Microsoft

January 2019, #294: The Distributions Issue

Bryan Lunduke — Wed, 02 Jan 2019 15:30:00 +0000

Do you remember your first distro?

The first version of Linux I truly used, for any length of time, was back at the end of the 1990s—in Ye Olden Times, when 56k modems, 3.5" floppies and VGA CRT monitors reigned supreme.

Linux itself had been a thing for a number of years by this point—with both SUSE (then known as the gloriously mixed-case and punctuation-filled S.u.S.E.) and Red Hat doing good business supporting it—when I decided to really give this "Free" operating system a try.

Because I'm a nerd. And that's what we do.

I remember the day well. It was cold. It was rainy. And I was taking an extended lunch break from my job at Microsoft (seriously). My days—and, all too often, nights—spent testing Windows NT 5 (before it was renamed Windows 2000) had taken a toll. I had reached peak "burn out".

After a mildly rejuvenating, two-hour long, burger-eating (and venting about our job) session with a co-worker, we made our way to the big-box computer store close to Microsoft's main campus. Once inside, we bee-lined it for the Operating System section (this was back when computer stores had rows upon rows of actual boxes that contained actual physical media, which, in turn, contained actual software).

Several versions of Windows were on display, and, lo and behold, right there next to them, was S.u.S.E. Linux—in a box. I grabbed it immediately. It was heavy. There were several CDs inside along with a manual (which would turn out to be necessary simply to get the system to boot).

Fifteen minutes later, we were back in my office installing Linux on one of my little Dell towers.

That's right. My first full-time Linux machine? A Microsoft, company-issued work computer. This was my way of "sticking it to the man"—and boy did it feel good.

Were there problems with my first foray into Linux? You bet. The sound card didn't work. Getting an X Server running (with any sort of GUI) was a mildly mystifying process. And, heck, just getting the darn thing to boot took the better part of an afternoon. But, even with those challenges, I was in love.

Thus, my 20-year long hobby of "installing every Linux distribution I can get my grubby little hands on" was born—right there on Microsoft's main campus, using funds I earned from my job at Microsoft, on Microsoft-owned hardware, using Microsoft-supplied electricity and company time.

Shh. Don't tell Ballmer.

From that point onward, one of the things about Linux that always has made me smile is the wide variety of distributions out there in the world. There seems to be one custom-made for every man, woman and child on planet Earth.

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Reinventing Software Development and Availability with Open Source: an Interview with One of Microsoft Azure's Lead Architects

Petros Koutoupis — Fri, 07 Dec 2018 13:00:00 +0000

by Petros Koutoupis

Microsoft was founded in 1975—that's 43 years ago and a ton of history. Up until the last decade, the company led a campaign against the Open Source and Free Software movements, and although it may have slowed the opposition, it did not bring it to an end. In fact, it emboldened its supporters to push the open-source agenda even harder. Fast-forward to the present, and open-source technologies run nearly everything—mobile devices, cloud services, televisions and more.

It wasn't until Satya Nadella took the helm (2014) that the large ship was steered around. Almost overnight, Microsoft embraced everything Linux and open source. It eventually joined The Linux Foundation and, more recently, the Open Invention Network. At first, it seemed too good to be true, but here we are, a few years after these events, and Microsoft continues to support the Open Source community and adopt many of its philosophies. But why?

I wanted to find out and ended up reaching out to Microsoft. John Gossman, a lead architect working on Azure, spent a bit of time with me to share both his thoughts and experiences as they relate to open source.

Petros Koutoupis: Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?

John Gossman: I'm a long-time developer with 30 years of industry experience. I have been with Microsoft for 18 of those years. At Microsoft, I have had the opportunity to touch a little bit of everything—from Windows to other graphical applications, and more recently, that is, for the last 6 years, I have worked on Azure. My primary focus is on developer experience. I know this area very well and much of it comes from the Open Source world. I spend a lot of time looking at Linux workloads while also working very closely with Linux vendors. More recently (at least two years now), I stepped into a very interesting role as a member on the board of The Linux Foundation.

PK: Microsoft hasn't always had the best of relationships with anything open-source software (OSS)-related—that is, until Satya Nadella stepped to his current role as CEO. Why the change? Why has Microsoft changed its position?

JG: I have spent a lot of time thinking about this very question. Now, I cannot speak for the entire company, but I believe it all goes back to the fact that Microsoft was and still is a company focused on software developers. Remember, when Microsoft first started, it built and sold a BASIC interpreter. Later on, the company delivered Visual Studio and many more products. The core mission in the Microsoft culture always has been to enable software developers.

For a while, Windows and Office overshadowed the developer frameworks, losing touch with those core developers, but with the introduction of Azure, the focus has since been reverted back to software developers, and those same developers love open source.

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Ubuntu Desktop in the Hyper-V Gallery, an Interview with Canonical and Microsoft

Petros Koutoupis — Fri, 26 Oct 2018 13:08:08 +0000

by Petros Koutoupis

Late last month, Canonical made an astonishing announcement: an optimized image of Ubuntu Desktop is now available from Microsoft's Hyper-V gallery. This wonderful new feature is primarily intended for Windows 10 Pro desktop users needing to run Ubuntu Desktop guest virtual machines.

Although the announcement itself came as a bit of a surprise, even more so when you consider the long tumultuous history between both Microsoft and Linux, it does, however, indicate that times (and the company) have been changing. In recent years, Microsoft has been making a concerted effort to embrace open source and open-source technologies.

The announcement did leave me with a few questions, so I took the opportunity to sit down with Will Cooke, the Engineering Director for Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical, and Sarah Cooley, Program Manager at Microsoft.

Petros Koutoupis: Please introduce yourselves and describe your primary role both at your company and for this project.

Will Cooke: I am the director of engineering for Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical. Our team is responsible for putting together every Ubuntu Desktop release, selecting which packages and which features we're going to ship, making sure that each release is of the right quality and working with partners on projects around Ubuntu Desktop—for example, OEMs shipping Ubuntu Desktop on their hardware and, in this instance, Microsoft, to improve the virtual guest experience for Ubuntu Desktop on Windows 10. For this project, I worked with our internal teams to line up the requirements for supporting the enhanced session and to make sure the features we needed would be included in 18.04 LTS and with Microsoft engineers and product managers to make sure we were always in sync on the latest progress.

Sarah Cooley: I am a program manager on the virtualization team at Microsoft. We have been working closely with the developer platform team in Microsoft, Will Cooke's team in Canonical, and xRDP's community to improve the Linux virtual machine experience on Windows 10—starting with Ubuntu. To provide the experience you see today, Hyper-V developers contributed to xRDP to make sure open source communities can run Linux virtual machines in enhanced session mode while working with Canonical to provide all of the tools necessary for Ubuntu to run well with Hyper-V with no additional setup. Outside this effort, I also work on the Windows Subsystem for Linux and Linux containers on Windows.

PK: Why Hyper-V and why Ubuntu Desktop?

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What Does "Ethical" AI Mean for Open Source?

Glyn Moody — Mon, 20 Aug 2018 11:30:00 +0000

by Glyn Moody

Artificial intelligence is a threat—and an opportunity—for open source.

It would be an understatement to say that artificial intelligence (AI) is much in the news these days. It's widely viewed as likely to usher in the next big step-change in computing, but a recent interesting development in the field has particular implications for open source. It concerns the rise of "ethical" AI.

In October 2016, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the European Parliament's Committee on Legal Affairs and, in the UK, the House of Commons' Science and Technology Committee, all released reports on how to prepare for the future of AI, with ethical issues being an important component of those reports. At the beginning of last year, the Asilomar AI Principles were published, followed by the Montreal Declaration for a Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence, announced in November 2017.

Abstract discussions of what ethical AI might or should mean became very real in March 2018. It was revealed then that Google had won a share of the contract for the Pentagon's Project Maven, which uses artificial intelligence to interpret huge quantities of video images collected by aerial drones in order to improve the targeting of subsequent drone strikes. When this became known, it caused a firestorm at Google. Thousands of people there signed an internal petition addressed to the company's CEO, Sundar Pichai, asking him to cancel the project. Hundreds of researchers and academics sent an open letter supporting them, and some Google employees resigned in protest.

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Why the Failure to Conquer the Desktop Was Great for GNU/Linux

Glyn Moody — Mon, 06 Aug 2018 11:30:00 +0000

by Glyn Moody

AI: open source's next big win.

Canonical recently launched Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. It's an important release. In part, that's because Canonical will support it for five years, making it one of the relatively rare LTS products in Ubuntu's history. Ubuntu 18.04 also marks a high-profile return to GNOME as the default desktop, after a few years of controversial experimentation with Unity. The result is regarded by many as the best desktop Ubuntu so far (that's my view too, for what it's worth). And yet, the emphasis at launch lay elsewhere. Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical and founder of Ubuntu, said:

Multi-cloud operations are the new normal. Boot-time and performance-optimised images of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on every major public cloud make it the fastest and most efficient OS for cloud computing, especially for storage and compute-intensive tasks like machine learning.

The bulk of the official 18.04 LTS announcement is about Ubuntu's cloud computing features. On the main web site, Ubuntu claims to be "The standard OS for cloud computing", citing (slightly old) research that shows "70% of public cloud workloads and 54% of OpenStack clouds" use it. Since Canonical is a privately held company, it doesn't publish a detailed breakdown of its operations, just a basic summary. That means it's hard to tell just how successful the cloud computing strategy is proving. But, the fact that Shuttleworth is now openly talking about an IPO—not something to be undertaken lightly—suggests that there is enough good news to convince investors to throw plenty of money at Canonical when the prospectus spells out how the business is doing.

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Opinion: GitHub vs GitLab

Matt Lee — Mon, 16 Jul 2018 11:30:00 +0000

by Matt Lee

Free software deserves free tools, not Microsoft-owned GitHub.

So, Microsoft bought GitHub, and many people are confused or worried. It's not a new phenomenon when any large company buys any smaller company, and people are right to be worried, although I argue that their timing is wrong. Like Microsoft, GitHub has made some useful contributions to free and open-source software, but let's not forget that GitHub's main product is proprietary software. And, it's not just some innocuous web service either; GitHub makes and sells a proprietary software package you can download and run on your own server called GitHub Enterprise (GHE).

Let's remember how we got here. BitMover made a tool called BitKeeper, a proprietary version control system that allowed free-of-charge licenses to free software projects. In 2002, the Linux kernel switched to using BitKeeper for its version control, although some notable developers made the noble choice to refuse to use the proprietary program. Many others did not, and for a number of years, kernel development was hampered by BitKeeper's restrictive noncommercial licenses.

In 2005, Andrew Tridgell, working at OSDL, developed a client that bypassed this restriction, and as a result, BitMover removed licenses to BitKeeper from all OSDL employees—including Linus Torvalds. Eventually, all non-commercial licenses were stopped, and new licenses included clauses preventing the development of alternative version control systems. As a result of this, two new projects were born: Mercurial and Git. Created in a few short weeks in 2005, Git quickly became the version control system for Linux development.

Proprietary version control tools aren't common in free software development, but proprietary collaboration websites have been around for some time. One of the earliest collaboration websites still around today is Sourceforge. Sourceforge was created in the late 1990s by VA Software, and the code behind the project was released in 2000.

Quickly this situation changed, and the project was shuttered and then became Sourceforge Enterprise Edition, a proprietary software package. The code that ran Sourceforge was forked into GNU Savannah (later Savane) and GForge, and it's still use today by both the GNU Project and CERN. When I last wrote about this problem, almost exactly ten years ago, Canonical's ambitious Launchpad service still was proprietary, something later remedied in 2009. Gitorious was created in 2010 and was for a number of years the Git hosting platform for the discerning free software developer, as the code for Gitorious was fully public and licensed under favorable terms for the new wave of AGPL-licensed projects that followed the FSF's Franklin Street Statement. Gitorious, also, is sadly no longer with us.

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Microsoft Buys GitHub: Three Weeks Later

Marcel Gagné — Tue, 26 Jun 2018 11:30:00 +0000

by Marcel Gagné

I heard that Microsoft would be buying GitHub just a couple days before it happened when Carlie Fairchild at Linux Journal told me about it. I replied to the news with a solid, “Get! Out!” Needless to say, I had my doubts. As someone who remembers all too well the “Embrace, extend and extinguish" days of Microsoft, the news of this latest embrace did, however briefly, bring back those old memories. When I was asked what I thought, I answered that the optics were bad.A lot of years have passed since, back in 2001, Steve Ballmer declared Linux to be a cancer. These days, Microsoft loves Linux. It says so right on its website. Two years ago, Steve Ballmer also proclaimed his love for Linux. In 2018, Microsoft has its own distribution that it uses in its Azure cloud. Microsoft includes several different flavors of Linux in its app store (the Windows Subsystem for Linux), all of which can be installed on Windows 10. Microsoft develops for Linux. Heck, Microsoft even contributes to the Linux kernel.

The reason I felt the optics were bad is that Microsoft has spent the last few years going out of its way to paint itself as a friend to Linux and open source. This, I thought, can only be seen as a bad move. Well, it’s been three weeks, more or less, since the the acquisition became official, to the tune of $7.5 billion US. What happened?

For starters, Jim Zemlin, the Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, praised the Microsoft acquisition of GifHub, suggesting that it could be a good thing for everyone. Former open-source star and the new CEO of GitHub, Nat Friedman, did an AMA on Reddit to reassure developers of open-source software that they had nothing to fear from the new landlords.

Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel and git itself, didn’t comment directly, but he has been critical of GitHub in the past, so perhaps it doesn’t change anything for him. Besides, the kernel is primarily housed on a private git server, and GitHub is just a public mirror for the code.

That didn’t stop some number of open-source developers from swearing off GitHub and looking for other places to host their projects. GitLab, a minor competitor to GitHub, seemed poised to be the natural beneficiary of this move. In a Twitter post dated June 3rd, it cited that its GitHub to GitLab conversion rate was running at ten times normal.

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Looking Back: What Was Happening Ten Years Ago?

Glyn Moody — Tue, 27 Feb 2018 15:48:52 +0000

by Glyn Moody

That was then, this is now: what's next for the Open Source world?

A decade passes so quickly. And yet, ten years for open source is half its life. How have things changed in those ten years? So much has happened in this fast-moving and exciting world, it's hard to remember. But we're in luck. The continuing availability of Linux Journal's past issues and website means we have a kind of time capsule that shows us how things were, and how we saw them.

Ten years ago, I was writing a regular column for Linux Journal, much like this one. Looking through the 80 or so posts from that time reveals a world very different from the one we inhabit today. The biggest change from then to now can be summed up in a word: Microsoft. A decade back, Microsoft towered over the world of computing like no other company. More important, it (rightly) saw open source as a threat and took continuing, wide-ranging action to weaken it in every way it could.

Its general strategy was to spread FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt). At every turn, it sought to question the capability and viability of open source. It even tried to convince the world that we no longer needed to talk about free software and open source—anyone remember "mixed source"?

Alongside general mud-flinging, Microsoft's weapon of choice to undermine and thwart open source was a claim of massive patent infringement across the entire ecosystem. The company asserted that the Linux kernel violated 42 of its patents; free software graphical interfaces another 65; the OpenOffice.org suite of programs, 45; and assorted other free software 83 more. The strategy was two-fold: first to squeeze licensing fees from companies that were using open source, and second, perhaps even more important, to paint open source as little more than a pale imitation of Microsoft's original and brilliant ideas.

The patent battle rumbled on for years. And although it did generate considerable revenues for the company, it failed dismally in its aim to discredit free software.

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Ubuntu Linux and Bash as a Windows Program!

Dave Taylor — Fri, 23 Feb 2018 17:16:02 +0000

by Dave Taylor

An Ubuntu Bash shell as a Windows app? Fantastic! Here's how to proceed.

Microsoft has ruled the operating system world for many years, and it's staggering to see how many computers run Microsoft Windows in all its many variants. In May 2017, Microsoft announced it had an installed base of 1.4 billion. Sure, there also are much more than a billion devices now running Android, but if you're running a desktop or laptop computer, odds remain that it's running some version of Microsoft Windows.

Microsoft hasn't just ignored the rest of the OS world—although it sure took a long time for them to bail on Windows Mobile and accept Android—so it was with delight that I read that the next version of Windows 10 would include a simple app that lets you run a Linux shell.

No hassles with complex installations, no dual booting, no virtual machines you need to configure—just a simple app to find in the Microsoft Store and a program to click and run whenever you want to expand your knowledge of Bash or Linux.

Sort of.

At the time of this writing, the app requires that you're in the early release program (it's free to join, and you'll become a beta tester for the next version of Windows 10), but once you're signed up and running the early release version, it is indeed a download-and-go program.

By the time you read this article, however, what I'm running as an early release of Win10 should be the latest public update, so that roadblock will vanish.

To get started, you'll need to enable the Windows Subsystem for Linux (which also lets you run other flavors of Linux and is pretty cool), but start by searching in the Microsoft Store for "Ubuntu" to find Ubuntu Linux on Windows. The latest version of Ubuntu is supported in the app too: 16.04 LTS.

Click to launch it once installed, and you'll be confronted with a window like the one shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Ubuntu as a Windows App? Excellent!

It's interesting to note that some standard Linux commands return nothing—like who am i—but most of them work fine, and there even are dot files in my newly created home directory /home/taylor.

This is a Bash login shell. You can confirm your own shell a couple different ways, but I like this command: ps $$.

Are you curious about how the system identifies itself? uname -a is the standard Linux command to get the version, which reveals this interesting info:

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Android Candy: My World, in a Lock Screen

Shawn Powers — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 13:10:46 +0000

by Shawn Powers

It feels weird to mention a Microsoft product in Linux Journal. But to be honest, there are some cool things coming out of the Microsoft Garage One of those things is "Next Lock Screen", which is an Android app that brings interactive tools to the lock screen.

This concept isn't revolutionary, but with Next Lock Screen, it's done very well. It's possible to launch apps, interact with messages and get customized notifications all without unlocking your phone. Do you prefer to have your calendar events on your lock screen? Done. Want to control your music? Done. Again, nothing here is really new, it's just integrated and customizable in a way that takes a bunch of good ideas and repackages them into a slick lock screen. You also can get the Bing wallpaper on your lock screen, which is pretty cool, because honestly, the Bing photo of the day is almost always incredible.

If you're not afraid to try an app developed by Microsoft, I urge you to check out Next Lock Screen. It makes a locked phone far more useful! (I should add that enabling interaction on your lock screen does make it far less secure, so be careful as to which features you enable.) Check it out at the Google Play Store.

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