly hypocritical?

[blub]

Sun cut off MS from Java because MS was creating an incompatible version of Java. That's the extend step.

[prodigal_erik]

They were not only dropping standard features like RMI and JNI but also sneaking proprietary methods into standard classes. They could have clearly and honestly put them in a com.microsoft package, but they couldn't trick anyone into writing unportable code that way, so they forked the whole language instead of contributing anything.

[TheRealDunkirk]

> Instead, you'll use Mono and its bindings to GTK or QT. This is exactly how it should be.

Oh, I'm quite clear. My point is that, if the stack had delivered on the premise of the idea of WinForms-level-easy GUI development, why haven't Mono-based GUI apps proliferated on Linux? Yet, after many years of including Mono in Ubuntu, they've pulled it from the default install.

> Microsoft had a project to write its own Java compiler. Sun took legal action to prevent Microsoft from doing so. And this was during the early 2000s. Python, Ruby, etc. were nowhere near mature enough to serve as the primary systems programming language for something like Windows.

Fair enough, but even all the way back in 2000, it was obvious that, if you were going to start from scratch on a language, there was no point in making it closed. There wasn't any more real money to be made in compilers by that point. GCC was being made available on everything, and $1,000 proprietary compilers were dying out.

> Isn't that just slightly hypocritical?

Sigh.

[digler999]

> I love my Surface Pro 4,

I'd love one if I could put linux on it. or if I could buy an OEM pc without an OS (and yes I know there are some vendors that "allow" (just that word makes me cringe) you to do it, but it should be a right). If, by their own definition, it's "intellectual" (and not material) property, then if I dont use it I shouldn't have to pay for it.

If they want to sell Surface because it's an awesome product, why do they need to go out of their way to lock their software on it ? If it's so awesome, surely people would want to use it, right ? If the proverbial destination is so great, why do they need to lock their guests inside ?

[jasonlotito]

> I'd love one if I could put linux on it

You can.

https://ramsdenj.com/2016/08/29/arch-linux-on-the-surface-pr...

"Something that sets the Surface apart from other popular tablets, is that it doesn’t artificially limit your capabilities. If you want to use it as a laptop, or install alternate operating systems on it, you are free to do so. I think the Surface is going to make a great Linux laptop, and I look forward to spending some time playing with it."

[digler999]

thank you for the clarification. I was aware that linux was great on surface 1,2 models, and last I had checked, either v3 or 4 were completely locked.

[Zaheer]

You're not their target demographic. 99% of people don't want to put linux on it.

[digler999]

back in the 90's, 99% of people didn't want linux either, and MS did just fine without "physically" locking you out of their competition.

[eropple]

I'm curious if you have a conception of exactly how much money creating, testing, and deploying a SKU of a product actually runs. Now multiply it by the number of permutations of the product. You should get a reasonably large number with six or seven zeroes at the end. Be honest: are they going to even break even off of the micropopulation that cares?

[digler999]

I dont follow your point. I'm not asking MS to sell me a linux version of their tablet. I"m saying they shouldn't use UEFI or other proprietary bootloader tricks to keep me from wiping windows off and installing my own software on it. That would be cheaper for them to do than spending extra development time to keep me out.

[eropple]

But...you can do that. Right now. The Surface Pro 4 has no "bootloader tricks"; it has Secure Boot, which you can disable from the UEFI menu. No x86 Surface ever has ever had any "physical" methods of "locking you out of their competition".

So either you want something that already exists or you want something new, and I'm very confused as to your initial post.

[shmed]

Microsoft did not sell computers in the 90s...

[PNWChris]

Beyond that, I find those that want to run Linux on a Surface often put it in Hyper-V and use putty + WinSCP + $TEXT_EDITOR_OF_CHOICE wired up to WinSCP. Heck, now there's the Windows subsystem for Linux.

X11 and VNC help if you want a Linux desktop, but that's admittedly a less than ideal experience.

Of course, virtualization generally precludes USB peripheral access, so my suggestions are a pure software and web development solution.

[bb611]

It appears that you can, it's just hard: https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/comments/4t64zt/gettin...

It looks like most of the linux issues are due to MS doing some weird architectural things (touch calculations on the GPU, etc), but that's just what I was able to find out with 2 minutes on the first thing google popped up.

[quanticle]

I could buy an OEM pc without an OS

I don't know about "without an OS", but Dell is selling a laptop right now that comes with Ubuntu Linux out of the box: http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-9360-laptop/pd?3x_n....

And, like others have pointed out, the Surface isn't "locked". Yes, it has SecureBoot and UEFI... just like literally every desktop motherboard shipped within the last 5 years. You can go into UEFI, turn off SecureBoot, wipe Windows and replace it with whatever you want. It may not work very well, but it's totally doable.

If they want to sell Surface because it's an awesome product, why do they need to go out of their way to lock their software on it?

Because the software is part of the product. Apple has shown us that customers do not consider hardware and software to be separate entities. They consider both to be an integrated whole.

[oelmekki]

I've hated MS a decade ago, because of their position against linux and because of IE6. I've watched them doing big efforts the last few years, and I welcome them - I can't wait to feel good about them. That being, this article indeed sounds too emphasized to not be fishy. Maybe it's a PR article, maybe it's just that the author from this financial publication bought MS shares lately, maybe it's something else, I don't know.

But yeah, I don't see either any major change in mobile MS usage around me.

[cutler]

Do you love the fact that MS earns millions from patent trolling Linux companies? How's that for open source "support"?

[supernovae]

All of that was prior leadership. Satya has largely reversed this trend (which wasn't limited to Microsoft) and has gone the polar opposite of open source licensing a-la BSD/Apache licenses (no strings attached) and joining the Linux foundation.

[cutler]

As far as I'm aware MS are still operating their Linux patents extortion racket. What on earth were the Linux Foundation thinking when they allowed MS to become a member? It seems the Linux Foundation is little more than a corporate jamboree.