[oclug] Can MS kill Linux?

[Milan Budimirovic]

Adrian Irving-Beer wrote:

>On Wed, Feb 23, 2005 at 12:22:29PM -0500, Rod Giffin wrote:
>
>  
>
>>What exactly would be the benefit to running Linux as a process
>>inside of Windows?  If you were a Windows user, you could get to use
>>Linux tools like, grep and diff that you can already get Windows
>>versions of I suppose.  Other than that, I have NO idea.
>>    
>>
>
>One possibility is to jump on the 'put our GUI and drivers on another
>platform' MacOS X bandwagon.  Of course, he can't *say* this (or maybe
>he's in denial and doesn't even make that connection in his head)
>because he's so anti-Mac.
>
>The other is to suggest (in a similar vein) that Windows would somehow
>be better if you took the same multi-vendor mix of applications, put
>them on the same graphical interface, put that on top of the same set
>of drivers, but replaced the underlying kernel (evolved from OS/2)
>with a Linux one.  I don't see much of an improvement there.
>
>Finally, there's the most ludicrous possibility, which is that
>*somehow*, if you extended Linux with a closed-source Microsoft-owned
>hardware driver layer, enough real Linux users would flock to your
>system to 'kill' the original Linux.
>
>I'm not sure if he's sensationalistic, out of touch, or just crazy. :)
>  
>
All that sounds too far-fetched. If anything, Microsoft would like to 
get out of the device drivers business and leave that to the 
manufacturers and the Open Source world.

The only way any of this would make sense from Microsoft's point of view 
is if they created a distro that had a Windows-compatibility layer on 
top of it. Their selling point would be a "Best-of-both-worlds" thing. 
Run all your Windows applications and have the all the goodness of Linux 
underneath. But even that would be fraught with peril, from both a 
marketing standpoint and a legal one.