[damon]

It's hard to let past Ballmer / Gates era sins go, and I'll probably take a lot of heat here, but moves like this continue to reinforce the Nadella era is truly serious about advancing OSS both within Microsoft and within the broader community.

[baldfat]

I really think the Open Source Community has been to focused on Microsoft for way to long. Even during the Ballmer ERA we had very Open Source Friendly People at Microsoft.

I think our focus needs to be on what is happening in the other areas.

1) Apple's Counterfeit Lawsuit for refurbished screens and Apple's Diagnostic Software requirement for basic repairs. If that mindset gets turned towards software we all will be in big trouble.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evk4wk/dhs-seizes...

2) John Deer and the very idea of ownership being taken away.

https://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/

I think Linux has won the OS War, minus desktop. Now it is moving to the hardware that is running it.

[chithanh]

In what way is what Apple did to Henrik Huseby worse than than what Microsoft did to Eric Lundgren?

I mean, Apple sued a business and wanted property confiscated. But Microsoft actually had someone sent to prison.

Louis Rossmann who became famous with his Apple repair videos, and is otherwise very critical of Apple repair policies, had some choice words for Microsoft in this case.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaoJErxYLtM

[nkassis]

Can't watch videos at the moment but found this article about this case:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2018/04/24...

[baldfat]

Eric Lundgren should have had people install Linux on the computers or some other Open OS. The issue was Microsoft made $25 a disc for selling to refurbisher shops.

100% agree its stupid but once Eric was caught he was in the hands of federal prosecutors and MS Lawyers that needed to "defend" the value of their property. This is why we encourage people to stray away from closed OS.

[sjwright]

I get irritated every time Louis and others bang on about those damn "refurbished" iPhone screen assemblies. Refurbished is a term that is frequently used to describe a used product that has been returned to near-new condition by replacing worn or faulty components with genuine parts or parts of equal specification.

These screen assemblies are NOT refurbished, they are not of equal or comparable specification. The replacement glass used on these refurbished assemblies is cheap fragile junk, not Gorilla glass or a comparable substitute. It's a greatly inferior product, so describing these assemblies as refurbished is at minimum misleading; personally I'd call it a scam.

If someone sold you an entire iPhone as "refurbished" where it's mostly genuine but an essential component was replaced with a third-rate fake—let's say the motherboard is a cheap Android equivalent running Android with an iPhone theme—everyone would agree that was a scam. The only difference between a fake motherboard and fake glass is most consumers will be unaware they've been scammed... until it breaks. (And even then, most consumers will just consider it bad luck and blame themselves.)

I know multiple people who have had their cracked iPhones independently repaired only to have the screen break again after a matter of days or weeks, under the most innocuous of circumstances. We are being scammed, and Louis Rossman defends the scammers.

[baldfat]

Your misusing terms. You are using the term refurbished but you really mean remanufactured.

Remanufacturing is the rebuilding of a product to specifications of the original manufactured product using a combination of reused, repaired and new parts. It requires the repair or replacement of worn out or obsolete components and modules.

Remanufacturing is a form of a product recovery process that differs from other recovery processes in its completeness: a remanufactured part should match the same customer expectation as new machines.

[sjwright]

You might be right from an industry wonk's perspective, but what matters is consumer expectation.

For example: Apple themselves uses the term refurbished to describe an iPhone that—but for the packaging—appears identical to a brand new item as far as any regular consumer could tell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refurbishment_(electronics)

[sjwright]

Actually if Wikipedia is anything to go by, the term remanufacturing doesn't apply here.

The term "remanufacture", however, is a distinct term used for products that are returned to the identical-to-new condition in industrial closed-loop processes, and which often possess the same warranties and guarantees as a new product.

I am definitely not talking about remanufacturing.

[baldfat]

Well what term are you using for a repair? If your using parts that are not under warranties nor is it the same as it was when it was manufactured?

When I buy parts off of ebay I don't expect them to be the same, no matter what the label is on the part. Just like buying "OEM" batteries on Amazon. You better know you have close to zero chance of having the same battery as you bought before.

[pjmlp]

Linux has won the server and HPC room war, there are many other kinds of deployments.

On mobile there is iOS and regarding ChromeOS and Android it is only an implementation detail, lets see where it goes if Google is serious about Fuchsia.

On game consoles we have a modified BSD on PS, Windows variant on XBox and Nintendo's own microkernel.

Then on IoT space BSD licensed OSes like mbed, Zephyr and RTOS are on the rise.

And then there is the whole mainframe and high integrity computing domains.

[emilsedgh]

Android it is only an implementation detail, lets see where it goes if Google is serious about Fuchsia.

I think you got it backwards. Android was a serious thing. Fuchsia is an implementation detail.

[pjmlp]

Not really, you missed the point that the Linux kernel is actually irrelevant for app developers on Android, to the point that ART might in the future run on top of Fuchsia and no one would notice.

There are no Linux kernel specific APIs in the list of stable NDK APIs.

https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis

As of Android 7 using non-stable APIs will kill the APK on launch.

https://developer.android.com/about/versions/nougat/android-...

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2016/06/improving-...

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2016/06/android-ch...

Only OEMs get to deal directly with Linux kernel.

You might naturally create an NDK application and do a bunch of syscalls, just it doesn't mean that the APK is guaranteed to work across all Android devices.

[emilsedgh]

Of course Linux is an implementation detail. When did I claim otherwise? That actually proves my point: Fuschia is another implementation detail as well.

[baldfat]

Linux = a kernel and if it uses the Linux kernel well that is what defines something as Linux.

[pjmlp]

Sure if it makes you happy, even if the userspace is completely different.

[baldfat]

Not happy, but how would you define Linux?

[trhway]

It isn't about Ballmer vs. Nadella. It is about the scale and importance of Azure and Linux/OSS usage there that made the MS hugely vulnerable to the same style patent attack that MS has been doing all these years against Android and the likes. Joining OIN they almost completely mitigate that risk. MS does that it has been always doing - milking and protecting its cash cow as much as possible.

[HankB99]

Can this move (WRT patents) be revoked if MS decides that it is not in their best interest to share freely?

At present it looks like they really have changed. Could they change again?

[kennymeyers]

You won't take heat from me. I think this is a very rational response to all the steps they've been taking.

[pkulak]

The WSL stuff has me seriously considering a Windows laptop next, which I would have told you was pants-on-head crazy a couple years ago.

[endgame]

The fact that Windows 10 updates bundle shit like candy crush[1] and use my computer as an advertising platform means my current and future laptops run GNU/Linux.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/05/humanity-weeps-as-can...

[imandride]

Removed at build 1803 good sir.

[endgame]

See, that's funny. Because when I woke my windows gaming machine from its long slumber, it updated and dumped "Bubble Witch 3 Saga", "Candy Crush Soda Saga", "Disney Magic Kingdoms" and "March of Empires: War of Lords" into my start menu.

[dewiz]

The positive experience of Microsoft with OSS hasn't yet translated in a positive experience with Windows.

Windows is still a closed platform, with several issues, like wasting disk space, degrading performance over months, frequent reboots interrupting work in progress and forcing software to be reopened, losing state, too much information on the screen, UI inconsistencies e.g. control panel and 3 different consoles (PowerShell, MSDOS, Bash), forced UI patterns, etc.

[kibwen]

Can confirm that despite my best efforts I just can't abide using Windows long-term. I have lots of games that are Windows-only, and after accidentally hosing my dual-boot Linux partition I've been honestly trying to use Windows alone for over a year, and the experience is increasingly frustrating, so pardon the following rant:

The Windows Antimalware service consistently pegs my CPU at 35%, and the service cannot be stopped. Trying to kill it in task manager gives you "permission denied", even if you run task manager as admin. There's an entry for it in the service manager interface, but any settings that would effectively disable it are apparently ignored; there is no evident effect. Registry hacking has been fruitless. The only thing that almost works is to go into the Windows Defender interface and flip the "realtime protection" switch, at which point the service will eventually stop itself up to half an hour later, and then undo the switch and turn itself back on again the next day; I can tell when this has happened because I can hear my fans spinning up from across the room. There's really no better way for Microsoft to drive home how little control I have over my own computer.

And this isn't the only thing. The Windows store is AFAICT pointless; even trying to install Microsoft software like Skype installs some weird limited version that tells you to manually install actual Skype if you want all the program's features. The fact that it keeps reinstalling Candy Crush shovelware lumps Microsoft in with scummy OEMs. You can't disable Cortana without also disabling the OS's search features. Disabling the ads in the start menu, lock screen, notifications pane, search interface, and god knows where else all require digging through different menus to flip different preferences. It endlessly pesters you to use Edge over any other browser and has the gall to reset your browser preference to Edge randomly after updates.

So I can applaud Microsoft for their OSS work, but Windows really is just thoroughly aggravating. Desktop Linux is also thoroughly aggravating, but at least when it is, I know it's usually my fault, and I know it can be fixed.

[pkulak]

Ouch, thank you for writing that all out. I've been using MacOS for decades now and really just want to change it up. Still don't think the Linux desktop is quite there, but maybe I'll just buy a used Thinkpad and give it a real shot as my full-time work machine.

[jki275]

I regularly turn the realtime protection off, it cuts off instantly. I suspect you've got something else going on if yours doesn't work correctly.

[rococode]

I dropped Linux for Windows with WSL a while ago and I've had no regrets. Just about everything that I use day-to-day works great, and even things that require a graphical display work fine with Xming [1]. For the rare occasions that WSL isn't compatible with something I can just boot up a VM, but I haven't needed to do so in a long time.

Also, with Windows 10 Pro you get access to group policy which gives decent control over updates. I haven't had an unwanted restart since I sorted out my settings, and extra features I don't want are not on my computer (like Candy Crush...). You also generally don't have to worry about incompatibility of your tools with Windows which is a great pleasure - unlike Linux where I often had to deal with Wine, weird UI bugs, and screen display issues. And chocolatey [2] exists, which handles updates very smoothly.

The main thing I miss from Linux is hotkey configurations. I used i3 with polybar and rofi and as a result rarely needed to touch my mouse. You can't do quite the same with Windows, but I've thrown together some code that emulates most of what I want (media hotkeys and rofi window switching) so it hasn't been a big pain point.

I don't know if it's some setting I did a while ago, but I use the full-screen start menu (with no tiles - I just use it to search with a pretty background) and I have never seen an ad.

[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/xming/

[2] https://chocolatey.org/

[linuxftw]

They're releasing their own linux distro (however half-baked it is). They need to join the OIN so the other Linux Patent holders don't sue them for infringement.

[jtr_47]

Do not trust a for profit company, ever to provide free or open anything. They are there to make money off of the work they do or that others do as contributions to their open source products.

[dwd]

There are also some long term employees like Scott Guthrie who have nudged the corporation in a better direction for many years.

[mulmen]

I will never forget and I will never forgive.