I think this is a great gesture. One, it's from Microsoft Germany, which in my mind makes it seem more genuine. (High open source adoption, and I would be surprised if it was blessed by Redmond.)
Two, it acknowledges the Halloween memos. This could have easily been left out.
Three, it's a cake. This new(?) cake tradition seems to say, "regardless of politics and history, cheers to you and your team on your achievements".
Finally, I don't think anyone can deny that Linux supporters have historically been brash and rude in the past when talking about Micro$ux Winblows. The rock at the window doesn't seem so out of place.
This gesture is just a PR operation with full benefit to microsoft. Microsoft has been bullying Linux and Open Source communities with big communication and legal budgets. Some of the target where big corporations, but most of the damage hurt physical people that attempted to earn their live under ethics and morales that seemed to bring a better world for everyone.
Imagine if a big nuclear corporation came to greenpeace and tell them "cheers to you" "regardless of politics and history". It just looks the same way to me.
The worst part is to depict Linux and Open Source people has equal bullier that microsoft. I can't see anything else but an attempt to bring the enemy as low as they are in the public mind.
Speaks to how far Linux has come. This might be just be my isolated geeky viewpoint, but does anyone else see a world without Microsoft more likely than a world without Linux?
edit: down voted for asking a reasonable question? WTF? I google for "Microsoft sues Linux" and nothing reasonable came up (it's pretty much mostly the Tom Tom stuff, which wasn't about Linux). Hence, I asked what the poster was thinking of.
"In July 2009 Microsoft submitted Hyper-V drivers to the kernel, which improve the performance of virtual Linux guest systems in a Windows hosted environment. Microsoft was forced to submit the code when it was discovered that Microsoft had incorporated a Hyper-V network driver with GPL-licensed components statically linked to closed-source binaries."
So obviously Microsoft didn't do it for altruistic motives.
I believe the only thing that a corporation can do that can count for "altruism" would be to produce a product / service that doesn't suck and practice fairplay rules with its competitors.Nothing more is expected of a corporation in an ideal society.
The corporation sounds like a sociopathic entity by it's very design. No wonder Mussolini said that corporatism was the first step towards fascism, which, rather alarmingly, implies that the world has already taken it's first steps towards it.
I don't think all corporations can be termed as sociopathic institutions . There are ofcourse certain aspects of its design , that makes it behave this way. Majority of the countries are dependent on growth based economies. So it becomes mandatory for an corporation to show a higher rate of growth and hence all kinds of malpratices arise. I am not sure whether measuring an institutions performance from one quarter to the next quarter is a good practice of measure. Correct me if I am wrong.
> “The vast bulk of Microsoft’s contributions has been to its own Hyper-V virtualization hypervisor drivers. Hyper-V is Microsoft’s 64-bit hypervisor-based virtualization system,”
"whatever the reason might be" as if it wasn't clearly stated in the article.
I watched that and saw Tux throwing a pebble, lightly, at the window in a "come out and play" gesture that kids might do. Microsoft then shuts the blinds and Tux wanders off looking slightly upset.
Bitter nerds go home. In business and politics you can't get caught up in history. The people in charge are not the same people that offended you, and they may or may not continue that trend.
Expecting an international corporation to paint themselves in a bad light is ridiculous. The fact that someone at Microsoft acknowledges Linux's accomplishments and appears to desire a mutually beneficial relationship can only be a good thing for everyone involved.
Linux has been around for long enough that there isn't much Microsoft could do to seriously threaten it (besides releasing a hacker friendly version of Windows with an unrestricted, cross platform C/C++ compiler).
I agree. It's just a video where a company pushes a distorted vision of the past relationship between said company and the community it's bent on destroying because it's perceived as a threat to its business.
I didn't intend my comment to be a complete retelling; I was just pointing out some odd things that stood out to me, and asking if anyone else here knew what they might represent.
If Microsoft wants to send a video gift to Linux, how about dedicating all their video codec patents to the public domain? Or making Ogg the default media format?
One step at a time. If Microsoft goes Free Software all of a sudden it will hurt its short term revenues.
Making ogg the default format sounds reasonable. Giving their video codec patents is not: they couldn't use them for defence. A global, written promise for not suing anyone for patent infringement unless they sue Microsoft for patent infringement sound much more feasible.
It's important to know that it's not Microsoft as a whole that hates Linux, the company is really split into three ideological factions: (1) The Gates Worshipers, (2) The Open Source Geeks and (3) The iWorlders
Those in (1) are the old guard, and opinions are hard to change. They tend to be near the top and want to return to the Bill Gates way of the iron fist.
Those in (2) are most of the programmers/devtools folks at Microsoft. They grew up and went to school (and maybe even came from academia) using Open Source and still love it. They are why you see things like F# being open sourced.
Then there are those in (3) which tend to be more on the XBox/Windows Phone side. Just like Apple, they don't really care about Linux. What they want is to offer another walled garden so they can take your money with little effort.
I didn't downmod, but it makes little sense to complain about flash video when it's absolutely unrelated to the topic at hand, and it was uploaded to YouTube by the Linux Foundation, not Microsoft.
To the folks downmodding: flash runs notoriously poorly on linux - it's far from universally accessible. Whether selected by MS or linux.com, it's strange that a more linux-friendly format wasn't chosen.
Or were you downmodding the typo? HN modding is weird...
I've been using Flash on both 64-bit and 32-bit variants of Debian for years now, with little problem. My only real complaint with Flash on Linux has been the inconsistent updates for the 64-bit plugin.
People who say "Flash works poorly on Linux" are either trolling, too newb to configure their browsers, or free software zealots who won't be satisfied until Adobe open sources everything they've ever made.
That's weird, leaving Firefox 4 open on Arch Linux with, for example, a YouTube page open for a few hours breaks the player and requires the flash process to be killed and restarted before it works again. IME, it's not a stable piece of software on Linux.
I watched this video using debian stable with flash manually installed from the official source. It played the first time, and broke the second time when I tried to show someone else. I find flash on linux "generally works", but frequently breaks in ways that doesn't happen when I use it on windows.
As for "too newb to configure their browsers", why should you have to delve into browser settings just to make something like that work? What you're saying here is an explicit "this won't work unless you fiddle with your settings" - which is basically the same as "this is not natively supported", ie: it doesn't "just work".
Two, it acknowledges the Halloween memos. This could have easily been left out.
Three, it's a cake. This new(?) cake tradition seems to say, "regardless of politics and history, cheers to you and your team on your achievements".
Finally, I don't think anyone can deny that Linux supporters have historically been brash and rude in the past when talking about Micro$ux Winblows. The rock at the window doesn't seem so out of place.