Just wait until people start to use their software and services, then listen out for the predictable punchline to the bad joke... "Microsoft will now be phasing out the previous Free service and now feature a Premium service for only $299.99. Compatible with Windows 7 only"

There is always a catch.

Nah, I don't think this is a case of embrace, extend, extinguish. This more closely matches Microsoft's "if you can't innovate yourself, buy out someone who can" pattern.

MS have realised that reinventing the wheel isn't necessarily a good thing, particularly given some of their attempts, so they, in common with every other business are using open Source software to lessen the strain "in these difficult times".

Hopefully they come to realise that lots of people are now using it and perhaps a bit of interoperability might be a good plan, though Rob and Loony have valid points which shouldn't be forgotten.

Trying hard not to gloat here, but any time someone suggests that Open Source is not a feasable way to go, I'll be able to point @ MS themselves. Common sense is prevailing, oh crap the world must be coming to an end, so is it pig sniffles or an asteroid?

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Windows Services for Unix has been a product of Microsoft's for years. It is under the GPL and my understanding is that Microsoft has complied with the terms of that license.

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Umm.... Noo.....

Not that I am aware of. Unless something has changed in the past couple years since I last looked at it.

For the record: SFU allows you to run POSIX environment on the NT kernel. Unlike other systems, NT is designed from the beginning to support multiple different sort of personalities. The Win32 environment is one of them... and POSIX is another one.

Apparently, from investigating strings embedded in SFU's binaries the bulk of the code actually originated from OpenBSD. Probably choosen due to the security and cleanliness of the code. This means that most of SFU originated from the BSD license.

This, of course, is nothing new. Microsoft has always stated that it liked the BSD code. It's very nice license that doesn't require Microsoft to contribute anything back to it's contributers.. so obviously they like it. The GPL requires people to contribute their changes back to the 'community' so Microsoft doesn't like that. Pretty simple stuff here to understand.

The BSD usage of Microsoft can be traced back to the original TCP/IP stacks it introduced into it's early Windows versions when the Internet came and gave them a nice reality check that was about as pleasant as getting hit them in the back of the head with a gigantic wet eel. Of course the port was shit and so was the stability of the OSes that used it... but whatever.

Are you confusing SFU with Cygwin?

Cygwin is, indeed, a GPL'd POSIX-like environment. It's provided by Redhat under the GPL that provides a Linux environment on top of the Win32 environment. So that has a quite a bit different approach to the same end.

Either one is quite nice, although I prefer the GNU environment for it's superior tools and usability over a hacked up BSD one.

Then there is other tools like Xming that provides X Windows compatibility for Windows and all that happy horseshit.

All in all with a small amount of effort Windows XP can be turned into a actually nice little Unix OS.

Of course it's still a shit Unix environment compared to Linux or OS X... but people tend to make the best with what they have and either tool provides a nice way to get the Unix tools and Unix source code compatibility without the Linux hardware headaches.

Oh. And the Xenix reference above is hilarious.

Ya sure. Most people don't know this but Microsoft got it's start as a Unix company, not a DOS company.

Microsoft purchased some Unix licenses and used that to produce Xenix for the x86 platform. They sold licenses to different folks and most of them ended up powering the POS (Point Of Sale) terminals that were popular among the Pizza Hut and BlockBuster sorts.

Microsoft hired the SCO folks to hack on Xenix for them.

Of course that is SCO as in 'Santa Cruz Operations', which sold most their software to Caldera Linux folks and created a split-off company developing Java web app environments that got purchased by Sun Microsystems which then got purchased by Oracle. It was the "Caldera Linux"-turned-"SCO Group" that ended up being the huge assholes after they were stomped into the ground by IBM.

So ya.. the success of Unix as a powerhouse OS can be pretty much traced to the BSD originated TCP/IP protocol stack and other Unix improvements that people took from BSD. As thanks the Unix folks then turned around (At that time it was Novell that owned that shit) and sued the BSD folks for making them all rich.

I guess Microsoft benefits from that heritage also.

Go Open Source! And remember folks.. the BSD license is _always_ better then the GPL because IT IS MORE FREE!!!!!!

Pictures some fat bastard. Software Bloat?

Microsoft have got several shipping products which are themselves open-source, including ASP.NET MVC, the WPF and Silverlight toolkits, several application blocks, and a heap of other stuff all available on Codeplex. And of course Visual Studio and ASP.NET include first-class support for jQuery.

"These paedophiles can't win, can they? If they're abusing our kids, they're evil, if they offer to babysit its part of an evil conspiracy to destroy our children "

An extreme rewording (I love the smell of Reductio ad absurdum in the morning XD) but it gets the point across. Let the leopard show it's changed it's spots before you trust it.

"Of course it's still a shit Unix environment compared to Linux or OS X... but people tend to make the best with what they have and either tool provides a nice way to get the Unix tools and Unix source code compatibility without the Linux hardware headaches."

NT with SFU is actually a much better Unix system then Linux, easily acheving that because at has, at least at one point, acheved SUS (Single UNIX Specification) complience. That is a feat that no linux distro has ever acheved.

Mine's the one with The Open Group logo on it.

That's right. Neither can Charles Manson win.

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NT with SFU is actually a much better Unix system then Linux, easily acheving that because at has, at least at one point, acheved SUS (Single UNIX Specification) complience. That is a feat that no linux distro has ever acheved.

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That's all nice and such. But certifications like that tend to lose their meaning when you actually have to end up using and support it. I was talking about 'better' in a real sense, as in something people tended to prefer to use and not in 'Oh, look I made the guys that own the Unix trademark happy and slightly richer' sense. :)

While MS bleats about software piracy, one has to wonder, about the examples they set for others.

So why doesn't the GPL'd code in Services for Unix count ?