Microsoft has developed its own Linux. Repeat. Microsoft has developed its own Linux

They didn't have much choice.

Having read the original Microsoft announcement, it sounds like they needed to work with a lot of existing hardware, open source and other third party software, SDKs, etc. Since all or nearly all of those were Linux only, Microsoft was faced with the choices of either using Linux, redeveloping everything themselves from scratch based on reverse engineering the Linux software, or else give up any hope of being the market at all. It's kind of like the choice that desktop software developers face in business markets, except the shoe is on the other foot in this case.

Linux dominates the mobile and tablet market (Android), high performance computing, 32 and 64 bit embedded systems, cloud, and now apparently SDN. Microsoft has their niche in the PC market, but it doesn't look like they will ever expand Windows very much outside of that. That doesn't mean that Windows is about to go away, but it does probably mean that it will become more like the traditional (non-Linux) mainframe market - supporting legacy systems in a stagnant or slowly declining market segment.

It's everywhere

They will even SELL you Linux

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/#Linux

COMMUNISM!!!!!!

ASIC v FPGA

"[...] that offers an API to program ASICs inside network devices."

Do the devices have ASICs - or the more flexible FPGAs?

So, what happens to SCO?

Just curious, of course, but I would have expected El Reg to ask that question.

I'd be rather interested in seeing just how they squirm out of that one.

Clearly...

Queeg is in charge of Microsoft.

Lindows coming to you'

What they will do with the desktop is give you the Linux OS, but still charge a license for a flakey Windows like GUI addon, that still phones home. They make too much money selling data about us.

Engineering vs Sales & Marketing

Could be a sign of engineers ruling the roost rather than the S&M gurus..

Which in my eyes is always a plus.

What...We're a Tech. Company?

Microsoft didn't realize the had become an "also ran" sort of company. When you're in tech. You can't just sit on your arse and think you've got a product nobody else can touch. MSFT stock made a nice leap in price just by announcing their CEO was leaving the company to "pursue other interests". Since Nadella took over, there have actually been real teams put together to work on new tech. It was sad seeing a company with the resources they have doing absolutely nothing. I'm happy MSFT is willing to do what it takes to try and take a leading role in tech.

Anyone remembers SCO?

Will Darl McBride sue Microsoft for not paying him $1500 "license" per CPU?

"what the cloud and enterprise networks find challenging is integrating the radically different software running on each different type of switch into a cloud-wide network management platform."

Translation: Instead of just staying standards compliant and making good itneroperable products, Microsoft keeps inventing their own (usually technically worse) secret versions of existing industry protocols just so they can lock their customers into paying through the nose for licences and crappy Microsoft apps. That has caused so many customers to switch away from using Microsoft infrastructure that even Microsoft finally can't keep sticking its head in the sand any more.

Not a distro, but sounds like they have used Linux for a software switch. Probably because Linux is frankly amazingly solid at networking and Windows has a tendency to crumble under real pressure like a rich tea biscuit under a bicycle wheel.

Back in 2003 I observed a Blaster/Nachi infection; the ISA servers just went unresponsive where the Linux iptables based firewalls just suffered a slight slowdown under unending ICMP type 8.

Albeit based on Linux instead of UNIX.

Is Microsoft taking the first steps in working towards introducing a complete system version upgrade based on the iOS and OSX method for future versions?

Endorsed advertising written within the OS code to bombard the end user..who knows?

Wouldn't this remove the need for service packs with only critical patches pushed to the users?

Next thing you'll know is, Microsoft will be giving away their OS..oh, they already have.

Are we

talking about this certain company that bought Skype and then announced that it will no longer support third party hardware? AverComm had this fantastic Skype Bridge video conferencing box that enabled the Boss to partake on conferences while being chauffeured to whereever. Open source my ass, Microsoft. And 1k€ of my money right into the bin.

http://de.aver.com/press-release/VCBridge%20Termination

Val

Microsoft, if you really care about linux, do something about Skype.

The screen-sharing is awful since the last upgrade two years ago.

What they said

What Jack of Shadows and Frank Rysanek said.... it would have been a good show that Microsoft's serious about their "Windows IoT" or whatever if they'd used it as a base for this. But Linux (as well as a few BSD variants and QNX to name a few) ALREADY run on all sorts of CPUs (x86, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC... Linux even supports MMUless variants in case any of these switches have one.) Linux and BSD at least already support some switch ASICs (and since you'll have source, if you're ASIC isn't supported you'll have a driver to reference when writing your driver.) Linux and BSD also have all sorts of networking functionality (QoS, throttling, switching, bridging, all types of packet filtering and mangling.. all hardware accelerated if possible.)

I'm surprised and duly impressed that Microsoft has gotten over NIH ("Not Invented Here") syndrome enough to admit to doing this. (Actually doing it is one thing, they've probably had the odd Linux system there for 10 years... but publicizing it is quite another.)

Spousal issues?

And yet another multi-billion dollar company makes money off of Linux while the developers won't see a dime from them for it.

I wonder if Linus' wife ever chides him, "..and how come you can't charge for this?".

Maybe that's why he's so salty.

Overlooking the obvious....

Apple famously painted themselves into a corner with the unmaintainable spaghetti code that was OS9. They went - cap in hand - to Berkeley University and asked if they could use BSD as the underpinning of OSX.....

MS have finally realised that they don't have a viable OS product (and never really have) and are going to build their next generation of rubbish on Linux foundations.......

"Apple famously painted themselves into a corner with the unmaintainable spaghetti code that was OS9. They went - cap in hand - to Berkeley University and asked if they could use BSD as the underpinning of OSX....."

"Classic" MacOS was awful. I won't defend it. I thought the worst "feature" was their insistence on claiming cooperative task switching was "multitasking". (Multitasking, the OS gives each program a timeslice, when it's done it's done... cooperative task switching, which is NOT multitasking, it's up to the app to yield it's time, making a call saying "OK I'm done"... if it never yields, the ENTIRE system locks solid. Which, along with having no memory protection, is why these systems locked up so damned often.)

What actually happened here was... Apple "deposed" Steve Jobs. Jobs went and started Next computers (NeXT always seemed to be capitolized differently every single time, even on the NeXt computers and literature themselves.) *They* took Mach microkernel + BSD and developed Objective C programming language, as well as a very modern (for 1985) object-oriented GUI. Jobs was convinced if the OS and computer were nice enough, people would pay like $10,000 for them. So, fast forward a few years -- next was on the ropes, but so was Apple due to the crapulence of OS9. Apple actually went cap in hand to buy up NExt and reinstall Jobs as CEO of Apple, OSX is a direct decendent of NextStep. This is why so many functions on it start with "NS".