this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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    Money has changed microsoft (lemmy.world)
    submitted 7 months ago by Waffelson to c/linuxmemes
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    [–] [email protected] 19 points 7 months ago (7 children)

    I'm a little concerned Microsoft will make a linux distro and introduce proprietary components into it that will drive users of other distros to it because "why use any other distro when the M$ distro can run my games/microsoft office/whatever?". Because that's how they'll kill linux: a bunch of proprietary kernel modules with which only Windows software can run.

    We should have multiple linux mega-corps before that happens, otherwise we're fucked.

    CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

    [–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago (1 children)

    They’d probably just buy canonical in this scenario.

    [–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

    Canonical would have to accept. Given their move towards proprietary code, that wouldn't surprise me in the least, honestly.

    CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

    [–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

    Is the public license meant to be the copyright licensing for your comments? Attribute - Non-commercial - Share Alike

    Is it meant for crawlers, AI database creators and the like?

    Are your comments automatically appended with the link? Or are you mainly copy-pasting it?

    And how does it mesh with the TOS of the lemmy instance you're on?
    I remember that Reddit has royalty free rights over all comments n posts made on the site, which allow them to do anything they want.

    [–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

    Is the public license meant to be the copyright licensing for your comments?

    Yes

    Is it meant for crawlers, AI database creators and the like?

    Precisely those

    Are your comments automatically appended with the link? Or are you mainly copy-pasting it?

    A keyboard shortcut

    And how does it mesh with the TOS of the lemmy instance you’re on?

    I don't know. That's for the crawlers, AI database creators, etc. to figure out. If they're non-commercial, then there shouldn't be a problem either way. For commercial uses, I hope it makes it impossible, but I'm not a lawyer, so I'll just tack on the license and hope it might have an effect 🤷 Takes but a keyboard shortcut (an sometimes time to explain it).

    Anti Commercial AI thingyCC BY-NC-SA 4.0

    [–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

    That's cool.

    [–] ricdeh 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

    How would that affect any of us? Linus Torvalds would still be the lead kernel maintainer, all the other FOSS distros would still exist, and all the people that currently use Linux (out of conviction, out of idealism, out of the FOSS/GNU philosophy) would stick with them, meaning de facto no change whatsoever.

    [–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

    Not everybody uses linux out of conviction, idealism, or principle. Many use it either by chance or convenience. The purists are probably not the majority of linux users.

    There are people who already won't switch to linux because windows has WSL. Gaming has held back many people from switching too, although that's becoming less of a problem. However, if there were no reason to switch to other distros, and an M$ distro were to become the most used distro...

    Do you know what M$ did when they had the largest market share for browsers? Do you know what Google is currently doing with their marketshare on the browser market?

    Windows has a pitiful representation on the server side, but if that changed to an M$ distro with proprietary linux modules in order to make certain software work (or something more insidious that I can't think of), it would change the server landscape too. And suddenly, you can't write stuff for the most popular servers without installing M$ kernel modules or software.

    The linux zealots are not the majority. Zealots never are.

    CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

    [–] dejected_warp_core 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

    A few things come to mind here.

    1. MS tried to ship a renegade JDK with proprietary features, back in the 90's. That didn't go very well for them, as they drew the ire of Sun Microsystems which was a decently sized player at the time. It was a clear licensing issue, and they lost the case. Point being: they're historically not great at this kind of thing.
    2. The GPL is designed to thwart this scenario, specifically for things like paid software (e.g. Windows). MS would have to move to a "free Windows software, paid service" model before any of this could happen. But the service must be optional, and they'd have to provide the source to anyone that wants it. That said, they're on track to make Windows free (as in beer), so who knows?
    3. Nvidia gets to ship binary Linux drivers, so closed-source binary packages for MS proprietary components on top of Linux might be possible. But again, I don't think they get to charge for that.
    4. WRT to drivers/packages, RedHat famously charges for access to their package repository, making automated patching and upgrading a nightmare if you go without. This is one hell of a GPL loophole and worthy of far more corporate exploitation. I can easily see MS following this path.
    5. "The net treats censorship as a defect and routes around it." - John Gilmore - (Many) People will just fork away or happily sit somewhere else in the GNU family tree, far from anything MS builds. If the need arises, compatibility layers like WINE will show up eventually.
    [–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

    The chances of seeing an M$ Winix or something in the next decade are pretty slim, IMO, but to me it's the worst case scenario / beginning of the end. I'm crossing my fingers that windows 12 is shitty, but not too shitty.

    I can only hope you're right.

    CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

    [–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

    thats EEE and we are all afraid of that

    [–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

    It's called Linspire, what you've described happened 20 years ago. It was not the cataclysmic event you described it as. TBH I'm not that concerned about a company who charges $400+ for an OS that still shows advertisements and loses support after 5 years when I could go out and get an OS with no ads or bloat for free that will never lose support.

    [–] [email protected] -2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

    Looking up Linspire, that was not Microsoft, but a separate company. That means they didn't have the windows kernel source code, nor the windows userbase. If M$ made a distro within which nigh any windows software worked (Photoshop, Visual Studio, Microsoft Office, ..., games), it were presented as a frictionless upgrade ("Upgrade to Windows LT!"), and suddenly 1-2 billion people were on it, what would happen to linux?

    I'm not sure things would be that rosy.

    CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

    [–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

    Linspire is what Windows named the company who made Lindows after acquiring them as a way of settling ongoing litigations against them. It was a Linux Distro that was built on the concept of running everything that Windows could. Windows was always a parent company to Linspire.

    2 Billion People won't use a Microsoft distribution of Linux unless they can control their greed long enough to make it worth using, which is unlikely.

    EDIT: I'm getting all my nouns mixed up lol

    [–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

    Microsoft sought a retrial and after this was postponed in February 2004,[9] offered to settle the case. As part of the licensing settlement, Microsoft paid an estimated $20 million, and Lindows, Inc. transferred the Lindows trademark to Microsoft and changed its name to Linspire, Inc.

    The company was thus never owned by M$. So there never was M$ proprietary code in Linspire.

    2 Billion People won’t use a Microsoft distribution of Linux unless they can control their greed long enough to make it worth using, which is unlikely.

    It's the power of default. If it comes by default on hardware, people will unknowingly use it. And if the upgrade path is smooth and unnoticeable, people will upgrade too.

    I'm not sure whether Windows is their cash cow anymore. I'd assume Office 365 (or whatever it's called now) along with Azure make up the majority of their income. Window is probably just the gateway to their garden. But, change is hard and most likely M$ won't pull an Edge --> Chromium with their OS any time soon - and I sure hope they don't.

    CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

    [–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

    Microsoft hasn’t changed all that much. They don’t see Linux as an OS to run games or MS Office with. It’s not a consumer platform and never will be, it’s more of a server/container maaybe workstation system for a tech-savvy/developer/scientist. Its UI is meant to open terminals and text editors, not movie players or game launchers. Microsoft loves Linux until it leaves the business area and try to sneak into consumer market. There’s nothing stopping them from doing harm to desktop Linux with all their „love” to Linux the modern mainframe system that happens to be industry standard. They can still patent things and do legality tricks (like in HDMI forums), try to put Windows on devices where Linux could be competition (one Linux handheld console = 10 more new Windows handhelds), bind consumers with something only Windows can run (Xbox Gamepass?) etc

    The MS distro you're talking about already exists - it is called Azure Linux (recently renamed from CBL-Mariner).

    [–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

    You might be right. I sure hope you are. Having M$ take over desktops with "Azure Linux" (or whatever they might decide to call the desktop version) and then servers would suck.

    CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

    [–] someacnt_ 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

    I doubt this, they have been sticking to Windows

    [–] [email protected] -1 points 7 months ago

    And things never change, do they? IE is still the main M$ brow- oh wait

    Anti Commercial AI thingyCC BY-NC-SA 4.0