Microsoft announced it is joining The Linux Foundation?

[Valeri Galtsev]

On Fri, November 18, 2016 5:44 am, Matthew Seaman wrote:
> On 2016/11/18 10:32, Polytropon wrote:
>> On Thu, 17 Nov 2016 20:35:36 -0300, SOUL_OF_ROOT 55 wrote:
>>> Can this be?  Microsoft announced it is joining The Linux Foundation?
>>
>> They are prividing a certain sum of money, and that amount
>> makes them a platinum member, not more, not less. Basically
>> anoyone who donates $500,000 annually can be a platinum member
>> of The Linux Foundation. In case of MICROS~1, this is probably
>> an attempt to re-gain "developers' share", a facet of "the
>> new MICROS~1" thathopes people forget security nightmares,
>> forced updates, patent extortion and vendor lock-in... but
>> who really knows what happens inside MICROS~1... ;-)
>
> Actually, Microsoft's motivation here is Microsoft Azure -- they've
> spend a huge amount of money on datacentres and servers and all the
> other infrastructure required for setting up a global cloud presence,
> and now they are very keen to encourage lots of people to use it (and
> pay them money for the privilege, of course.)
>
> Since their principle target market is the Enterprise, and they aim to
> be able to migrate just about any Enterprise computing system from
> dedicated hardware to their cloud, that means they need to support just
> about all of the different OSes that a variety of different Enterprise
> setups could be using.  So they now support a lot of OpenSource OSes.
> Which includes both FreeBSD 10.x and pfsense by the way -- as well as
> all the usual Linux suspects.
>
> Oh, and when I say 'support' that means that you can phone up Microsoft
> about your FreeBSD or pfsense related problems on your Azure VMs, and
> Microsoft are contractually obliged to help you out.  They did a
> presentation about all this at the last BSDCan.  Plus there are two
> FreeBSD src committers who work for Microsoft,

Jeez, the last scares a hell out of me! It looks quite similar to another
case: working for RedHat guy (everybody knows the name, so I skip that)
committed everybody into systemd, firewalld and friends. Once related
stuff has infested the kernel tree, you have only two choices: either get
along, or get away. (Luckily in Linux case, I fled servers to FreeBSD long
before the above happened. Just couldn't take the need of reboot once
every 45 days on average...)

Valeri


> and who are doing a lot
> of work making sure the Hyper-V drivers etc. are all working and
> performant.  There have been reports of a FreeBSD VM on azure achieving
> 37 Gb/s on 40 Gb/s hardware for instance.
>
> Microsoft in its aspect as the global cloud computing company is really
> quite different from Microsoft in its aspect as the PC desktop operating
> system company.
>
> 	Cheers,
>
> 	Matthew
>
>
>


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247
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