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by saosebastiao 2691 days ago
Why would it need to be Linux? I love linux, but mostly because it works well and is open source. I'd love for a big tech company to put their weight behind SEL4. That would go a long way for Microsoft: formally proven security, tiny footprint, good performance, etc. It's something that has massive potential for super computers all the way down to IOT. It just needs a proper ecosystem behind it.

Or maybe buy QNX off of Blackberry and make it open source again. That would also be nice.
3 comments
kokey 2691 days ago
I think as long as Microsoft holds onto Windows tightly the better bet in the future will always be a Linux or UNIX-like OS. Like many other things, the thing that works more like evolutionary systems tend to prevail. Linux might be the dominant race of the UNIX ancestry tree at the moment, but it may not retain that dominance and the thing that will overtake it will probably come from the same UNIX evolutionary roots, e.g. the BSD side where FreeBSD, Darwin, MacOS and iOS came from or the other Linux side branches like Android and Chrome, or somewhere less unexpected. The only way Windows tree OSes will prevail over this is if they allow more branches to evolve, even open source parts of it. User interfaces tend to do better if owned by an organisation with a concentrated purpose and commercial vision, but the stuff under the bonnet seems to do a lot better from being more open and evolutionary.
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pjmlp 2691 days ago
Looking at the embedded market OSes, everyone is pretty keen in moving away from Linux into RTOS, mbed, NuttX, Tizen IoT, RIOT, eventually Fuchsia, ....

Who knows which ones will survive, however they all have two things in common, they aren't GPL based and just enough POSIX to keep C and C++ happy. Additionally some of them do have stable ABI for drivers.

Linux's long term victory might be constrained to the server room, and even there it is debatable, given the increase in managed runtimes for micro-services, which could even be running bare metal for what I care.

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20190129 2691 days ago
Perhaps Google Fuchsia[0]?

I hope not.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia

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devereaux 2691 days ago
Because of the market share and ecosystem.

As you said, it works well and it's open source. But that's not enough, as they could then chose BSD. But Linux is what's used by most, not BSD.

Given Microsoft new strategy to just adopt what everyone else is using, they will eventually use the Linux kernel.

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Kye 2691 days ago
Microsoft already has a lot invested in Linux support. They're not going to switch to something with a fraction of the community and ecosystem even if it has a lot of good qualities.
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