Microsoft President Brad Smith Acknowledges They Were Previously Wrong On Open-Source

[Cyberax]

Not even that much; if they simply release MS Office for Linux, then I will believe them. Or Exchange, or Sharepoint, or AD. Anything that is in common usage. And I mean a feature parity release, not a hobbled Lite edition as they did with Office for Mac for so many years. But they won't. Not ever.

I'd worked with MS source code... There's no way they can easily port Office to Linux, it would require a major rewrite (macOS version of Office was forked from the main Office tree looooooong ago). The same applies to AD, it's too deeply integrated into the MS Server code base.

Exchange for Linux is possible, but not really that important. If you can afford Exchange then you can afford couple more thousand USD for a Windows license.

Note, that MS SQL Server now works great on Linux.

[Teggs]

The tiger is changing its stripes, as some animals will when the environment changes and they need to blend in to hunt.

Still a tiger.

[miabrahams]

MS is still on the wrong side of history in many aspects.

Whether or not they're on the "wrong side of history" they are raking in more money today than they ever have and their business continues to grow. Where are the enterprise grade open source alternatives to MS products? When is the Year of the Linux Desktop going to arrive?

[shmerl]

Whether or not they're on the "wrong side of history" they are raking in more money today than they ever have and their revenues continue to grow. Where are the enterprise grade open source alternatives to MS products? When is the Year of the Linux Desktop going to arrive?

Should we care about what they rake? The are still still hostile to open source in various ways, despite their claims for the opposite.

[Moscato]

Open Source Net Framework completely no just Core for servers or else shut up.

.net 5 will be completely opensource

[Volta]

M$ is cancer and their spyware OS called windows 10.

[Volta]

Whether or not they're on the "wrong side of history" they are raking in more money today than they ever have and their business continues to grow. Where are the enterprise grade open source alternatives to MS products? When is the Year of the Linux Desktop going to arrive?

When is the year of m$ on smartphones going to arrive? Never, because Linux already killed it. There are killer Open Source apps m$ can only dream about.

[yoshi314]

I'd worked with MS source code... There's no way they can easily port Office to Linux, it would require a major rewrite (macOS version of Office was forked from the main Office tree looooooong ago). The same applies to AD, it's too deeply integrated into the MS Server code base.

Exchange for Linux is possible, but not really that important. If you can afford Exchange then you can afford couple more thousand USD for a Windows license.

Note, that MS SQL Server now works great on Linux.

from what my local mssql gurus told me, licensing is so stupid, that it's still better to get windows server with mssql. also ad integration (domain accounts in db) is lackluster on linux version.

if you want a simple mssql db setup, it will work. everything more advanced is a hassle.

[Cyberax]

if you want a simple mssql db setup, it will work. everything more advanced is a hassle.

MSSQL actually quite often works faster on Linux than on Windows, especially on high-end servers. AD authentication also works fine, but I personally recommend against it anyway.

As it is, there are multiple companies running huge MSSQL clusters on Linux. And large MSSQL clusters (thousands of nodes) were the reason for the port, because managing Windows Servers is just problematic at these scales. GUI tools are useless and you need to find people who are good with Windows scripting, and this is not at all trivial. So there was a clear-cut business case for the MSSQL port.

But even the largest Exchange/AD installations can run on a small cluster (tens of nodes). They still can be comfortably managed using regular GUI tools, so the business case for Exchange-on-Linux is much weaker.

[onlyLinuxLuvUBack]

The tiger is changing its stripes, as some animals will when the environment changes and they need to blend in to hunt.

Still a tiger.

Or maybe a lying hyena.... see youtube: lion king be prepared