this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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I'm a little concerned Microsoft will make a linux distro and introduce proprietary components into it that will drive users of other distros to it because "why use any other distro when the M$ distro can run my games/microsoft office/whatever?". Because that's how they'll kill linux: a bunch of proprietary kernel modules with which only Windows software can run.
We should have multiple linux mega-corps before that happens, otherwise we're fucked.
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They’d probably just buy canonical in this scenario.
Canonical would have to accept. Given their move towards proprietary code, that wouldn't surprise me in the least, honestly.
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Is the public license meant to be the copyright licensing for your comments? Attribute - Non-commercial - Share Alike
Is it meant for crawlers, AI database creators and the like?
Are your comments automatically appended with the link? Or are you mainly copy-pasting it?
And how does it mesh with the TOS of the lemmy instance you're on?
I remember that Reddit has royalty free rights over all comments n posts made on the site, which allow them to do anything they want.
Yes
Precisely those
A keyboard shortcut
I don't know. That's for the crawlers, AI database creators, etc. to figure out. If they're non-commercial, then there shouldn't be a problem either way. For commercial uses, I hope it makes it impossible, but I'm not a lawyer, so I'll just tack on the license and hope it might have an effect 🤷 Takes but a keyboard shortcut (an sometimes time to explain it).
Anti Commercial AI thingy
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0That's cool.
How would that affect any of us? Linus Torvalds would still be the lead kernel maintainer, all the other FOSS distros would still exist, and all the people that currently use Linux (out of conviction, out of idealism, out of the FOSS/GNU philosophy) would stick with them, meaning de facto no change whatsoever.
Not everybody uses linux out of conviction, idealism, or principle. Many use it either by chance or convenience. The purists are probably not the majority of linux users.
There are people who already won't switch to linux because windows has WSL. Gaming has held back many people from switching too, although that's becoming less of a problem. However, if there were no reason to switch to other distros, and an M$ distro were to become the most used distro...
Do you know what M$ did when they had the largest market share for browsers? Do you know what Google is currently doing with their marketshare on the browser market?
Windows has a pitiful representation on the server side, but if that changed to an M$ distro with proprietary linux modules in order to make certain software work (or something more insidious that I can't think of), it would change the server landscape too. And suddenly, you can't write stuff for the most popular servers without installing M$ kernel modules or software.
The linux zealots are not the majority. Zealots never are.
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A few things come to mind here.
The chances of seeing an M$ Winix or something in the next decade are pretty slim, IMO, but to me it's the worst case scenario / beginning of the end. I'm crossing my fingers that windows 12 is shitty, but not too shitty.
I can only hope you're right.
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thats EEE and we are all afraid of that
It's called Linspire, what you've described happened 20 years ago. It was not the cataclysmic event you described it as. TBH I'm not that concerned about a company who charges $400+ for an OS that still shows advertisements and loses support after 5 years when I could go out and get an OS with no ads or bloat for free that will never lose support.
Looking up Linspire, that was not Microsoft, but a separate company. That means they didn't have the windows kernel source code, nor the windows userbase. If M$ made a distro within which nigh any windows software worked (Photoshop, Visual Studio, Microsoft Office, ..., games), it were presented as a frictionless upgrade ("Upgrade to Windows LT!"), and suddenly 1-2 billion people were on it, what would happen to linux?
I'm not sure things would be that rosy.
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Linspire is what Windows named the company who made Lindows after acquiring them as a way of settling ongoing litigations against them. It was a Linux Distro that was built on the concept of running everything that Windows could. Windows was always a parent company to Linspire.
2 Billion People won't use a Microsoft distribution of Linux unless they can control their greed long enough to make it worth using, which is unlikely.
EDIT: I'm getting all my nouns mixed up lol
The company was thus never owned by M$. So there never was M$ proprietary code in Linspire.
It's the power of default. If it comes by default on hardware, people will unknowingly use it. And if the upgrade path is smooth and unnoticeable, people will upgrade too.
I'm not sure whether Windows is their cash cow anymore. I'd assume Office 365 (or whatever it's called now) along with Azure make up the majority of their income. Window is probably just the gateway to their garden. But, change is hard and most likely M$ won't pull an Edge --> Chromium with their OS any time soon - and I sure hope they don't.
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Microsoft hasn’t changed all that much. They don’t see Linux as an OS to run games or MS Office with. It’s not a consumer platform and never will be, it’s more of a server/container maaybe workstation system for a tech-savvy/developer/scientist. Its UI is meant to open terminals and text editors, not movie players or game launchers. Microsoft loves Linux until it leaves the business area and try to sneak into consumer market. There’s nothing stopping them from doing harm to desktop Linux with all their „love” to Linux the modern mainframe system that happens to be industry standard. They can still patent things and do legality tricks (like in HDMI forums), try to put Windows on devices where Linux could be competition (one Linux handheld console = 10 more new Windows handhelds), bind consumers with something only Windows can run (Xbox Gamepass?) etc
The MS distro you're talking about already exists - it is called Azure Linux (recently renamed from CBL-Mariner).
You might be right. I sure hope you are. Having M$ take over desktops with "Azure Linux" (or whatever they might decide to call the desktop version) and then servers would suck.
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I doubt this, they have been sticking to Windows
And things never change, do they? IE is still the main M$ brow- oh wait
Anti Commercial AI thingy
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