The End Days are Here...MS to sell it's own Linux distro

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They can't kill something that fundamentally doesn't need to eat or breathe. Tell me, just where is FOSS defeated? Pyongyang?

@Spiderpig: Those are some awfully big words you've aimed at hackerkind. At the risk of my seeming crass, do your homework.

The answer to which is basically yes. Microsoft would slap a .NET frontend on a Babbage difference engine if they thought they could sell it. The kernel is quite substantial even without a shell, but manipulating it at that depth doesn't strike me as terribly relevant to M$ clientele - to the majority of Redmond devs, it's a mess. Makes me wonder if Satya will find ANY GNU gurus willing to distort the aims of the Linux foundation this far...
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Last edited by cberg on 17 Oct 2015, 6:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.

What words, and what homework?

You referred to FOSS as obsoleted, so either I as a developer have been a troglodyte lately or you need to think about the actual reach of shared ideas. There's nothing defeatist about working for internet access for billions.

I didn’t say it’s obsolete. I was talking about what seems to be the most widespread opinion from my admittedly narrow point of view, and, not knowing more, I’m worried that opinion may be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I wouldn’t pay so much attention to this topic if I didn’t want free software to succeed, and, as far as doing my homework is concerned, I’m trying to learn to program, and I’d really like to make a meaningful contribution some day, though I may well be too late. I’m especially concerned about hardware being securely locked so it can only run its preinstalled operating system, because it’s the perfect way to block the likes of me from learning. Had computers been built this way eleven years ago, I wouldn’t even know free software exists to this day.

UEFI sucks out loud but it hasn't been all bad. I have 2014 model (Albeit from Intel reps...) Dell XPS all-in-one tablet thingy and it's perfectly happy running Fedora. From what I know, the bootloader locks can even be popped on a Surface Pro 3; what really concerns me is bootloader locks on more temperamental architectures like smartphones. The upshot of all this is really just a matter of scamming users - how can I own what I can't control? Story of my career right there.

Basically everything is possible unless M$ or Apple buy it first. This dynamic makes teaching technology almost taboo, it drives collaboration underground. People are deluded enough to think they can patent your genetics behind your back, so these days they do the same with ideas you might otherwise profit from.

As much as this scares me, the Microsoft IP portfolio is not an idea graveyard like Jobso's.

There is SOME chance of Redmond meaningfully augmenting *nix, we just have to force them to publish THAT.

I'm not so worried about UEFI, having lived through the early 2000's when we were using JTAG's & bit-banging & worse to put Linux on anything with bootcode by redirecting to a stub & having that reinitialize into Linux. Oh, and the days of booting weird stuff on compact macs pretty much the same way (but just using software).
Hackers are like Nature in that Jeff Goldblum-y sort of way...

It's the second point the scares me more, when I don't have the legal right to remove and replace the code in a piece of hardware I've purchased for my own use. Sorta like saying I don't have the legal right to make annotations in a book I've bought because someone else owns the copyright...

Makes me glad I got my car when I did. Not only did I score an endangered stick shift, my next car might ditch onboard diagnostic ports for O.T.A. UPDATES , not only that, it might log and transmit everywhere I go.

Lets face it, we've gotta be %100 prepared to absolutely lay waste to the internet of things. Particularly if somebody tries to run it all from their skunkworks splinter-distro.