[GTALUG] ​Microsoft and Canonical partner to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10 | ZDNet

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Giles Orr <gilesorr at gmail.com>

| Or, as a friend of mine put it, 'the concept of "embrace, extend,
| extinguish" hasn't been lost.'

Interesting theory for why Microsoft is doing this.


Now another question: why is Canonical doing this?

- piles of money from Microsoft?  (I have no idea if Microsoft is paying.)

- piles of fame / market share?

- another desperate attempt to break out of the linux ghetto?
  (Like their various tablet and phone attempts.)


Plenty of what Ubuntu does grates on me, but that may be unfair.

- making it easy to use stuff that isn't open source in a variety of
  ways, some of which seem legally questionable
  (closed source kernel drivers, patented codecs, ZFS [open source but
  legally incompatible with GPLed code], Adobe Flash, ...)

- eclipsing the Debian project.  In a totally valid way.

- producing little code and not sharing well what they do produce.

Summary: not following community norms, and being way too successful in
this approach.


The strongest Linux distro company is Red Hat.  It appears that
Microsoft goes out of its way to avoid helping Red Hat.  Divide and conquer?

On the other hand, even though I like Red Hat, I don't want just one
successful distro company.