TR Forums

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/23 ... violation/

Why can't MS just 'fess up and say "oops our developers screwed up, and we're making things right", instead of trying to spin it into something it isn't? I'd have a lot more respect for them if they would just be honest about stuff like this.

I suspect for the same reason surgeons won't -- admitting a mistake (or even apologizing) gives additional ammunition to anyone who might sue you. Though in this case there would appear to be plenty of ammunition already, corporate cultural practices get pretty ingrained. And I suspect getting respect from the Linux faithful is something they gave up on long ago (if it was even ever something they wanted).

The Hyper-V code base originates with Virtual PC (and possibly also from Kidaro) so it's possible the violation wasn't even technically made by Microsoft if it predates the acquisition. (Which of course doesn't make any legal difference -- you acquire the liability when you acquire the company). Whatever the origin, somebody's not doing code reviews like they should.

Linus Torvalds weighs in on the issue.

I like his attitude; very pragmatic. It also touches on something I've been saying for a few years now, specifically the issue of militant Open Source evangelists. IMO the Open Source community is sometimes its own worst enemy -- mindless MS-bashing and hurling insults at people for being "too stupid" to use Linux is counter-productive, and ultimately drives potential users away.

I like a lot of what Linus says, he strikes me as a very pragmatic individual. The only black mark against him is the bitkeeper stuff.

notfred wrote:

I like a lot of what Linus says, he strikes me as a very pragmatic individual. The only black mark against him is the bitkeeper stuff.

That, and resigning linux to the x86 architecture.. IDIOT.

just brew it! wrote:

Linus Torvalds weighs in on the issue.
IMO the Open Source community is sometimes its own worst enemy -- mindless MS-bashing and hurling insults at people for being "too stupid" to use Linux is counter-productive, and ultimately drives potential users away.

Thats soo true. In some forums, not so enlightned as TR or say Ars, the OSS trolls are so rampant that within an hour of any article regarding MS, you have a 100 junk post destroying any chance of relevant discussion. Such things almost makes we want to run MS out of spite... A more nuanced debate playing to the strengths they have is much better, without hiding the weaknesses. And the same goes for MS of course...

Although i must say that Torvalds has some great arguments there that some more then other should take to heart, but then, what would the internet be without p0r... i mean trolls.

Nitrodist wrote:

notfred wrote:

I like a lot of what Linus says, he strikes me as a very pragmatic individual. The only black mark against him is the bitkeeper stuff.

That, and resigning linux to the x86 architecture.. IDIOT.

Umm... huh?

Linux was originally developed for x86 because x86 was cheap and readily available when Linus started the project. I don't think it would've ever reached critical mass if it had started out on some other platform, because the developer community would've been limited by availability and/or affordability of hardware to do the development on.

Since then, it has been ported to many non-x86 architectures. In addition to x86/x86-64, Linux is available for DEC Alpha, Sun SPARC, ARM, PowerPC, PA-RISC, Itanium, and IBM mainframes. And that's just the officially supported Debian ports...

So WTF are you going on about with this "resigned it to x86" BS?

just brew it! wrote:

So WTF are you going on about with this "resigned it to x86" BS?

I couldn't make sense of that either. Especially since if you're looking at client (ie, non-server) systems, there are probably more ARM chips running Linux than x86.

I was alluding to the Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate.

Nitrodist wrote:

I was alluding to the Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate.

Ahh, OK. Never mind, then...

Nitrodist wrote:

I was alluding to the Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate.

That was a good read, thank you for sharing. And I'm with UberGerbil in response to the OP; it's just how they operate.

Nitrodist wrote:

I was alluding to the Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate.

Except he didn't really "resign" Linux to x86 in any substantive way. Ted Ts'o points out later in that thread that Linux, even at that early stage, was really not that intimately tied to x86; Minix certainly has architecture-specific code as well, and there was never really an objective comparison of how much of each system was dedicated to a particular machine architecture.

One of the points of contention where Linus was emphasizing 386-specific code was really not about portability to other architectures, but rather portability to earlier x86 processors before the 386. At that time, this was somewhat of a bigger deal: it wasn't backward compatible to pre-386 x86 processors because it used 32-bit protected mode. Tanenbaum criticized him for taking special advantage of these 386-specific features -- he said, " I don't have figures, but my guess is that the fraction of the 60 million existing PCs that are 386/486 machines as opposed to 8088/286/680x0 etc is small." Linus's defense of 386-specific features wasn't really about "resigning" Linux to x86 per se, but about using 32-bit protected mode with modern MMU features which weren't available on earlier processor models. Sure, other architectures weren't on Linus's radar at the time since it was a small project, but I don't think he ever claimed he'd object to the premise (not that I'd put it past him).