News Briefs – 05/24/2021

> It’s possible the next version of Windows will basically be a proprietary desktop environment on top of a proprietary fork of the Linux kernel,

I’ve seen that claim… but the basic Windows NT guts are at least as solid as Linux. Dave Cutler used everything he learned from doing VMS for DEC; he was an experienced minicomputer OS designer, and he had Microsoft’s OS/2 developers as his original core group. They had learned proper coding practices (sometimes unwillingly) from the IBM mainframers they were working with. Microsoft did have more than its share of problems making ntfs work, and I’ve never seen any explanation as to why… but I don’t remember any problems with memory leaks, scheduler problems, etc.

Now, the “Windows” GUI shell, which MS maintains are integral to Windows… that’s a bug-infested nightmare, with hacks and thunks going back to the 16-bit days, with at least four different APIs, some of which are deprecated but still used, others official but version-dependent, and a whole lot of undocumenter kewl-hacker-d00dery. Yeah, they could graft that onto Linux using their POSIX layer… but the NT guts run just fine, and that’s all paid for, and there’s always the opportunity to add “undocumented features” to give special capabilities to Microsoft application software (a practice which go back at least to DOS 2.0) or sabotage software Microsoft disapproves of (as with MS adding a check for Windows 3.0 to prevent it from running on OS/2 or DR-DOS)

NT, Linux, GNU HURD, Plan 9, BSD, Darwin… they’re all old and stable and do pretty much the same thing, interfacing between the hardware and the application software. Down there in the boiler room, it’s just managing processes and schlepping bytes between I/O and storage devices.

Yeah, Microsoft could get rid of the programmers it has assigned to maintaining the NT kernel that underlies Windows 10, but switching to an outside kernel – any of them, not just Linux – wouldn’t be free. Once they start selling it as a commercial product, the have liabilities, particularly since many of their customers have their own courts and their own police. Maintaining their own kernel means they won’t get blindsided by someone slipstreaming back doors into open source code (as has been tried with Linux) or compromising the development crew (as has been tried against Linus Torvalds.)

I’m sure someone can make a spreadsheet showing how Microsoft would save a bazillion dollars by using someone else’s kernel… but I don’t think it would work out that way in real life. Though I wouldn’t take the stance that it would never happen; corporations make counterproductive or suicidal business decisions all the time.

Lowell Houser says,”…I always thought that there really was some truth to the Microsoft story regarding IBM licensing DOS from them just because honestly it makes sense because American corporations at the time were devoutly short sided and arrogant…”

I agree and I also knew his Mom helped him get the contract. At the time IBM was building the PC they expressly wanted something put together with off the self parts very fast and outsourcing the OS was a way to do it. Other OSes were available for IBM PC’s but they were more expensive. Gates outsmarted them and constantly tried to improve. He also used the trick that allowed deep discounts for PC makers on OSes “if” every single computer they sold only shipped microsoft OS. By the time this was banned by the justice department he had a monopoly.

There’s other of what I believe is skullduggery on microsoft’s part with Linux. I believe microsoft crippiled liniux.

I noticed this, finally, when a OS I was thinking of using PCBSD changed it’s name to TrueOS, then TridentOS then…to my total confusion and astonishment they dropped using FreeBSD as a base and moved the whole TridentOS base to Void Linux??????? This has got to be one of the most dumbfounding things I’ve ever seen ever or maybe not[they had been at it for decades and had a very good desktop BSD complete system].

I remembered that the only thing Linux lacked was a good standard desktop and it could crush microsoft and they almost had it twice. Back in the day there was a linux desktop called “Enlightenment” it was way, way ahead of windows. It did all kinds of stuff that you now see on windows and that Apple uses. It also used very low resources and was fast. Faster than windows. All it needed was a really serious work on bugs cause it definitely had some but the basics were there. If the bugs were worked out I could have easily seen it as becoming THE linux deskltop which would have a compunding efffect. Bt all of sudden when they are almist there they decide to rewite the whole damn thing for like 10 years. ?????? The whole fades away.

Now at the time I thought it was just crazy hackers that made this looking for perfection but no doubt the lack of progress killed it.’

Then again later on Gnome had finally got a really good desktop and while it wasn’t as exciting as Enlightenment it was very functional and then all of a sudden they rewrite it so it’s damn near unusable without massive tweaking and they remove a vast majority of tools and functions used to personalize it. And this goes on for years and years. Once again I think they are just nutty free software people.

The last one, the DesktopBSD one is where I finally thought that there had to be some deeper problem.

If you are microsoft and you are making billions what would it cost you to pay off the say top five or six people on these projects. Most of time it’s one, maybe two very good hackers that keep the thing going and since it’s free, poverty is a hazard. What if microsoft got a lawyer to talk to them [non-disclosure agreement first] and offer them $500K a year to bring it to a halt. Couldn’t cost more than $10 million at the max and they make that before breakfast.

I bet this is true. The BSD case sealed it for me. Why would people spend decades working on something to abandon it to some unknown thing? Why would people take a big fast moving successful desktop and completely destroy it? Because they were paid to I believe.

I of course have no hard evidence for this at all and I bet the only ones that know are the top Microsoft people, their lawyers and the programmers.