Q&A with Microsoft’s Chris Jones, Bob Muglia
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I really wish this area was addressed more. MS’s direction seems to be follow the leader–EMC/VMware ESX, or even the (I wish it could replace ESX–I am a Xen fanboy) Xen. With chipmakers looking into virtualization solutions inchip, I see computers doing more with less. I think that is a great thing.
Longhorn […] will help reduce […] phishing by engineering the mail client to recognize a phishing email and tell the user they’re being duped
That sounds like Thunderbird 1.1 (only Microsoft’s is a year later).
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/roadmap.html
We already provide source code with Windows CE, and it is freely available for people to use, change and put into their products under Microsoft’s shared source license. […] First, people are not really well educated on open source. You have to identify what open source license is the license they are talking about? Is it GPL, is it shared source, Apache or Mozilla?
Shared source is not open source!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_source
GPL is a non-intellectual property license
That sounds pretty bad (“non-intellectual” sounds like “dumb”) and it’s wrong too. GPL absolutely relies on copyright to work.
You cannot contribute and retain your patent rights
What about Nokia? They retain their patents to use outside of the Linux kernel.
We want to keep the option open for all different types of implementations, so if you want a storage server and nothing else, we’ll have a license for that
I get tired reading about all the Microsoft licenses, let alone reading or maintainting them. License simplification was one of our office’s reasons for going from MS Office to OpenOffice.org
What about Nokia? They retain their patents to use outside of the Linux kernel.
It has yet to be tested in court whether Nokia can distribute the Linux kernel with that restriction.
There’s some good stuff here. I think that Microsoft has finally realized that there are many different usage models, and that most of them don’t look anything like their current offerings. The problem is, the MS product menu is going to be a bit more than overwhelming for many customers. Do I need the Application Server or the Small Business Server? They can’t have a common platform on which all of these modules are built, which is ultimately a challenging situation for Microsoft and their customers alike.
With regards to virtualization, I really do think that MS is missing the boat here. If not virtualization on chip, as a previous poster suggests, or in firmware, as I imagine in the long run, then the hypervisor should live as a (gasp) microkernel (ducks) underneath the virtual OS partitions. The basic flaw of the VMWare/VirtualPC system is that the hypervisor runs on a host OS that does things. For example, it listens to network sockets and reads and writes to memory. This means it also has bugs, which can easily affect all virtual hosts. A hypervisor should do little more than allocate resources and monitor requests. It should be like auctioneer, making sure the bidding is fair and that there are no abuses. But what if the auctioneer was allowed to bid also? This would cause some concern.
One thing’s for sure: Longhorn will look and feel different than any previous version of Windows. There will be a learning curve, and people will want to stay with what they’re comfortable with… for years. I would NOT want to be in Microsoft’s shoes right now. Forget about figuring out growth prospects, it will take everything they have (and that’s quite a bit) just to keep their userbase from slipping away.
It has yet to be tested in court whether Nokia can distribute the Linux kernel with that restriction.
It has yet to be tested in court whether or not Novell can distribute the Linux kernel because they have not pledged not to use their patents against it.
See how dumb that sounds.
7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
Nokia has not ever asserted patent rights against the kernel. Explain to me how they are not legally allowed to distribute Linux? All they have done is make a promise?
Did you actually even take the time to read the GPL?
The idea of indexed filesystem and backups in the filesystem is wrong…
Indexed filesystem is a strategy for launching TC and the security will not be more, will be few.
A cracker may want to read your database and he will have a good vision of your files. But this I said will be done probably also by Microsoft with the TC technology.
Backups in the filesystem consume only disk-space, if backup can be done also with a normal FS, why must be done in FS? This is a stupid idea, is without reason…
And probably linux and *BSD will don’t read this WinFS
of this mysterious and posticipated Longhorn.
Microsoft ,you implemented IPv6 from FreeBSD? Don’t you?
I can agree on some of the arguments you made in your post (like that MS is hampered by its backwards compatibility), but please use different language in the future. Otherwise I might believe you are just a bored adolescing teenager.
LoL. There is a saying in India, kutte bhonkte hain to haathi apni chaal nahi badalta…in english it translates to: Elephant doesn’t give a damn due to barking dogs.
Microsoft is what sells today. Linux’s desktop dream is already in dust. I don’t think Linux is a bad OS, but it doesn’t have a focus.
Microsoft has proven record of getting things done. See the time from DOS till date, its leading. Why? Ever tried to think honestly?
People wanted stability and Microsoft gave rock-solid Win-2003 OS. Now people want security and customized OS, and i assure you…Microsoft will deliver this one too. I believe they are leaders in the field because they don’t just say but they do also. They do what people want not like Linux folks who do what they want to do and not what people want.
>People wanted stability and Microsoft gave rock-solid Win-2003 OS. Now people want security and >customized OS, and i assure you…Microsoft will deliver this one too.
And what about us people that actually expected an OS to be secure, stable and modular by design??
Perhaps MS delivers, but why are the so late?
Read this article an you know what I mean…
Microsoft is trapped in a virtual bind
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=24060
<p>They do what people want not like Linux folks who do what they want to do and not what people want.</p>With Linux, they do what they want, and the people get what they want because they are the same. The devlopers, bug trackers, etc are the users!
Actually, MS seems to be coming round to the idea of hypervisors: the virtualisation tech they’re now proposing for Longhorn is hypervisor-based and will use the new hardware support from AMD and Intel.
It’s not clear what’ll happen to Virtual PC, although I imagine they’ll leverage its device emulation to support their hypervisor.
Note also that the hypervisor scheme proposed by MS (and also used by Xen and by IBM pSeries) is to have a minimal hypervisor but handle devices in a guest OS. This still increases your trusted software base a bit, so for really high reliability you’d want some means of addressing this. Xen has features for splitting this functionality out into multiple (restartable) virtual machines – these features are going to be extended in future. It’ll be interesting to see if MS come up with something similar (beyond the promise of running a minimal Windows in the parent partition).
OSNews is always very good for including hypervisor news. http://www.virtualization.info also has some need hypervisor news on it.
“Microsoft is what sells today. Linux’s desktop dream is already in dust. I don’t think Linux is a bad OS, but it doesn’t have a focus.”
It really amazes me how little people know about the Linux desktops (GNOME/KDE) they are so far ahead in features to XP. Of course the next Windows OS will have features Linux desktops have had for years (want a list?)
Microsoft will claim the next big thing in security in Longhorn is to not be administrator by default, of course people will believe them.
Only 50% of the comments here mention Linux. Shouldn’t we be aiming for 90%? Come on guys, pick up the pace. Linux Linux Linux. What was the article about again?
“Microsoft has proven record of getting things done”
On the contrary, they have a proven track record of out manuevering the competition by whatever means necessary. OS quality has nothing to do with it, it’s simply what comes with the machine.
You Windows fanatics really need to quit deluding yourselves in to thinking that MS is #1 in marketshare because they’re the best when they’re clearly not.
Hark:
>> You Windows fanatics really need to quit deluding yourselves in to thinking that MS is #1 in marketshare because they’re the best when they’re clearly not.
But they did gain the market share in the first place, and that wasn’t by sucking.
Linux may be technically superior in some arenas. But overall when it comes to user experience, software support, etc.. Windows is still on top.
MS does indeed now have catchup to play. At the time of XP, I believe Windows was still superior almost all around for the desktop. But that was 4 years ago and they’ve done little. They’ve given linux the chance to catch up in some areas, and do better in others. But with Longhorn, expect some of those things to again fall to MS. Windows is here to stay for at least another 5 years unless they majorly fuck up Longhorn. If avalon is as good as it should be, .NET starts to be used in conjunction with Indigo and XAML.. you will see Windows sticking around for a long time.
I also think Windows will stick around for a long time, having longhorn be moduler and major parts of it using .NET and managed code will make it more secure and stable, also they can add in new features faster and cheaper after this point.
I also remember reading that the next version of Windows after longhorn will have even more newer/re-writen code and use .NET even more then longhorn to make it more secure and more stable.
It’s true that they are late on this stuff, but once they get going they could very well be on top for quite some time.
Only time will tell and how good longhorn really is.
I’ll wait and see this time next year.
Well you would expect Longhorn to be great and nothing less but by the time it’s released Linux(first userspace OS)/Mac-OS-X still will have features Longhorn lacks. You only need to look as XP the realize that.
The Mac-OS-X just makes Microsofts OS look silly and old, which it is anyway. It seems people will have a bad memory when they buy Longhorn but I hope it’s sales crash compared to XP.