Linked by Roberto J. Dohnert on Wed 21st Jan 2004 18:55 UTC
As many of you may remember I did a review of Windows Services for UNIX 3.0 (SFU) a few months ago. I remember being frustrated with that release because it seemed to me that all Microsoft did was throw something together just to be able to say "Hey look, we have this". I thought, since Microsoft released version 3.5, I would revisit and see what changes were done with it. I downloaded the beta version a while back and from the beta I was very impressed with the improvements that Microsoft made. Being a beta version it was buggy and some things just didnt quite work. I finally got the final version of the OpenBSD-based SFU 3.5 and this release makes dynamic leaps and bounds over previous releases of this software package. I am glad to see a lot more work was put into this release.
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Good points J.Edwards and Gil Bates. My example of IE for Unix is probably a bit extreme - my point was that there is the perception that MS has not always taken the greatest care to maintain backward compatibility and support for older products - especially ones hosted on competing platforms (example - now that the browser war is won - IE support for Mac wasn't too important either).
If MS was to somehow coopt Unix-like OSes by using SFU...
OR fail miserably trying to do so...
then history suggests MS probably won't have too many second thoughts about potentially stranding customers who incorporated SFU into their strategies when MS changes its mind later and drops support (or stops building it into newer versions of Windows).
Nothing against Interop Systems, but if MS drops support for SFU, I doubt too many enterprises would consider it a viable option to buy their support from them and/or develop in-house expertise to support SFU. Cygwin, on the other hand, is supported by a vendor most enterprises are familiar with (Red Hat) who isn't likely to drop support (or is probably perceived that way at least).
Interesting that Word for Unix is still around... I wonder how much usage that is getting these days...