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Microsoft The Almighty Buck Linux

Microsoft Sponsors Linux Foundation Event 134

Posted by timothy from the not-entirely-new dept.
darthcamaro writes "There was a time when the Linux Foundation wouldn't take money from Microsoft. That time is not today — Microsoft is listed as a Gold Sponsor of the LinuxCon Europe event, paying $20,000 for the privilege and also getting a guaranteed speaking slot as a result."
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Microsoft Sponsors Linux Foundation Event More

Microsoft Sponsors Linux Foundation Event

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  • Mitt Romney sponsors Obama's campaign victory. Seems anti-antithetical for MS to host anything involving Linux... what's the catch?

    • Re:In other news.. (Score:5, Informative)

      by joaosantos ( 1519241 ) on Tuesday November 06, 2012 @11:25AM (#41894599) Homepage
      HyperV. Microsoft wants to sell it.

      • I run Windows guests on Linux hosts. I cannot imagine any reason I would want to flip that around.

        • Re:In other news.. (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Mitchell314 ( 1576581 ) on Tuesday November 06, 2012 @11:39AM (#41894789)
          Hardware stress tests? :P
        • HyperV is a bare metal hypervisor, it doesn't run on Windows. I don't know how good it is because I've never used it.

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
          Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Like it or not with so many major subsystems constantly being futzed with drivers break a LOT more often on Linux than they do on Windows.

            i'm sorry you have so much trouble. i've never had as much trouble with drivers in linux as in windows, but each to their own i guess.

            the problem with your argument is that anyone would be forgiven for thinking with all the great things you mention about windows (compared to linux) it was a better OS. all it really means it that windows has no excuse for its driver fuck ups... it certainly doesn't make them less likely.

            there's good reason why datacenters are full of linux servers.... and it has less

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Wolfrider ( 856 )

            --You're a Friend, so pls take this in the spirit that it's intended. ;-)

            --I have had trouble with the last couple of Linux Mint revs and driver regressions when trying to upgrade on the same hardware. Right now I can only run Mint 11 on my 6-core AMD box, or else I don't have sound ++ maybe some video / screen saver stability problems. Very disappointing. Although, there are quite a number of Debian-derived distros out there, and I haven't really tried poking around to see what might work because of tim

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Hyper-V - while Microsoft would love for everyone to run Windows Server everywhere they know that isn't going to happen. They also see the virtualization trend and they want to have Hyper-V dominate that market. They are a bit behind vmware and possibly KVM yet, but they do have a solid product they want to push.

      I'm assuming almost everything they talk about will be how you can virtualize your existing Linux machines on to Hyper-V.

      • Re:In other news.. (Score:5, Informative)

        by LVSlushdat ( 854194 ) on Tuesday November 06, 2012 @11:35AM (#41894731)

        I signed up for a 90 day demo Azure account, just to see how it compares to Amazon AWS, and was surprised as hell to see them offering Linux vms.. So just for giggles, spun one up, and sure enough, it was CentOS. They're pretty darn cheap on the demo though, I left the vm running and set a reminder to kill it before the 90 days was up, and about 30 days into the demo, I get an email telling me the account was getting close to running out of the "free" specs and I'd need to add a credit card for charges to continue.. This, mind you, on a vm thats just the os/normal services, nothing else running.. I went ahead and cancelled the demo.. Will stick to AWS and their free tier... I've had both a Win2003 AND an Ubuntu vm running there on the free tier for nearly six months, and both are actually runnning some remote services that I had been running on my home servers..

    • Re:In other news.. (Score:4, Funny)

      by zrbyte ( 1666979 ) on Tuesday November 06, 2012 @11:25AM (#41894611)

      Not much, but there is a cold-wave going through Hell.

    • Re:In other news.. (Score:5, Informative)

      by OzPeter ( 195038 ) on Tuesday November 06, 2012 @11:26AM (#41894615)

      Mitt Romney sponsors Obama's campaign victory.

      Seems anti-antithetical for MS to host anything involving Linux... what's the catch?

      Well as per this article Microsoft is offering Linux on its Azure platform [pcworld.com], so its quite reasonable for a major vendor of Linux services to want to be part of a Linux conference (and I had to stop myself from laughing out loud when I wrote that)

  • Nope, not April 1st. I'm curious what Microsoft has to say. No doubt it is to praise Microsoft, but I wonder if they are going to positively speak about Open Source and Linux

  • When is Winux coming out? LOL

  • Well, linux brings them alot of cash... Android-flavored

  • Azure (Score:4, Informative)

    by zmooc ( 33175 ) <zmooc@zmooc.DEGASnet minus painter> on Tuesday November 06, 2012 @11:22AM (#41894559) Homepage

    Azure (the MS cloud) now supports Linux images. They probably want some attention for that.

  • Why all the corporate sponsorship press? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Tuesday November 06, 2012 @11:27AM (#41894645)

    Hey SlashDot, how about some "News for Nerds" sometime soon? This is two days in a row with an announcement about some large corporate entity throwing money into a marketing pot. If we wanted this kind of news, we'd be on the Businessweek site right now.

  • Microsoft understands they will loose dominating position forever. And why not sell Office on Linux?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ignacio ( 1465 )

      They wouldn't have to (lose dominance) if they took a few steps:

      1) Complete wine
      2) Port explorer, the common controls, and COM
      3) Sell it all bundled together

      But as they say, "Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall".

  • Money is stronger then convictions. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Nyder ( 754090 ) on Tuesday November 06, 2012 @11:33AM (#41894709) Journal

    MS has been an enemy of linux since the beginning. Taking their money now just shows that Linux can now be bought off.

  • if you can't beat 'em... (Score:3)

    by Type44Q ( 1233630 ) on Tuesday November 06, 2012 @11:36AM (#41894753)
    if you can't 'em, join 'em... and sabotage from within.

  • Just in case anyone doesn't understand (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Tuesday November 06, 2012 @11:53AM (#41895023) Homepage Journal
    Linux Foundation is an organization of really large businesses. They currently pay the salary of Linux Torvalds and a handful of other programmers, but they are first and foremost an organization of really large businesses. Many of the businesses are not particularly friendly to Linux. Most of them don't deserve your trust. A number of them produce proprietary drivers which run in the kernel, against the licensing of Linux itself.

    • Hey Bruce, nothing but respect, but if "proprietary drivers" loaded into the kernel is the only way I can get my work done, it's kinda hard for me to jump on the "binary blobs are evil!" bandwagon...

      • Re:Just in case anyone doesn't understand (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Tuesday November 06, 2012 @12:45PM (#41895817) Homepage Journal

        Hi Chibi Merrow,

        Why are proprietary drivers the only way you can get your work done? I'm not asking you so much as I am asking you to tell me why it happened to you. It's probably going to be something like company X wouldn't make open drivers. And then tell me if you really think that company X is protecting some precious intellectual property and if they would actually be damaged if it was released as Open Source.

        Very often the driver only works on their specific hardware, and there isn't really any chance of financial damage from opening the driver.

        • But then, for some of us, we run Linux and/or use other Open Source software because of cost, stability, feature sets, and the fact that it meets our needs. While the Free part is nice, it is an ideal, and if using a binary blob (that has never caused a system issue for me) on my desktop system so I can play Xonotic, Urban Terror, the original Quake, etc. in 3d with decent frame rates is what is required, I personally don't mind. But then, that is *my* needs/wants/desires, for my machines.

          If you use Linux

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by HiThere ( 15173 )

            From my point of view, "binary blobs in the kernel are evil" is a form of future-proofing. It limits the changes that the kernel developers can make without breaking them. When you don't understand what something is doing, it's hard to manuver around it.

            OTOH, I will admit that I also have a sidgeon of ideological bias. But I also have a large lump of practicality. I've had too many systems die under me because of something proprietary that nobody understood or could fix, and which the prior manufacturer

          • I have 3D hardware here too. It has wonderful frame rates and drives a whole lot of monitors from just one card. It runs on the open driver. I was just careful what I bought. Please try that next time.

            There will come a day when that binary doesn't run with modern kernels, and the manufacturer has gone on to other things and no longer supports it.

            • Certainly will... but my current vid card (since that is the blob I referenced earlier and you are now) is a 5 year old nvidia card... when it no longer meets my needs, I certainly will be replacing it, and open source-ness of the drivers will take a large part of the accounting... but when I bought it was "do i want it working and a blob, or just basic 2d support and open"...

        • Well, in my case, it's nVidia.

          And from them (and their proxies), the explanations I have generally heard have been:

          1) There are things in the code that they do not have sufficient rights to release in an open manner.
          2) There are features of the "graphics hardware" implemented in software as part of the driver, and they believe these features give them a competitive advantage which would be lost by opening up the code.
          3) There are workarounds for hardware defects in the code, and releasing them would embarra

          • Hm. I worked for 19 years in film, 12 of them at Pixar. I am aware that Intel graphics are not a high-performance solution at this time. What is ATI lacking today in cards that run properly with open drivers?

            Thanks

            Bruce

            • I work in Air Traffic Control simulation, primarily Control Tower and Cockpit simulators. We've got a custom deferred renderer for very complicated lighting conditions... Like night time around an airport with literally thousands of dynamic lights.

              In the past, our shaders just didn't work on ATI cards under Linux. Or they fell back to software mode. Or they gave unacceptable performance. Haven't tried them recently, but any time I look into the current quality level of AMD's open source Radeon drivers, the

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Belial6 ( 794905 )
        Something being evil, and the only way to get your work done are not mutually exclusive.

  • Ask MS Sucessful partners first! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I can see it now... a bright future for linux, walking side by side with MS.

    Just ask Nokia how they became what they are now

    • what part of linux can walk side by side with microsoft? its not as if "linux" is a company.

      if microsoft buys out canonical, millions of ubuntu users may defect to debian or redhat etc.

      even if microsoft somehow gained control of the mainline linux kernel, it would merely be forked (same as what happened when openoffice was forked to make libreoffice when shitty smells were wafting out of the oracle offices).

      and microsoft has too many commercial operating system competitors (google, apple, redhat, c

  • Awesome (Score:3)

    by jones_supa ( 887896 ) on Tuesday November 06, 2012 @11:59AM (#41895113)
    Imagine all the suckers who live in an alternate universe where they joke "imagine a bizarre messed up alternate reality where Duke Nukem Forever is released, Microsoft would actually sponsor a Linux event, and so on".

  • The Fox (Score:3)

    by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Tuesday November 06, 2012 @12:09PM (#41895239)
    The fox is now in the chicken coop.

  • For those a bit slow on the uptake (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "So you want to love those conferences to death. I’ve killed at least two Mac conferences. First there was the Mac App Developers Conference. I was on the Board of Directors of the Mac App Developers Association long ago, and after I left I worked to try to turn it into a cross-platform developers conference, and I did. I managed to make it.. their last conference was very cross-platforn, both Windows and Macintosh, which of course turned off their Macintosh audience; half of the conference was irrele

  • Don't be so surprised. Microsoft has done more for open source than Apple ever has.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by imikem ( 767509 )

      And they've done more TO open source than Apple ever has. What's your point?

      • Really? Like what?

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by imikem ( 767509 )

          Really?

          Does "SCO" ring any bells? Assertion of patents on FAT? Pressuring OEMs not to offer Linux preloaded? Munging Internet Explorer to make open source browsers look bad?

          I could go on, but I have better things to do this evening and very little interest in pursuing some pointless argument. Feel free to hate Apple, indulge amnesia or whatever turns your crank. All these companies can be expected to do what they think will help their bottom line.

          For the record, I'm glad MS is showing signs of playing nicer

  • I can't wait to see them booed off stage
  • They're porting surface to Linux w00t, it'll probably be on Ubuntu first though shux ;-)
  • I don't even think Microsoft looks at the events they sponsor. I can't tell you how many tech events I've been to where Microsoft was listed as a "Gold" sponsor. The last few were small ones in a 100 person conference room and nobody from Microsoft was even there. They just paid the x number of dollars to get their name listed as a sponsor for the event. What is $20,000 to a company that charges $30,000 [microsoftstore.com] for a single-processor edition of SQL Server 2008 Enterprise?

  • There's no exit door on the Microsoft tent!

  • Microsoft sponsored POSSCON [posscon.org] and had a keynote speaker. The organizers were a bit embarrassed by how the crowd (and even other speakers) treated him (and Microsoft) given how much money Microsoft had provided - even providing a very nice lunch. They didn't sponsor the following year, for which we were thankful.

    Now the keynote speaker himself should have been quite embarassed too as he kept on talking about how Microsoft was all about standards and helping people, etc; how they're integrated open source, a

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      cynical.

      The cynicism was completely warranted a decade-plus-change ago. It isn't >>as much anymore. Just because a group of people put forth something as truth and agree among themselves that it is, isn't proof or truth. At worst, it's a bunch of like-minded haters agreeing on something (shocking concept). At best, it's people speaking more out of emotion than logic. While most Nerds are certainly incapable of change, not all nerds are that way. I prefer to keep an open mind at all times.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        It is still warranted. They haven't done ANYTHING positive that comes even close to approaching the negative things they have done in the past. The first that comes to mind is the way they stacked the committees on the Word processor format standard. And got a totally unusable standard mandated. Even though it includes microsoft proprietary features, even Microsoft hasn't managed (or chosed?) to implement it. (I'm not counting partial implementations. Anyone can do those. Even an ASCII text file woul

        • I guess, if they don't do anything vile for a decade, I might sort of trust them even if they don't start doing positive things. I give that a 0.00,000,000,000,001% chance. At most.

          You don't count UEFI or should i reset the clock?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by HiThere ( 15173 )

            I don't count it yet, because I don't yet understand it. I suspect that it will reset the clock.

  • Linux is embedded in a great many products in the world and Microsoft collects a lot of money in license fees from those installations. A lot more than 20,000 I'd say.

  • Honestly, the LinuxCon is a completely insignificant conference in Europe where US corporations celebrate themselves. I don't mind Microsoft to sponsor the event.

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