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meax
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PostPosted: Sun May 08, 2005 9:07 pm    Post subject: Microsoft's favourite distro is.... Reply with quote

Gentoo! Muhaha

Two Videos, 88 MB each, wmv.

Should we be scared now?8O
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PostPosted: Sun May 08, 2005 10:24 pm    Post subject: Re: Microsoft's favourite distro is.... Reply with quote

meax wrote:
Gentoo! Muhaha

Two Videos, 88 MB each, wmv.

Should we be scared now?8O
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No, actually we should be proud.
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PostPosted: Sun May 08, 2005 11:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Wow and to think. Microsoft loves the software i use but i hate microsoft...8O
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PostPosted: Mon May 09, 2005 12:04 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

jd5419 wrote:
Wow and to think. Microsoft loves the software i use but i hate microsoft...8O
Don't. Hate is counter-productive.
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PostPosted: Mon May 09, 2005 12:29 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Could someone please explain why for all the dial up users? :(
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PostPosted: Mon May 09, 2005 2:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'd say it's mostly because Gentoo is as far from being competition to windows as possible (for the majority that is)... Microsoft has nothing to fear Gentoo for as it's targetting a small geek crowd. This would also fit their (apparently) new strategy pretty well, which is http://www.theregister.com/2005/05/05/_taylor_linux --> in other words seems like they are starting to accept that their customers might want to run both Windows and Linux, and by Linux they'd prefer it's some kind of embedded/specialized thing (for which Gentoo is suitable) and not a desktop.
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PostPosted: Mon May 09, 2005 2:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

vrln wrote:
I'd say it's mostly because Gentoo is as far from being competition to windows as possible (for the majority that is)...
I think rather the opposite is the case. Think about it. Would Microsoft waste their developers' and managers' time on a distribution they view as irrelevant? Come on.
vrln wrote:
Microsoft has nothing to fear Gentoo for as it's targetting a small geek crowd.
They have to fear more from metadistributions than they do from dedicated Linux vendor companies. If bad comes to worse for you, you can always buy out a competitor. You can't buy out a community-driven metadistribution that by definition can embrace and extend technologies much quicker than you, Microsoft, can do yourself.
vrln wrote:
This would also fit their (apparently) new strategy pretty well, which is http://www.theregister.com/2005/05/05/_taylor_linux --> in other words seems like they are starting to accept that their customers might want to run both Windows and Linux, and by Linux they'd prefer it's some kind of embedded/specialized thing (for which Gentoo is suitable) and not a desktop.
One thing I've learned over the years is never to take The Reigster too seriously. Microsoft, like any big company, is driven by two conflicting imperatives: the shareholders' interests (maximizing equity value), and the managers' interests (maximizing revenue through sales). Anything else is pure crap, especially the "let's be evil" thing.
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PostPosted: Mon May 09, 2005 5:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

moocha wrote:
Anything else is pure crap, especially the "let's be evil" thing.


Hmm... It's not crap if it's maximizing revenues :)
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PostPosted: Mon May 09, 2005 5:06 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

moocha wrote:
vrln wrote:
I'd say it's mostly because Gentoo is as far from being competition to windows as possible (for the majority that is)...
I think rather the opposite is the case. Think about it. Would Microsoft waste their developers' and managers' time on a distribution they view as irrelevant? Come on.
vrln wrote:
Microsoft has nothing to fear Gentoo for as it's targetting a small geek crowd.
They have to fear more from metadistributions than they do from dedicated Linux vendor companies. If bad comes to worse for you, you can always buy out a competitor. You can't buy out a community-driven metadistribution that by definition can embrace and extend technologies much quicker than you, Microsoft, can do yourself.
vrln wrote:
This would also fit their (apparently) new strategy pretty well, which is http://www.theregister.com/2005/05/05/_taylor_linux --> in other words seems like they are starting to accept that their customers might want to run both Windows and Linux, and by Linux they'd prefer it's some kind of embedded/specialized thing (for which Gentoo is suitable) and not a desktop.
One thing I've learned over the years is never to take The Reigster too seriously. Microsoft, like any big company, is driven by two conflicting imperatives: the shareholders' interests (maximizing equity value), and the managers' interests (maximizing revenue through sales). Anything else is pure crap, especially the "let's be evil" thing.


You missed my point - what I mean is that if Microsoft were to start advocating a policy of "peaceful coexistance" as suggested by the article, it is in Microsoft's interest to promote distributions that are especially suited for very specific specialized (rare) tasks. This is merely because this would make people view Linux as something which corporations may want to use for clusters, server farms and so on while Windows is still the de facto desktop and that Linux poses no threat to their core business. Claiming that Gentoo is a threat to Windows is pretty far fetched if you ask me (I'm not claiming that you said this at all), as it's even in the Linux world a more of a "freak-distro". There is no way any major corporation or even the majority of home users are going to want to run a constantly changing metadistribution, especially not a minimalistic source-based one that takes days to install (for specialized things such as clusters, servers and so on it's a different thing, which brings me back to my initial point).

The Register, while of course not exactly an advocate of 100% pure journalism, is still a fairly respected source. This doesn't mean that Microsoft has suddenly switched their strategy course though, huge companies like MS obviously have conflicting inner intrests and so on. I'm not sure if your refering to me with that "let's be evil" line, but if you are, I never said anything to even suggest that.

I also think the opposite about corporate Linux distro companies. To claim that a volunteer project can extend and use technologies faster than a huge corporation with over tens of billions in the bank is not very realistic imho. In the end, money talks more than idealism. The people developing the core Linux related programs are not all volunteers, many are hired by huge companies with financial aims (Novell, IBM and so forth). The most important issue however is support (and being able to post on public forums doesn't count if your talking about major corporations) - with volunteer projects there is noone that is going to stand behind the distribution and say "this is our product, and if you pay us you can get guaranteed professional support". A volunteer project also depends on the main developers who are driving the project - just look at Debian what is possible (compare the current situation with 3 years ago). For example if a company goes Novell/RedHat, they can be pretty sure that it'll exist in 5 years.
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Last edited by vrln on Mon May 09, 2005 5:22 pm; edited 1 time in total
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moocha
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PostPosted: Mon May 09, 2005 5:21 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ah, yes, I missed your point somewhat - and we are both in agreement on the "Gentoo is not a threat to Windows" stance - it's obviously not one, not by a long shot. The idea I was trying to convey is that we should feel proud that the developers at Microsoft actually like Gentoo. Developers like cool technologies, and Gentoo is one :).
As to the "let's be evil" thing - I was trying to pro-actively counter the usual rants about Microsoft being the new evil empire, being commited to subjugating the world, etc etc. You know, the usual zealotry crap :).
About the technology issue - we're in disagreement there... I do believe that the bazaar can outperform the cathedral at adapting, simply because the bazaar isn't forced to speak in a single voice. Microsoft have done amazing things when it comes to changing their corporate culture to a more open one, but it's simply not possible for a publicly traded company to match a loosely coupled community's speed of adapting to a changing playing field. Note that I'm referring strictly to Microsoft's particular brand of "innovating", which sort of isn't. True innovators are a rare breed...
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PostPosted: Mon May 09, 2005 5:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

moocha wrote:
Ah, yes, I missed your point somewhat - and we are both in agreement on the "Gentoo is not a threat to Windows" stance - it's obviously not one, not by a long shot. The idea I was trying to convey is that we should feel proud that the developers at Microsoft actually like Gentoo. Developers like cool technologies, and Gentoo is one :).
As to the "let's be evil" thing - I was trying to pro-actively counter the usual rants about Microsoft being the new evil empire, being commited to subjugating the world, etc etc. You know, the usual zealotry crap :).


Agreed, it's quite an honor that Microsoft likes Gentoo. I didn't mean that Gentoo was hand-picked only because it's one of the hardest distributions to use, but I'd vote that Microsoft is intentionally avoiding to compare Linux to Windows for mainstream desktop usage. There's a ton of good distros for server/etc aims too and Gentoo was chosen before them :) I only use Gentoo as a desktop though, and absolutely love it.

I'm not a fan of the zealotry stuff either. I think MS has alot of good products, for example Office and the Xbox - their OS I'd never use myself if I have the choice, but who knows how Longhorm will look, too early to say.

edit:

About innovation, that is indeed a major plus for open source software. Microsoft (or Dell) has never really been good at innovating, but they sure know how to take others ideas and refine them (have you checked the leaked Xbox360 design? Looks like they took everything that's good in the PS2 design and made it better). Being a huge corporation doesn't automatically mean that innovation is rare though, Apple is a fine example. Time will tell if the open source development model will outpace the commercial development model (I hope it will, but I'm more pessimistic in that regard - I'm fine with how things are right now already though). I have to admit though, that if you look at KDE or Gnome and compare how it looked two years ago, it's very very hard to say their development hasn't been extremely impressive :) And the vast majority of KDE/Gnome developers (to my best knowledge) are volunteers, so that does challenge my point of view.
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Last edited by vrln on Mon May 09, 2005 5:41 pm; edited 2 times in total
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PostPosted: Mon May 09, 2005 5:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Er, I edited my above post adding a paragraph (wanted to avoid yet another post for that) and I think it was while you were replying, so now I have to post again nevertheless to flag the thread as modified... Argh :).

Edit: ... thus forcing you to do the same. *hangs head in shame* I really should stop doing this kind of thing...
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PostPosted: Mon May 09, 2005 5:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

moocha wrote:
Er, I edited my above post adding a paragraph (wanted to avoid yet another post for that) and I think it was while you were replying, so now I have to post again nevertheless to flag the thread as modified... Argh :).


Yeah, I also edit my posts alot in the following 5-15 mins after I've posted them - it's a bad habit :P
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PostPosted: Mon May 09, 2005 6:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

So kool,
Microsoft Developers like Gentoo,
Gentoo developers hate Microsoft.
Keep the good work Gentoo devs and keep kicking Microsoft away.:wink:
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PostPosted: Mon May 09, 2005 7:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i remember a /. article a while ago that featured an interview with one of the guys in charge of microsofts linux testing and he spoke of a lab full of the usual distros, when he mentioned gentoo i shuddered.

to be honest the profit motive will probably colour the thinking of any design desisions, its against their interest to have an open system with interoperability and debian/gentoo style upgradeability. the problem microsoft has is it would dearly love to move users to a subscription based system but while its an option for business you are never going to persuade the general public to rent a pice of software when they are used to paying outright a pretty small amount and keeping it as long as they wish.
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PostPosted: Mon May 09, 2005 8:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hobbit_HK wrote:
moocha wrote:
Anything else is pure crap, especially the "let's be evil" thing.


Hmm... It's not crap if it's maximizing revenues :)
Ah but when you're maximising revenue you may not be maximising total profit. In fact, you may actually be losing profit by trying to gain more revenue.

Just a minor technicality...
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PostPosted: Mon May 09, 2005 8:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

codergeek42 wrote:
Hobbit_HK wrote:
moocha wrote:
Anything else is pure crap, especially the "let's be evil" thing.


Hmm... It's not crap if it's maximizing revenues :)
Ah but when you're maximising revenue you may not be maximising total profit. In fact, you may actually be losing profit by trying to gain more revenue.

Just a minor technicality...


Haha... At last I found another person who likes to prove someone else's argument wrong with "a minor technicality" ;)
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PostPosted: Mon May 09, 2005 11:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

ewan.paton wrote:
the problem microsoft has is it would dearly love to move users to a subscription based system but while its an option for business you are never going to persuade the general public to rent a pice of software when they are used to paying outright a pretty small amount and keeping it as long as they wish.
Actually it's not an option for business. Quite the opposite - it's much worse for business than it is for retail users, for cost accounting reasons. With a normal pay-up-front licensing system, it's possible for a business to distribute the licensing costs over several years, including licensing costs in capital costs and giving the accounting department the flexibility of recovering these costs as they see fit. With a subscription system, that is not possible, and the subscription costs become running costs eating into yearly profits, which the shareholders don't exactly appreciate. For a big enterprise like, say, Hewlett Packard, that has several thousand seats and correspondingly purchases a whopping lot of licenses, something like this can end a career, hence accountants tend to avoid such situations like the plague.
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PostPosted: Wed May 11, 2005 12:40 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

moocha wrote:
jd5419 wrote:
Wow and to think. Microsoft loves the software i use but i hate microsoft...8O
Don't. Hate is counter-productive.


You mean here contra-productive? Am I right? ;-)
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PostPosted: Wed May 11, 2005 3:15 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

lefsha wrote:
moocha wrote:
jd5419 wrote:
Wow and to think. Microsoft loves the software i use but i hate microsoft...8O
Don't. Hate is counter-productive.


You mean here contra-productive? Am I right? ;-)
No.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition wrote:
coun·ter·pro·duc·tive, adj.
Tending to hinder rather than serve one's purpose.

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PostPosted: Wed May 11, 2005 3:18 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

How did you figure that Gentoo is their favorite distro. If you watch the videos you'll see that they run about 40 different distributions, Gentoo is just one of those 40.
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PostPosted: Wed May 11, 2005 3:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

They imply it, especially on the Channel9 comments.
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