Contributions From Azure

T

tomxor

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/freebsd-now-available-in-azure-marketplace/

It's not uncommon for IAAS guys to roll their own OSS images for better support, and that's great, for Microsoft too! (even though I'm not exactly what you would call a fan) ... but this part kinda made me cringe:
The majority of the investments we make at the kernel level to enable network and storage performance were up-streamed into the FreeBSD 10.3 release, so anyone who downloads a FreeBSD 10.3 image from the FreeBSD Foundation will get those investments from Microsoft built in to the OS
Click to expand...

I'm a newbie and I've kept it purely technical so far, but some things one just can't help but be highly opinionated about... I'm highly suspicious of anything Microsoft touch even when they appear to be generous, that's a reputation they have earned, they have caused me too much pain - generally I want nothing to do with them.

I completely understand that's probably an unwelcome opinion compared to helping hands and bug fixes. Perhaps someone more informed could save me from running away screaming and let us know the extent of their contributions to the kernel and their planned future involvement in kernel development on FreeBSD.

In-case this is inadvertently my last post: thanks for everything your all good folks :p :beer:
 
Hi tomxor,

Stay cool! They tell us why they are interested in FreeBSD: "Why is it so important for FreeBSD to run in Azure?” Many top-tier virtual appliance vendors base their products on the FreeBSD operating system." They NEED FreeBSD, because their big clients use it!
So we can assume, FreeBSD is on the rise; even the guys from Redmond can't ignore that fact any longer. As long as they gain no influence in the line
and direction of the evolution of FreeBSD; take their money!!! Microsoft is going slowly down and they know it...
:):cool:
 
I agree with angus71, mostly – beware, there's life in the old dog yet :). I want to add another consideration. For those who roll out their own customized OSS, one of the greatest goals you could achieve is to get as much as possible of the customizations into the mainline. Otherwise, you would need to touch your code again and again with each new OSS release, which would be sort of a maintenance nightmare. Instead you would be glad to donate the code and perhaps the big guys donate some money too, and you get back the maintenance of your additions by the community for free and "forever".
 
From /. commenting about BSD in Azure:

Clippy: I see you're running FreeBSD. Would you like to upgrade to Windows 10 now or reschedule for later?
 
Hah, yes I saw that too. I think the truth of this is what my logical brain suspected... slightly hyped PR, while they have been commiting code, I think it's only for specific virtualisation drivers which I guess wouldn't even be loaded or compiled on normal installs. At least I hope.

On the other hand my instinctual brain is imagining some nightmare of a pre-emptive interrupting clippy from hell scenario manifesting as i'm halfway through typing pkg install from a vt :eek: >Install Windows 912641?... NO... > You selected "YES"... pay us for access to your word files while you wait?

This is the most info I can currently find... From the same slashdot thread from Ster:

Hi folks,

Disclaimer: I'm a FreeBSD committer.

MS has been committing various Hyper-V drivers for months. Just like VMWare does for its hypervisor.

This is less

OMG a new fork! Embrace, Extend, Extinguish!!!

and more

Here's a pre-built VM image with 10.3 + a few Hyper-V drivers that weren't backported in time for the 10.3 freeze + a few scripts to automate configuration in the Azure environment

You know, like every other cloud vendor's VM images. Nothing to see here, move along.

So, stop Hyper-Ventilating! ;-)
Click to expand...

Which is quite reasonable... and I know the reality of software is that nothing is pristine, most code is dirty, but for some reason things really seem tainted to me when M$ touches it.
 
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