Microsoft Embrace, Extend, Extinguish FreeBSD?

W

walterbyrd

Slashdot article: Microsoft Has Created Its Own FreeBSD

https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/06/09/1827256/microsoft-has-created-its-own-freebsd

This is a comment I found on another forum. Interesting thought, IMO.


From TFA . . .

Redmond is not keeping its work on FreeBSD to itself: Anderson says "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."

Do you see that big word MAJORITY in there? That means there are parts of the kernel that Microsoft is keeping closed source to themselves.

That is the classic, Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. We're to the Extend part right now. It has been extended with proprietary extensions that are not given back to the community.
 
That's exactly what I thought of when I saw it. Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.

Maybe it's that time again - to relocate.
 
You're reading way too much into it.

As the above screenshot illustrates, Microsoft is the publisher of the FreeBSD image in the marketplace rather than the FreeBSD Foundation. The FreeBSD Foundation is supported by donations from the FreeBSD community, including companies that build their solutions on FreeBSD. They are not a solution provider or an ISV with a support organization but rather rely on a very active community that support one another. In order to ensure our customers have an enterprise SLA for their FreeBSD VMs running in Azure, we took on the work of building, testing, releasing and maintaining the image in order to remove that burden from the Foundation. We will continue to partner closely with the Foundation as we make further investments in FreeBSD on Hyper-V and in Azure.
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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. There are some exceptions where we included some important fixes that weren’t complete in time to make the FreeBSD 10.3 release – you can get the details of those additional commits here.
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https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/freebsd-now-available-in-azure-marketplace/
 
Code: 
font-family: 'Segoe UI','Segoe WP',Tahoma,Arial,sans-serif;
Hmm. I find it interesting that, on the internet, Microsoft only specifies Microsoft fonts. Interesting.
 
The OP beat me to it. Anyways, here's the link to the article that I read: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/09/microsoft_freebsd/ From what I can ascertain, Microsoft is making additions to FreeBSD to support their Azure cloud service. In the article, Microsoft straight out said that they want everyone, no matter what operating system that they are using, to be able to use their Azure cloud service. Embrace, extend, extinguish? Not going to happen because FreeBSD is open source. What they can do is do what Apple did: Fork it. So instead of having the three big versions (Free, Open, Net), OSX, and the minor ones (Dragonfly, pico, and others), we could have an MS-BSD. It could be commercially supported. Who knows? But I do know that one thing for certain is that they cannot extinguish FreeBSD because it is open source. The community will adapt and thrive despite their attempts to kill it.

Any why FreeBSD? I remember an article from way back when where Microsoft stated that they liked the BSD style license because it was compatible with closed source code. They complained that the GPL is a cancer. However, Microsoft has released SQL server for Linux, so that is interesting in and of itself.

EDIT:

The original article from 2001 on the Chicago-Times website, which quotes Steve Ballmer calling the GPL a cancer, is dead, but here's a link which describes it: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_cancer/
 
Actually I beat you to it :p Thread 56541

I don't think this is any where as different as a fork, as others have now said, it's basically just another convenience image from a cloud provider, ready configured for their services, in addition they have however contributed some virtualisation drivers which I know nothing about but by definition shouldn't affect anything non azure based.

RE MS-BSD? they've pretty much already been there and done that, it was called xenix, not BSD but it did contain some BSD among other things.
 
How is it that, in 2016, folks still see every new thing Microsoft tries as an attempt to conquer the world? It seems rather obvious to me that they're working like mad to remain relevant in a rapidly changing ecosystem in which their products cannot be expected to remain dominant as a matter of course. One must either adapt to change and survive, or become extinct, but avoiding extinction through adaptation won't guarantee one remains at the top of the food chain. Especially if the food chain itself changes.
 
ANOKNUSA The new CEO seems to want to change Microsoft culture in a good way but he's only been in office for two years. Microsoft has only been out of US Federal oversight for six years (after having it extended for non-compliance). Ballmer was still CEO just two years ago in case anyone has forgotten. So it's almost as if some are expecting us to trust them overnight while Microsoft continues to sue open software elsewhere while trying to buddy up with us at the same time.

A harsh and, probably, bad example is the time one of my managers hired a guy who had gotten out of prison for theft, coincidentally just two years before. I was not aware of this till later but he seemed like a decent enough fellow. Did good work and everyone liked him till we noticed things disappearing on a regular basis and caught him on a security camera after hours.
 
ANOKNUSA said:
How is it that, in 2016, folks still see every new thing Microsoft tries as an attempt to conquer the world? It seems rather obvious to me that they're working like mad to remain relevant in a rapidly changing ecosystem in which their products cannot be expected to remain dominant as a matter of course. One must either adapt to change and survive, or become extinct, but avoiding extinction through adaptation won't guarantee one remains at the top of the food chain. Especially if the food chain itself changes.
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Yes it's obvious to me that's what they are doing too... but they have no real dedication to any of the new things they do, it's like a child pressing all of the buttons to see which one does what it wants without caring about the consequences. But more than that, there is this consistent underlying tone of mistrust in users and fairly reliable exploitation in nasty ways. Many of the things that come out of microsoft are well designed from well intentioned people, but that's always ruined because it's not enough to win by focusing on creating something good, the evil always seeps to the surface in new and ridiculous ways as they attempt to create new monopolies.

That turned into a rant but whatever, they can't be trusted... I thought that was obvious.
 
I really can't see a downside to Microsoft supporting FreeBSD on their Azure platform and don't understand the misplaced animosity here. This isn't connected to their past or present behavior with Windows in any way and personally, I appreciate Microsoft's contributions to supporting FreeBSD in any capacity and hope it continues well into the future. It only benefits the project in my opinion.

Just a friendly reminder: Since this is a topic that can potentially attract a difference of strong opinion, lets keep in mind we need to adhere to the Forums' rules in order to continue discussion here.
 
protocelt said:
don't understand the misplaced animosity here.
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I don't think you really meant that. I mean, you do understand where it comes from, don't you?
protocelt said:
This isn't connected to their past or present behavior
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That remains to be seen. As the saying goes, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." Those of us who went through those things "in the past" keep one eye on the lookout.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
I mean, you do understand where it comes from, don't you?
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Of course, which is why I used "misplaced" in my post.

drhowarddrfine said:
Those of us who went through those things "in the past" keep one eye on the lookout.
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I don't see an issue with that. I'm simply saying the worst that can happen out of this is Microsoft dropping support for FreeBSD on their Azure platform, so as I said earlier, I really don't see a downside. In fact, given they are supporting FreeBSD at all on their platform tells me there is enough demand for it. If anything, I'd call this quite a positive thing for the project.
 
After doing a bit of research, what is really going on is that Microsoft is providing drivers for FreeBSD that will enable it to run on their Hyper-V virtualization platform, and some additional software for their Azure Cloud Services (ACS) which runs on top of the kernel. So as it stands, it is just code that allows FreeBSD to support ACS. They did the same thing with Linux a few months ago with Debian (although I think Ubuntu has made the list as well) as the endorsed distribution. They are doing this because they want ACS to run on all the major platforms so users can, well, use their cloud services. So in other words, nothing to see here people. Calm down and move along.

Users don't trust Microsoft, and based on past behavior, for good reason. But with this new CEO, perhaps things will change. Their code contributions are, as expected, profit motivated. I am not sure what to think about the endorsement from Microsoft that FreeBSD is a major platform. I'm sure there is a complement in there somewhere. Some of the comments on other websites that I have seen go along the lines of "Install FreeBSD because it just works" and such. I have also seen comments where people think that FreeBSD's network stack is superior in security and performance when compared to other operating systems, including Linux. So we may have an opportunity for advocacy here.
 
Maelstorm That's as much as I could find too, and it's not unusual or more special than other OOS as you mention, my fear is that it was... or may become more than that:

protocelt said:
...I'm simply saying the worst that can happen out of this is Microsoft dropping support for FreeBSD on their Azure platform, so as I said earlier, I really don't see a downside. In fact, given they are supporting FreeBSD at all on their platform tells me there is enough demand for it. If anything, I'd call this quite a positive thing for the project.
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Oh it is a positive thing, and as they are currently only fiddling with virtualisation drivers then like you said the worst that could happen is they drop support and those drivers go to waste.

I think the worst that could happen is if they want to contribute more than that, and how their PR was spun made it sound like a lot more than some drivers and a config - in such a case I don't think I would be alone in saying a LOT worse could happen.

Just to be clear I'm not concerned about this anymore, it's become clear what this is all about and that's simply supporting azure nothing more.
 
Dropping support is along the lines of my point about past behavior. Someone starts using Azure cause it supports FreeBSD. Then they drop FreeBSD while pointing you to IIS to buy. I've seen it. This is nothing new.
 
Remember that Microsoft gets "no vote" on how their committed contributions are re-used. You can take them for your own use as you like without Microsoft's consent. That's the power of the BSD license.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
Dropping support is along the lines of my point about past behavior. Someone starts using Azure cause it supports FreeBSD. Then they drop FreeBSD while pointing you to IIS to buy. I've seen it. This is nothing new.
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Perhaps nothing new in a context free view on Microsoft.

The news is that you can move the whole FreeBSD installation quickly over to for example AWS. The real question is, why somebody might want to put a FreeBSD installation on Azure in the first place. AFAIK, AWS EC2 got more bang for the bucks.
 
I can think of several reasons why someone would want to run FreeBSD in Hyper-V. The big one is to allow someone to install FreeBSD in a virtual machine to get a feel for it and decide if they like it or not before throwing dedicated hardware at it.
 
I really don't understand what the fuss is all about. Just because it's Microsoft we have to doubt all their motivations?

Microsoft using FreeBSD? I'd say the system simply works because, wasn't FreeBSD meant to be used in the first place? If you truly stand behind free software, if you truly value digital freedom (which FreeBSD does IMO, considering its license) then you'll also value parties who you may not particularly like for using it. In this case Microsoft. I'd say the system works.

As to that embrace, extent... comment. You guys do realize that there was once a time where Microsoft made it into the list of top 20 contributers to the Linux kernel? Granted: their main goal was providing better compatibility for their own servers, but even so they did contribute. And this happened a long time ago.

And well.. Linux is still going strong, pretty much independent.
 
Maelstorm said:
I can think of several reasons why someone would want to run FreeBSD in Hyper-V
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I currently work for a SaaS company and a lot of their Microsoft services run on Azure. We also have around 500+ Linux servers, mostly on Xenserver. They would like to move everything to Azure/Hyper-V and get rid of Xen (one hypervisor platform). I very much applaud the possibility to migrate some stuff from Linux on Xen to FreeBSD on Azure.

I can think of several reasons why FreeBSD on Azure would, in certain cases, be the better choice.
 
Maelstorm said:
I can think of several reasons why someone would want to run FreeBSD in Hyper-V. The big one is to allow someone to install FreeBSD in a virtual machine to get a feel for it and decide if they like it or not before throwing dedicated hardware at it.
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Perhaps, you misunderstood the question. It didn't want to question cloud computing using FreeBSD. The point was, if people question MS Azure, why not going straight to e.g. AWS.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
Absolutely! Their history shows why. Brought to court and fined billions on two continents and under US Justice Department oversight until 2010 is good enough reason.
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Guilty until proven innocent? Also: you're not exactly placing things within context. One of those fines was handed out by the EU for failing to present users with a choice screen of what browser they wanted to use. Even though the OS itself posed no limitations what so ever on picking whatever you wanted to use. To be honest I also somewhat question the EU's ruling there. Especially because it happened at a time when FireFox and Chrome were already very strongly present on the browser market, if not plain out dominating it.

Next Microsoft got fined for violating a patent in their Explorer browser. The ability to add extra functionality through plugins was patented by a small company in Chicago (Eolas) and the University of California. The US and their famous patents.. Can't really say I'm surprised there either, it would be more surprising if a company didn't get sued over a patent dispute.

Even so I still fail to understand the relevance with Microsoft using FreeBSD in their Azure cloud. And even more so how this would threaten FreeBSD in any way.
 
ShelLuser said:
Guilty until proven innocent? Also: you're not exactly placing things within context. One of those fines was handed out by the EU for failing to present users with a choice screen of what browser they wanted to use. Even though the OS itself posed no limitations what so ever on picking whatever you wanted to use. To be honest I also somewhat question the EU's ruling there. Especially because it happened at a time when FireFox and Chrome were already very strongly present on the browser market, if not plain out dominating it.
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I have always been on Microsoft's side on this matter even though I don't really like any of their offerings on the operating system market. The whole matter was pure lunacy driven by ignorance of EU's lawmakers faced with new technology that they didn't understand at all and MS's competitors taking advantage of that ignorance. It was Microsoft's operating system and they had the right to bundle their own browser with it. They did nothing to hamper the ability to install other browsers so the whole point of the lawsuit was on very thin ice from the beginning.
 
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