Well for one, it's true that mobile devices play an increasing role in computing for the masses. Microsoft also has nearly zero mindshare for that market. I'm personally skeptical of any of their endeavors reversing that, but even in theory I don't see how any thing they do in desktops and laptops helps or detracts from their relevance to mobile at this point. Given they already give away their platform for the sake of boosting Bing and friends in those markets, nothing really changes.

I also want to express that contrary to a widespread belief, mobile form factor isn't going to completely replace laptops, due to simple human factors issues. So one of the worst things for MS to do would be to piss away their relevance to laptops chasing mobile. That said Windows 8 showed exactly how hard MS could work to do precisely that and still not get particularly penalized in the market.

Finally the 'tendency toward web apps' does not automatically make something particularly useful for both mobile and laptop. Even for those that are adaptive, the mobile sites frequently suck because there simply isn't enough real estate on mobile devices to provide an adequate experience. I do however appreciate how IOS and Apple re-popularized the concept of providing dedicated purpose-driven apps, though disappointed so many of them are just the Mobile web site 'app'-ified. Browsers make for far better run time environments than they used to be, but still significantly lag traditional applications given roughly equivalently naive developers.

I guess it comes down to 'it would be a good idea to release their OS like everyone else does'. The question is in what sense and for whom? It could be good for consumers (maybe, though it would diminish even further the chances they would try out an alternative platform that would be better for them than Windows), maybe good from 'the way the world *should* work'. It could be good for companies like Lenovo, Dell, HP, etc as their costs go down and therefore they can price lower. It's not a good idea for Microsoft as a business though. It doesn't have much potential financial upside for them and represents sacrificing a boatload of their revenue. They already are doing precisely what you prescribe in mobile/tablets because they felt they had to, but taking it further in a general just wouldn't make a lot of financial sense. The exceptional case may be upgrades, I suspect MS suffers pretty high costs supporting older editions to try to get people to spend money on upgrades. That said, 8->8.1 was a free upgrade and 8 was considered horrible, and even so about 30% of the 8 users never bothered to do the 8.1 update, so there may be no good answer for how they could mitigate their costs without a risk of decreasing likelihood of upgrade-by-buying-new-device as an unintended consequence..

The point about share is that it continues to be the case in *SPITE* of being the more expensive option (though admittedly most of their users don't get direct control over giving them money). I don't say the secret to their share is charging, it's just that they manage to get away with charging even when free alternatives exist. It only becomes a 'good' idea from a business perspective if they are under some competitive threat that would force their hand to do what everyone else has been forced to do. That threat just doesn't exist, so they'd be trading current revenue stream for a relatively meaningless small bump in mindshare. I'm not going to enjoy this crappy OS more just because it's free, I'm still going to prefer Linux (not much chance of them making inroads into *THAT* 3.4% of the market no matter what). For consumers the cost of their OS license is already hidden in the system purchase, so they don't even give a single thought to all of this.

The business side is interesting and highly dependent on circumstances. While it makes little sense for MS to go free-as-in-beer for Windows, it makes a ton of sense for RedHat to more prominently promote free-as-in-beer use of their platform as they rapidly lost hearts and minds to Canonical. While they are being better about it (they used to go out of their way to make life tough for projects like CentOS) they are still being peculiar about it (CentOS v. RHEL instead of just 'RHEL for free'), but they are under pretty serious threat to their credibility as people selecting Ubuntu dilutes their image as 'the' authoritative Linux company. Here RH gives up the fantasy that they'll extract revenue from large chunks of the market, but protects their image. MS just doesn't have this problem. On the desktop, they have a lock. On the server their fortunes aren't so nice, but their platform is *SO* different it's unlikely to convince people to change one way or another.

I'm not saying MS is best or knows best or makes the best products. I'm just ignoring the technology and focusing on the chances MS would go along with such a plan based on current business realities and assessing how 'foolish' or not they are being by charging for their offering.

'arbitrary' in my view includes 'free for non-commercial use' and even less kosher licensing terms for use without paying. I was thinking that way as he referenced 'dirty look from auditing', which I took to mean an assumption that software is being used against copyright/licensing allowances.

I was perhaps too guarded in trying to explain that blind firing of people for using Linux is almost certainly not a good practice but accepting that companies do have to worry about employees doing 'arbitrary' things without appreciating the nuance of the terms of the 'free' (as in beer) software they are using.

In terms of IO and CPU scheduling, there exist configurations of the linux kernel with *HARD* real time guarantees. That has approximately zero relevance to desktops, so MS didn't bother developing that and most linux distros ship with those disabled anyway. WinCE might have had that, but I have heard their current Windows 8.1 kernel does not.

There are flat out crazy things you can do with networking in linux kernel space. Linux kernels drive some pretty hard core networking equipment. MS doesn't play in the market, and frankly could only break in in *theory* by giving away their work, so it's not in their best interest to bother. Virtualization has caused MS to implement *some* of those capabilities that they formerly ignored, but no where near everything.

I didn't say that functionality was necessarily relevant to what MS cares or should care about, just that the Linux kernel is a solid piece of technology that carries some fascinating features. The stuff Google puts on top of that stack, on the other hand... There's a good amount of room for improvement there.

My point is that while the present isn't indicative of the future, neither can we extrapolate relatively small percentage shifts into inevitable conclusions of the market reality. I'm not exactly enthusiastic about Microsoft, but I'm fatigued in general how technology reporting sees *anything* go from 0.1% to 0.2% and then starts going crazy proclaiming the eventual domination of the market by that thing because it *GREW 200% Year to YEAR!!!*. Also playing it the other way when something goes from 90% of a billion person market to 89.9% share and declaring that 'it's doomed because over a MIILION users have moved away from it'.

I really like some of those niche players, but it's just tiresome pretending they'll be something they are not. Frankly, if Mint had MS market share, I'd suspect it wouldn't be nearly as well suited a platform for it's current users as it is now, so people shouldn't get too excited about 'winning' users away from MS.

I know you said that you don't care, this rant was less directed toward you specifically. Just the statement that oh once upon a time MS made money at OS sales, but that's sooo 90s just seemed a sample of making a pretty dire assessment of a business that's overwhelmingly on top still.

I wouldn't be *too* surprised if *someone* used a BSD to try to break into the ecosystem. However I don't see how a BSD kernel is a necessary or even particular relevant step to get away from Google's stranglehold, which is more in the upper end of the stack rather than bound to things like the kernel.

I do not believe Microsoft would be the ones to try such a thing. If they are going to get anything non-linux based going in the handset market, it'll be built on their own kernel (which can do the job in theory). If that continues to fail, I wouldn't be surprised by a 'Android with Bing' effort, but I would bet it would keep the base common and just mess with app store/search/maps/etc defaults. I don't see a big motivator for something in the middle given their existing in-house tech and the reality of the mobile device market.

With some exceptions (e.g. LLVM), Apple's engagement on open source has been consumer only. Even then, it's really around their kernel. Most of the rest of Apple's business is facilitated by closed source software. Of course while they need and provide respectable technology, the real driver of their ludicrous levels of success is more about style/marketing.

IBM does open source extensively, but the bulk of their business centers around proprietary closed software. If IBM open sources something, it's because they gave up figuring out how to monetize it and instead use it for reinforcing their image. IBM is actually interesting, despite nearly dropping completely from the mind of most people, they still command a lead over Microsoft revenue wise.

No company permits 'arbitrary' software. Many companies do trust the employees to understand licensing and 'play with' free software. They generally have an education course on how to find licensing terms and to read the license more deeply for signs of 'commercial use clauses' and what GPL means versus BSD and so on and so forth.

IBM doesn't bat an eye when if an employee puts Fedora on a company asset. They have your ass if you put any open source code into any product without legal review, and also if you use a partner's source code and contribute anything open source based on that. So yes, a long standing large company that is very very very careful about software licensing will go along with it.

Not all 'playing with' is for personal gain. Some of it enables advancing your companies agenda/saving costs/etc. I would not use my personal resources for exploring things that would advance my company without much gratification for me on a personal level.

Which won't by them anything.. They throw out their singular primary advantage (backwards compatibily for decades of application) for.... well actually not much of anything. The Linux kernel can do tricks that Windows kernel cannot, but in the scheme of things not something that will boost MS revenue. The BSD kernels are already roughly at the same functional level, so no new function from that area.

It made sense for Apple because they had only their classic OS which was clearly ill-equipped in fundamental ways and it let them skip the investment of doing it from scratch. MS had already spent that money, so they don't get to skip anything.

If MS started doing a linux distro, it probably would do more harm than good. Distrusted by the target market with a value add that would probably amount to making it easier to manage linux *like* windows, but at that point why not just run Windows? I'd personally be more swayed by the ability to muck about with Windows in the same style as linux, but I recognize that would be a bad idea for Windows.

What kills me is that their update check process sucks up over 2 GB of ram every damn day on my laptop. I have never seen any other platform's *updater* do anything remotely so peculiar. When I didn't have Windows forced on me, I respected it more and assumed they had made a solid product that just wasn't my cup of tea. However I have experienced that their products aren't nearly as well done as I thought they would be...

No it really isn't. Yes there are things it brings to the table. Yes there are problems with some startup scripts. No systemd wasn't the only answer and some decisions that systemd cause real difficulties that come along for the ride along with the good.
-Binary log files as the primary strategy is not an absolutely necessary thing to acheive the desired end
-Service startup should degrade better when access to pid 1 is not possible
-Some software lost capability that could be done under SysV that deviates from the limited path set out by systemd (e.g. 'reload' and also services cannot begin startup until fully stopped, which messes with some software that negotiates handing over in-flight transactions).

I think that's the bulk of the things I can lay squarely at the feet of systemd/journald that causes me grief. I would be less bothered and optimistic that constructive feedback would get these issues addressed, but the way systemd is developed does not inspire confidence. There are other offenders that frustrate me in various ways (pulseaudio, network manager, d-bus, dconf), so systemd does get maligned for the same sort of stuff that others get away with.

Android being sluggish is also not about the kernel. Linux kernel can deliver plenty fast.

Windows kernel is solid enough and all, but lacking a significant chunk of functionality that can be found in linux. Some of that is because it's in userspace in Windows, some of it is because Linux has been an R&D platform for academia for decades and thus has capabilities that MS wouldn't touch with a thousand foot pole as it represents work with about 0% chance for it affecting revenue and non-0% chance of it being a maintenance burden.

I meant the costs of users electing not to upgrade (doing security updates for 3-5 code streams) versus the revenue of personal-use upgrade revenue (which might be nearly nothing).

I doubt that the situation will move that way any more than it already has. The question remains what competitive pressure pushes them into making Windows a loss leader? If you say the competitive pressure is more on the phone and/or tablet front, Microsoft is already doing that ('with Bing' for tablets, and their phone platform is free for any partner that cares). On the laptop/desktop, there is zero competitive pressure (OSX and Linux share *combined* is less than MS's 'failure' that is Windows 8). It's a nice thought that platforms that many of us hold dear could be significant enough to influence the behavior of Microsoft in such a dramatic way, but it's merely a fantasy. Android and IOS has made MS change some things, but nothing in the form factors MS currently charge for.

I could see them deciding the costs of users upgrading isn't worth the revenue of charging for upgrades, but when a vendor wants to preload Windows on a desktop or traditional laptop, you bet your ass MS will continue to demand their slice of that pie (Enterprise is a big cash cow, but so to is the revenue from device manufacturers).

That 'one time' is basically from their inception to today. MS revenue in the industry is only behind Apple and IBM. Their biggest money makers continue to be Windows and Office. Windows 8.1, generally cited as MS's failure and antiquated approach compared to Apple 'giving away' OSX (including updates with hardware purchase really) has a larger market share than all the other desktop platforms combined, despite those being 'free' and Windows costing money. Their 'failure' is massively more successful than the competition.

I'm stuck using it due to work and get pissed at it so much and really appreciate using a Linux desktop platform more, but I'm not so deluded as to ignore the market realities. MS isn't going to open source windows (in fact it really can't, there's too much third party cross-licensing deals) and it won't even 'give it away' except under confusing situations that ensure their bread and butter revenue source is protected (for the 'life of the product', not clarifying speculation that they are going subscription, pirates get free upgrade, but still not 'genuine', so really nothing changed).