Microsoft Linux is not what you thought (or hoped)
techrepublic.com
techrepublic.com
In a commodity environment, all choices are functionally equivalent. Corn from this supplier can be used in all the same ways as corn from that one. Because of this, all units of a given commodity tend to be priced the same at the same place and time.
Operating systems are now a commodity with a price of free. Microsoft hasn't charged anybody for Windows for years, and neither does Apple charge for its OS or upgrades anymore. Those used to be a big part of those companies' revenue. What changed?
Both Microsoft and Apple started making more money from services than from licenses. Even when sold as an "Enterprise License," the real product is not the otherwise-free software, it's the support you get with it that enterprise customers must have to keep the lights on.
Since Linux was always free, the profitable Linux company (Red Hat) got into that business of selling services and support right away. The other side of this business for MS and Red Hat is hosting. For Apple, who was never good at hosting, they got into selling music as a service and made enough money from that to make OS income irrelevant.
So we have reached the point in personal computer history where all operating systems are free commodities with zero-to-few distinguishing features between them. The users' choice rides on their comfort level with the surrounding environment, the specific tools they can or can't use, and the products in which they have sunk costs -- existing things that have to keep working. Those are the things that MS is selling to with this Linux push. Keeping folks on the Windows juice.
Here's the rub. Devs like Linux and open source. That's not going away. Users, however, overwhelmingly live on Windows. The stats aren't even close. Windows owns the desktop, full stop.
How does Microsoft give devs what they want and users, too? By subsuming Linux into Windows. In other words, featurizing it. Rather than extinguish Linux (not doable), Microsoft is extending Linux's reach into Windows boxes. Frankly, it's brilliant and harkens back to the good old days of mainframe virtualization when the OS you run was completely irrelevant and unrelated to the OS the hardware was running.
It's well know that one of the best ways to kill a competitor's product is to featurize it. In other words, add what they do as a feature to your product, making them irrelevant on their own. Linux had already done a pretty good job of making itself irrelevant on the desktop, lacking as it is does even a simple, standardized executable form that regular humans can double-click on and install. This is kind of Job #1 for software. But I digress.
By making Linux a feature of Windows, it won't matter one whit where devs like to work. Their apps will simply run on Windows. Microsoft will provide that one-click executable and they will virtualize the entire environment so well that the Windows user will not know or care that Linux was ever involved. Linux users will get the device support they gripe about not having since the devices will all be virtualized, too.
This is truly the best of both worlds. It's not E^3 (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish) because Linux won't be extinguished. Instead, it will continue to be the place where independent and open source dev happens to a large degree. The only change will be Microsoft facilitating the deployment of those "Linux" apps (that term soon to be irrelevant) to a wider audience, and that's a Very Good Thing.
That would reduce their programmer requirements because they would no longer be working on the OS, but only on the GUI. That is pretty much what Apple did around 20 years ago with OSX. It would also permit them to make new releases every year or so, instead of every 5 years.
Meanwhile the world's open-source resources will maintain the underlying GNU-Linux OS that Microsoft, like every other software company, can freely use.