Microsoft Embrace, Extend, Extinguish FreeBSD?

kpa said:
It was Microsoft's operating system and they had the right to bundle their own browser with it.
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You are absolutely correct except when it comes to a monopoly position and Microsoft has a monopoly position on the desktop. Taking advantage of a monopoly position to harm competition is illegal in almost every country in the world.
 
Except that Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly in cloud computing and hasn't even on the desktop for some time now. Competition exists in both markets with some quite viable alternatives at present. Past market dominance and/or behavior by Microsoft doesn't make this any less of an opportunity for FreeBSD in the present.
 
Cloud computing has nothing to do with desktop computing and Microsoft has had dominance on the desktop since forever. That has not changed much, and was especially back in the late 90s and early 00s when this all took place.
 
Any of you guys remember DR-DOS? It was a version of DOS that was published by Digital Research. What they did was reverse engineer MS-DOS and write a very complete specification of it. Then they took that specification and gave it to their programmers to come up with a new DOS that wasn't a copy of MS-DOS. DR-DOS would run Windows 3.x, until Microsoft changed Windows to run only on MS-DOS or PC-DOS (Both were written by Microsoft back then).

Then when Windows 95 came out, Microsoft missed the boat on the WWW, so they bought a browser from someone (I don't remember who), rebranded it, and called it Internet Explorer. This was when you had to pay for Netscape Navigator. Microsoft found that they couldn't even give away IE, so when 1998 came around, Microsoft released Windows 98, with IE bundled in and set to default. Netscape suddenly found that they could no longer complete and had to give their browser away, for free. It was around this time that Apple was struggling and many people were questioning Apple's viability as a platform. Microsoft forced Apple to adopt IE as their default browser by threatening Apple with cancellation of Microsoft Office for Macintosh. If that had happened, then there most likely wouldn't be a Apple Computer today. Another victim of Microsoft was the Opera browser. However, during this time, Microsoft invested USD$400M in Apple to keep them afloat so Microsoft could say that they had a competitor. Same or similar situation between Intel and AMD.

Then there was the issue with the OEMs. Microsoft charged different OEMs differently depending on the OEM's cooperation in loading Microsoft software onto the machine and setting IE to the defaults. OEMs that fully cooperated were given perks such as lower per copy pricing on Windows, rights to early deployments, etc.... Those OEMs who didn't cooperate fully, or loaded competitor's software such as Netscape, were forced to pay higher per copy fees for Windows. In one case (I think it was Compaq), Microsoft threatened to denied new licenses until well into the Christmas season so the OEM wouldn't be able to get their machines to market on time for the Christmas Holiday.

So yeah, this is the behavior of the same Microsoft that we all know and love today. Although there are many choices for desktop operating systems out there, Microsoft and Apple are the only two big ones out there. Don't get me wrong, there are people who run Linux and *BSD, but they are few and far between as most of the planet runs Microsoft on the desktop. Now for servers, that's a different story. Most web servers today run some version of Unix, be it *BSD, Linux, Solaris, or something else.

As I mentioned before, this is all a ploy by Microsoft to push their cloud services to as many platforms as they can so they can make money now that cloud computing is taking off. Microsoft is late to the game though because Apple, Google, and Amazon have beaten them to the punch. Microsoft is smart in one way though: They will not invest in new technology (or a new market) until their is a viable market for it so they can get a return on investment. That way, they let others work all the bugs out and develop the market so they can muscle in and try to take it over. They did it with the browser wars, they did it with the Internet, they did it with the desktop (That last one is a bit of a stretch though.), they tried it with mobile (phones) and failed, they tried it with music players (remember Zune?) and failed, they are trying it with tablets, they are trying it with game consoles, and now they are going to try it with the cloud. There is nothing altruistic about Microsoft's motives, as their motive is making money, and lots of it. If you think otherwise, then you are deceiving yourself.

I know that some people wonder why Microsoft is not to be trusted. Well, there's your answer.
 
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Maelstorm said:
As I mentioned before, this is all a ploy by Microsoft to push their cloud services to as many platforms as they can so they can make money now that cloud computing is taking off.
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It's not a "ploy," it's a plan. They need to stay relevant, and they've learned over the last 15 years that no one's going to trust their overly complicated, resource-hogging, desktop-centered computing platform to run a reliable server. At the same time, large businesses aren't going to fork out huge stacks of cash to retrain their cubicle drones to use a new computing platform, because a huge percentage of the workforce are still people who only use computers out of necessity and consider what they already know and use to be an objective standard.

Change is necessary to remain competitive, but the degree of change differs between Microsoft and their enterprise clients: if Microsoft doesn't change greatly they'll be left behind;, if their enterprise clients change to much, they'll end up with an unhappy and inefficient workforce. The apparent solution is a virtualized platform that system administrators can rely on and mold to their hearts' content, coupled with middleware that makes that virtualized platform work with the same old garbage the office drones are used to using. They have a selection of virtualized platforms to choose from, two of them---Linux and FreeBSD--being free software projects that Microsoft can't possibly own and are available elsewhere, and so can't eliminate as "competitors." It's also worth noting that about 99.99999999% of Microsoft's customers have no idea FreeBSD even exists; the only people who are going to use this service are those who would have liked to find their own way to shoehorn FreeBSD into their workflow anyway.
 
Maelstorm said:
Any of you guys remember DR-DOS? It was a version of DOS that was published by Digital Research. What they did was reverse engineer MS-DOS and write a very complete specification of it. Then they took that specification and gave it to their programmers to come up with a new DOS that wasn't a copy of MS-DOS. DR-DOS would run Windows 3.x, until Microsoft changed Windows to run only on MS-DOS or PC-DOS (Both were written by Microsoft back then).
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Odd. I've used Novell DOS back then for most of the time (I started replacing command.com with NDos, then eventually replaced the whole OS with Novell DOS for its better networking capabilities) and never ran into this issue.

You're mixing up your facts a bit here: the beta release of Windows 3.1 had these issues but the final product ran just fine on alternative environments. It did give out a warning about possible compatibility issues but apart from that things ran normally.

Maelstorm said:
This was when you had to pay for Netscape Navigator.
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Uhm, no? Navigator, based on the freely available Mosaic, was available free of charge as well and was even included with OS/2 back then. The usage policy was a bit twisted, but it remained free of charge for non-commercial usage. Licenses weren't a major issue back then.

Thing is: I'm not denying that Microsoft has done some pretty weird things, but the same can be said about most companies from that era. What I am saying though is that in my opinion it's a little narrow minded to keep holding the past against them. The Microsoft we had then is pretty different from the Microsoft we have now. Though some influences seem to be pretty much the same. When looking at the horror which was Windows 8 then I really think that Microsoft sometimes still believes it can dominate the market.

But that doesn't mean that nothing good can come out of their efforts at all. A little distrust will never hurt, but following plain out paranoia won't do anyone much good.

Which is another thing: if you truly believe that Microsoft can damage FreeBSD like this then I also think that you're not giving the FreeBSD foundation enough credit. It takes 2 parties for such a scheme to work: Microsoft trying to do some damage / sabotage, but also the foundation who would eventually let it happen.

I think the FreeBSD foundation has been through much worse than this already, so quite frankly I don't doubt that they'll be able to decide what's best for FreeBSD here. And if people become really distressed over the way things go then a mere fork() is all they'd need to preserve what they care for.
 
Back when the 8086 was current tech, I used to quite like MS (and they were even a significant Unix OS vendor back then). Then a long series of what I considered to be misdeeds or morally/ethically questionable behaviour turned me strongly against them.

While I'm still distrustful of them, I see this official support for FreeBSD on Azure as basically only good overall for FreeBSD. The magic of the BSD license makes it impossible for them to do any real long term harm to *BSD. I have considerable faith in the BSD developers and code-expert-level users, the vast and constant code review process, that I don't believe that they could get away with trying to slip in harmful code (and to do so would be a PR catastrophe for them when it inevitably was exposed).

There is a major benefit for FreeBSD in this. The world seems to be charging forward into the virtualised / cloud infrastructure model, with no signs of slowing down. Having FreeBSD easily available on all major VM platforms is essential for its future success. That is what this move by MS achieves.

Sure, they might try to pull people across from FreeBSD to the dark side, but this doesn't really give them a whole lot of leverage in that regard. Suppose they capture a large number of FreeBSD VM units, then try to throw spanners into the works to try to push those over to their OS. It doesn't work as long as there are competitive alternative VM platforms for people to deploy FreeBSD VMs. Such a move would be more likely to give them a net loss of customers than make any real dent in FreeBSD. One great thing about the virtualised infrastructure model is that it makes it relatively easy to change infrastructure supplier if the current supplier goes bad.

So, overall, I say that it's no bad thing currently, but yes a careful eye needs to be kept on them. Save the worrying about it for if/when there is actually something real to worry about. Until then, enjoy the free marketing and endorsement they are providing for our OS.
 
Funny, I had an email conversation with a Gnome developer many years ago about this very thing: "embrace, extend, extinguish". I used to be a mod on the now defunct "gnomesupport" web site and a Gnome HIG tester - we had a conversation about how Mono on Linux was a ".NET" reverse engineer if you will, and how Microsoft would quietly sit in the background until Mono was heavily used in Linux then step forward with "ahem, that belongs to us". Funny enough, Microsoft went and open sourced .NET. I never would have thought it would go in that direction.
 
All I am gonna say is if there is any "anything, what ever that may be" that MS wants to get inserted into FreeBSD, it comes with a transfer of the ownership, IP and all, and in a way that MS is not even allow to say something like "FreeBSD built with MS techology". They contribute purely as a gift, nothing else. Later if MS say "ahem" FreeBSD can say "yeah but". Frankly I would not let them insert a line of descriptive text in anything.
Scope creep can in incredibly sly. Obviously my trust boundary excludes MS.
 
BSD license is very straightforward when it comes to contributions. Whatever MS has contributed now to FreeBSD is already "lost" to them, their contributions haven't bought them any votes in the re-use terms of FreeBSD that includes their contributions. They can of course try to have their influence on the ongoing development work of FreeBSD but still all of the results of the development are going to stay within the BSD license that allows anyone to take the source and run with it and do whatever they want to do with it.
 
There's the other side of the coin as well and this is probably not what you have thought about or don't want to hear (at least some people here certainly don't). MS could easily make their own fork of FreeBSD and promote that as their own creation as long as they acknowledge the original license and copyright as it is required by the BSD license. This is pretty much what Sony did with FreeBSD on PS4, if MS has similar plans it could easily happen but who knows.
 
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