Noam Meltzer wrote:
> Its a little surprise to me that M$ is trying to port their software to
> UNIX,
Defending Microsoft is not included in my duties.
But -
it's a big surprise to me that people don't know these facts.
Actually, I believe that this activity is less than 1% of the UNIX
activity of Microsoft.
If you take all the UNIX activities of MS and refer to it as to a
company, then Microsoft is the biggest UNIX software company.
Microsoft maintains dozens of UNIX projects, and is involved in many
others.
Many of the projects are Open Source, like parts of the .NET (they have
sample implementations for FreeBSD, for example).
Many others are free (like beer). For example, there was a multimedia
tool (I think NetMeeting or NetShow) for various UNIX platforms.
There are free plug-ins for UNIX tools (for example, the FP server
extensions).
There are UNIX/Linux drivers for various Microsoft hardware products,
such as mouses, keyboards, etc.
As you probably know, NT and 2000 are Micro-Kernel OS'es, and all of
the functionality is implemented as a SubSystem. So Microsoft developed
a full-functional UNIX system, that instead of running under a machine,
it runs as an NT SubSystem. It's called "Softway", and can be run
simultaneously with NT/2000 (like running Linux under VMware under NT,
but contrary to Linux under VMware, Softway runs natively).
Visual Source Safe was ported to UNIX.
There are many other tools that were ported to UNIX.
Microsoft is also involved with MainSoft, and some of MS products are
working under UNIX without a real porting, but just by putting them,
almost as-is, under the layer of MainSoft.
Some of the historical biggest UNIX software companies were founded by
Microsoft (like SCO, the only owner of the official source-code of UNIX
which was recently acquired by Caldera).
This list was quickly written from my memory, but I'm sure that there
are zillion other UNIX projects of Microsoft. And if you thought that
"egg.microsoft.com" is the only UNIX/Linux in Microsoft, then you don't
know anything ("you" != Noam, but a typical reader of this message).
> but I think I'm going to try this at work.
> You must know the enemy to fight it!
If you really want to "fight the enemy", it is a bad idea to take an
application which is less than 1% of their UNIX activity, and try to
know Microsoft better out of this application.
I think it will be wiser to just learn more about their UNIX activity.
Even without trying anything, it will take you weeks to learn it.
--
Eli Marmor
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CTO, Founder
Netmask (El-Mar) Internet Technologies Ltd.
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