As I was reading this article I kept thinking to myself "Microsoft is going to boot Firefox from Windows" before realizing that MS doesn't have that sort of power (compared to say Apple).
It's really interesting how MS will approach this. Unlike Apple, MS doesn't have direct control over which apps go on the operating system, they aren't even in a position like Google where their app store is the dominant platform for getting apps.
This will be interesting, interesting to see how MS responds. Will they give in and let users easily set their default browser or will this turn into a cat and mouse game.
Lastly I think what MS is doing with the default browser is foolish. Did they learn nothing from the antitrust cases of the 2000's
> Did they learn nothing from the antitrust cases of the 2000's
They learned for awhile- until the rest of the industry caught up.
This might sound weird but I've actually been rooting for Microsoft a lot lately. A majority of their revenue is not from ads and lock-in BS and they weren't called in front of Congress recently over antitrust concerns. I was hoping they would set themselves apart from the pack in an odd way by making good software and hardware products that people enjoy using. (xbox, windows, office, WSL, VSCode, Visual Studio, hololens, phones, laptops, Halo on Steam, etc.)
Seeing the new browser war and direction Windows 11 is headed, now has me worried. The widgets pane is obviously for serving ads.
I understand that these public companies are required to act in the best interests of shareholders but I fear that the obsessive push for revenue gains only benefits short term shareholders. Long term shareholders get the shaft when every decision is aimed at squeezing revenue just for the next quarter.
Edit: I'm not a Microsoft/Windows-Stan either, I've been using Linux intermittently since 2006-ish and now daily drive Fedora as my main.
Microsoft's ad problem is that they damage their existing products to advertise new products that are a lost cause.
There was that "crash your desktop" bug caused by an ad for Teams but longer ago there was OneDrive... DropBox, Box, Google and many others could make file sharing programs that could sync successfully, but somehow Microsoft couldn't.
To add injury to insult they made OneDrive the default way to save files in Microsoft Office, but sometimes a problem with OneDrive would mean YOU COULDN'T SAVE YOUR WORK AT ALL.
If you've had that experience ONCE you are NEVER going to use OneDrive ever.
Then there was that time that OneNote was a pretty good product but Microsoft killed it by inserting at least five icons on and around your desktop (practically up your nose) signalling that it is absolute garbage that they're trying to force up your A*.
Google kills products after the launch, but Microsoft kills them in the process of launch with it's internal advertising.
> To add injury to insult they made OneDrive the default way to save files in Microsoft Office, but sometimes a problem with OneDrive would mean YOU COULDN'T SAVE YOUR WORK AT ALL.
It's worse than that. The change to default OneDrive breaks auto-save everywhere that isn't OneDrive. On the Mac, this includes breaking auto-save on pre-Azure Sharepoint instances and network shares, but some of that works sometimes on Windows. So Office is a worse product even if you never use OneDrive.
Yep and as a Mac user with office your just left wondering why. Why on earth would I use one drive on Mac. One of the many reasons stopped using office on Mac. Rip excel.
OneDrive on Windows is fine now, but oh my gosh OneDrive for Mac is a mess. I didn't use it until my new M1 Mac (so maybe they are re-implementing everything without kernel extensions and it's causing issues), but it absolutely sucks. Every time it starts it can't find the folder, and I have to tell it where it is, then it will say "up-to-date" but nothing will actually have synced, then when it eventually catches up it spews duplicate files everywhere because every other box I have OneDrive on has updated since this computer actually synced. And Office doesn't understand that when I save in the ~/OneDrive folder, it goes into OneDrive, so it won't enable AutoSave or sharing unless you do a Save As and save it to the OneDrive SharePoint site it automatically adds.
It's like OneDrive on Windows 5-6 years ago. I know other people that used it, it worked fine at one point, but now it's terrible.
Icon fonts like `Material Icons` are a terrible idea for exactly this reason.
They can also confuse search engines (Try a Google search for "keyboard_arrow_up" and scroll down a few results for instance, Bing too if you put it in quotes).
Webmasters should use SVGs or bitmaps with appropriate alt or aria attributes; but it's easier to just load in a font and hope that it loads fast enough to not cause problems / that the user doesn't override it
I was also kinda liked The New Microsoft and prepared to put my anger towards them to the side (I remember the ACPI memo days). Also, as a grown-up computer user, I got appropriate number of licenses (for every Microsoft application we use) for my family and personal computers.
However, the latest GitHub Copilot stuff, their agreement with OpenAI, return of their embrace, extend, extinguish tactics with GitHub, VSCode and other stuff undone everything.
It's their DNA now. All Microsoft Empire is built with crushing monopoly as their core value and driving force. Changing this requires more than changing a mere CEO and posting a "We Love Linux" banner.
The only really good thing they do is hardware.
Posted from my Debian 11 box using Microsoft Keyboard.
Every company aspires to be big enough to integrate the entire stack and kick out all their competition. Only a few manage to do it.
There was never a new Microsoft. There was only Microsoft when they admitted they didn't have a stranglehold monopoly on PCs anymore.
It's as basic a strategy as anything you'd find in Art of War: When you're #2, cooperate with #3 to take down #1. When you're #1, pull up the ladder so #2 and #3 can't use it.
> The existence of company DNA is a marketing fib.
It isn't - company DNA doesn't always represent positive attributes.
Company culture, incentive structure, priorities and skill-sets are all part of what's given the shorthand "company DNA" (and all are self-reinforcing/self-replicating. Google's DNA makes it exceptional at developing and scaling complex web services, but terrible at product longevity (except for the break-out hits), and terrible at consumer electronics. Apple is mostly the opposite. In spite of all their efforts, both companies struggle to be half as good as the other one in the areas outside of their core competency, because of their respective company DNA.
I recently left Apple and my new company gave me a choice of windows or macOS as my device and I chose windows. I’m not really sure why. But I do have to say after not using windows for 10+ years it’s come a long way. Wsl simply is amazing. Vscode works perfectly with it. The office apps are leaps and bounds better than there macOS counterparts. I certainly have never been a MS lover but I think they are much better now than their 90s reputation.
They are also, very much, embracing Linux. More and more of Azure has Linux underpinnings and we'll see more integration of Linux in Windows, starting with WSLg.
I mean a lot of the Azure stuff is realising that they could either: continue offering Windows Server only and likely miss out on a lot of potential customers but gain some sales of Windows Server, or start offering Linux in their cloud offering. Ultimately they decided to do the latter, and I'd bet that it's the more profitable option.
I think the writing has been on the wall for a while now - Windows (server or otherwise) is no longer considered the money maker - now it's Office and Azure.
Nadella was literally the top Cloud Computing executive at the company before he was picked for CEO.
Yes, but likely they will then "extend" Linux so if an dev is using WSL to develop a linux project you will need to install MS things on your production enviroment, likely in the NET Core world... I am sure this will happen with the full support the Linux Foundation whom they paid off. It will also come by default in Azure I am sure
After they "extend" with MS open source then start to require just a few closed binaries, that is not a big deal right, for the functionality... see VSCode as an example of this in modern times. This likely will be a paid feature unless you use Azure where it will be free...
I don't really see that as much of a concern. If Microsoft announced plans for world domination tomorrow, all I'd need to change in my workflow is which fork of VS Code I'm using.
What kind of EEE do they currently do? Outside of GH, I don’t even see them having any kind of position dominant enough to extinguish anything and GH doesn’t seem to have shifted in any way since MS bought them, they were "value add on top of git" before and are still now.
Why? I mean it's clearly Embrace. But Embrace and Extend are the goals of OSS. MS is a for profit company true. But OSS has never been anti-profit. The last E is problematic of course and MS has a history of going for Extinguish in the past. However I haven't seen any sign of that behavior in the current leadership and they've been doing their thing for a while now. You may not believe MS can change and you may not trust them. But that's a faith statement right now not a fact statement.
I think, Microsoft clearly understands that Linux is not going anywhere, but they can try to limit where it goes instead of trying to make it go away.
Linux has two fronts: Server and Desktop. It's clearly won in server space, in some very important categories.
But, what if Microsoft can make Windows attractive enough, so it can run Linux applications without the Linux desktop itself, and prevent developers from installing a bona fide distribution to their boxes alongside Windows? With this, they can
- Add some proprietary extensions to WSL to keep some dev tools trapped
- Double down on secure boot and key management, citing "We can run these applications anyway, where's the monopoly?"
- Slow down adoption of desktop Linux installations
Hence, push Linux to server space to reclaim the "creative/young" desktop space, and prevent them from becoming irrelevant, and pushing Linux to systems rooms of cloud, so it becomes something like "The real world" in Matrix (the movie)?
I've understood the second E to mean "...with our proprietary stuff". Building OSS on top of other OSS is still just Embrace.
An example of Extend would be building features for WSL that only work in WSL, not Linux proper. So now people become dependent on the MS ecosystem, and lock-in begins; the lock-in is what enables the Extinguish phase.
Hard to say. I think to some extent there would have to be something to 'extinguish'.
At this point, 3d rendering is a bit of a crapshoot; Multi-platform vendors will likely have a pluggable rendering pipeline anyway (i.e. need to use DirectX for XBox, PS4/PS5 APIs, Metal for iOs, DirectX for Windows, maybe Vulkan if they developed on Linux or just want to make it easier to port later).
If I reach in my head, perhaps some form of 'DirectAI' API could limit competition in some markets or force vendor lock-in.
Otherwise, I think Microsoft is in a space where they seem to be pretty OK with; being the #2 in a lot of spaces is still profitable, with the benefit of less oversight regarding antitrust.
The other place I -might- forsee Microsoft doing 'lock-in' is around their developer tooling. By that I mean, they have a lot of cool tech that is a PITA to deploy at scale... unless you use Azure. SignalR scaleout would be a prime example that comes to mind.
I don't exactly see how WSL fits in any "extinguish" strategy. Maybe in regards to desktop Linux? I doubt Microsoft are aiming to extinguish desktop Linux considering its currently irrelevant market share and Windows no longer being Microsoft's bread winner. WSL seems to be more for the benefit of Azure, their real money maker, and backend developers.
I'd wager it started development as an internal tool considering how much of their workforce now works on Azure and the Windows team being absorbed into the Azure department.
I imagine WSL doesn't really affect most Linux desktop users and it really only impacts those that used full-blown VMs for dev work on Windows anyway.
I doubt many people are dual-booting on work computers and WSL really only benefits developers, which are most likely developing something on Linux (i.e. server linux) for work.
Again, Windows is no longer the bread winner of Microsoft and desktop Linux is comparatively irrelevant to Microsoft considering it represents like 1% of the market. Both ChromeOS and macOS are more direct competitors to Windows.
Why would they work to extinguish a non-competitor for a product that has taken a backseat from all of their other products? It just doesn't make sense.
> I doubt many people are dual-booting on work computers and WSL really only benefits developers, which are most likely developing something on Linux (i.e. server linux) for work.
I was dual booting Linux. I find WSL perfect for this because I can basically have different distributions with a lot of common tools stored in a windows folder. It’s perfect!
>Again, Windows is no longer the bread winner of Microsoft and desktop Linux is comparatively irrelevant to Microsoft considering it represents like 1% of the market.
If it's not their breadwinner then they should port over their office suite and the Windows API to Linux.
If it's not their breadwinner then they should port over their office suite and the Windows API to Linux.
How much do you think it would cost to port Office to Linux? How many extra Office licenses do you think they'd sell? Given your estimates of these two numbers, do you think Microsoft would turn a profit off of Office for Linux.
Anyway they've already 'ported' a decent subset of Office to Linux in form of Office365
This isn't helping your argument. Why would they do that? Again, Linux is comparatively irrelevant at 1% market share. It's not worth the cost, which is why most games don't have Linux ports.
I'd argue the opposite... Although I'm changing jobs in a few weeks, WSL2 has allowed for a push towards Linux/Docker usage and a significant uptake for new development. This is in a historically mostly Windows environment... if it weren't for WSL, it would still all be windows.
The shift in open development of .Net Core/5/6 has been nice too. I absolutely love the Remoting extensions/tooling for VS Code as well. I can edit/terminal on remote systems with ease. All of these things have made actually building/deploying to Linux servers a pleasure.
I jokingly say that Windows is one of the best Linux Desktop distros at this point, and there's some merit to that claim. I have the new terminal set to my WSL environment as default, spend most of my time in VS Code using WSL and Docker. Of course, I'm also switching my personal desktop back to (only) PopOS in a few weeks, also bought an M1 Macbook.
I'm not tethered to Windows in any meaningful way, but the water is pretty nice. It's crap like in TFA that causes me to not want to stay in the Windows pool.
GitHub is still pretty independent of Microsoft. Internally it’s a different pay structure, somewhat different employee benefits, finance decisions, and different leadership.
Oh no, not the "potential!" Please, I had completely forgotten that Microsoft owned npm until reading your comment. There's no more "potential" there than any other product/service from any other company, and Microsoft has done absolutely nothing to indicate that they will screw with npm.
For CoPilot, you need a language model, where the current best one is made by OpenAI, which doesn't like to share its stuff.
This is the same OpenAI, which got $1B from Microsoft, and gave commercial licenses to Microsoft to use GPT-3.
Which is the company which also owns GitHub, and also has a platform like Azure, so it can just "lend" GPT-3 and some servers to train the said model on some code, which GitHub clearly has possession of.
So, while they're different, and it's casually owned by the other, this ownership allows them to put one's code and other's GPT-3 access into "good" use.
At the end of the day, public code is public, so license doesn't matter, eh?*
*: CoPilot is trained on all public code containing GPL, AGPL and similar licenses which doesn't allow proprietary use, so it's another ball of hair.
I think they recognize that, but are stating that Microsoft has taken a hands-off approach after acquiring GitHub and that GitHub mostly runs independent of Microsoft, similar to NPM.
I understand the temptation to root for New Microsoft, but we should all remember that large corporations are extremely powerful psychopaths. Anything they do that seems ethical is self-serving, not part of a moral code that they will follow even when it hurts them.
I understand, but disagree with the sentiment... Companies are a collection of different people, with differing actual personalities, including agreements, disagreements and meaningful conflict and negotiations.
To some extent it comes from leadership down, to another it starts at the ground floor. In the end, I think most MS movement has been self-serving, that doesn't make it inherently bad or good. I'm not liking the OS-shift, which seems to be following Apple/Google in a lot of ways.
Of course not. I love New Microsoft's products and customer/dev support. I vastly prefer Microsoft over any other FAAMG. I trust them more and think they're far less harmful than any of the others.
All that said, I don't believe any of this is because of ethical principles. It's because they make more money by being "good" than by antagonizing their own society and customers.
> Companies are a collection of different people, with differing actual personalities, including agreements, disagreements and meaningful conflict and negotiations.
Yes, but as we've seen throughout human history, morals disappear as soon as people are part of a large group. You can participate (and even lead!) while telling yourself that the things you're doing as a group are totally out of your control.
For example, I have a Jewish friend at Facebook who is appalled by their enablement of conspiracy theories, but he still works at Facebook.
If everyone at Facebook who objected to their company's behavior would find another job, I guarantee the behavior would change or the company would collapse.
> I think most MS movement has been self-serving, that doesn't make it inherently bad or good
I guess it depends on your definition of "bad". I have never observed a large corporation take a huge hit to its bottom line in order to stand up for something moral. I don't think I ever will. To me, that's "bad" -- a group of people who exercise an enormous amount of power without feeling that they're personally responsible for the consequences. That's why I described it as psychopathy.
> I understand that these public companies are required to act in the best interests of shareholders
This is not true. Public companies are only required to be honest with shareholders, no more or less. The shareholders are free to invest elsewhere if the don't like how a company is run, or to exercise whatever voting rights they bought with the shares.
That might have been true in the past, but now there are activist shareholders who will try to take control rather than dump the stock and move on to something else. After all, it is their investment, and if they choose to raise their voice then that is their right as well.
Sure they can raise their voice but they're limited in what they can achieve, legally speaking. Especially in large companies with a lot of shareholders. Unless the companies by-laws give shareholders undue influence, which would be unusual.
It's true that activists can make a nuisance of themselves if there are enough of them but they basically have to hope to get sections of the press on their side and for the company to care about that. The risk, of course, is the bad press ends up hurting their own investment.
In short, they have no legal recourse unless the company mislead them in some way.
Are you really this unfamiliar with this or being obtuse about it? Of course it is unlikely that a single shareholder will have enough stock to hold clout, but that's not how these people operate. Just like no one person makes a difference when protesting anything. You find like minded people, gather together, and make your large number of people heard. Sure, it's not easy to get a large enough percentage of the stock, but there are ways of doing it and it has been done and will continue to be done. A recent tech example is how Disney was pushed by its investors to pursue the streaming options [0].
Have you tried playing this out to the end? You're hung up on words like "require" that I, some random dude on the interweb used, rather than actually realizing the intent or spirit of the comment. You think any company receiving negative press is going to just allow that to continue without addressing the concerns somehow? An activist investor/shareholder doesn't just stop with press briefings. If they still feel agrieved, they can attempt to manipulate the board by having their own member installed. From there, they can direct if the CEO even gets to keep their job. As a board member, they have a lot more power.
I feel like you're limiting your imagination on how much power stockholders can have. Some companies are probably a little more resielient against this type of "attack", but rich people play all sorts of games because they feel slighted or bored. Watch the TV show "Billions" if you want some fun fictional aspects, but these stories are not made in a vacuum.
Btw, naming calling does not help you make your case, whatever that may be. Neither does watching a fictional TV show. I'm really not inclined to continue this if this is the level of discourse.
Can you show me one instance of activist shareholders of a major company ousting a CEO via filling the board with shareholder nominated directors? And no, "imagining" it happening isn't evidence of it happening.
If you think the term obtuse is name calling then that's kind of on you. That's not my intent. It's just a word that aptly describes the conversation. Obtuse and ignorant are often misunderstood and taken as name calling when if someone was name calling words like stupid and dumb would be better suited.
Shareholder activism can work. Yes, there are plenty of search results titles that show the activism attempts to oust someone failed. However, I did not pursue further (beyond the scope of your question and lack of willing to search on your own) if the attempt still had a change towards the activist's agenda.
It seems that shareholder activists seem to be disliked in the normal business world, but the normal business world has taken us down some dark paths so I think they can take a hike. Businesses have shown they care little to nothing about the "greater good", but are only concerned about the stockholders. So people have gotten savvy to that notion, and have started to weaponize stock ownership. Just like anything else, it can used for "evil" and it was for a long time with hostile takeovers. Now, these takeovers can have an impetus for good instead of greed.
> I understand that these public companies are required to act in the best interests of shareholders but I fear that the obsessive push for revenue gains only benefits short term shareholders. Long term shareholders get the shaft when every decision is aimed at squeezing revenue just for the next quarter.
Never so succinctly have I seen described the economic problem of the modern age; endless growth for its own sake. Sure, it's motivated by profit, but society and global elites don't act as if there are significant downsides to an investment-driven economy. Rather, it's treated as a virtue, else we wouldn't all be buying into it, literally and figuratively, for the bare minimum of not losing our wealth.
> Halo on Steam
Hah, you don't hear much about Halo anymore. But it's entirely possible you may be able to play Halo on Steam on your Linux machine in the near future. Combat Evolved plays really well on my M1 Macbook through Parallels (even with Anniversary mode, given some settings tweaks) and Reach is playable but drops a lot of frames; if you ever get a Linux machine that runs on ARM then you can virtualize Windows for ARM in a way that blows away any x86_64 emulation I've seen in the past.
Of course most of the work to make that a reality isn't even because of Microsoft besides their compiling of Windows for ARM.
Besides that...
> xbox, windows, office, WSL, VSCode, Visual Studio, hololens, phones, laptops, Halo on Steam, etc.
Honestly, the only decent things you mentioned are Office, VSCode, and Halo, which are all things that just about any other company could have created. Office itself is begging for a viable alternative, but has been effectively grandfathered in to being a necessity for businesses. I mentioned Halo but not Xbox because, IMO, Xbox is an obsolete concept and Microsoft knows this.
There's GitHub, but it's only a matter of time before Microsoft decides to add "plans" for features that are already free as well as forms of prioritization for all things Windows.
I guess I'm not exactly sure what point I'm trying to make besides that I kind of agree with you in the sense that M$ has been less problematic than other Big Tech in recent years. With Windows 11, now I'm not so sure.
Imo their Lumia phones (and the accompanying OS and new UI philosophy) were also something special, and I say that as a hater of those products earlier on (i.e. before I got to know them better). It's a shame that those phones didn't catch on.
Just a side note: I already can play Halo on Steam on Linux with only one minor issue (Proton's conversion of DirectX to Vulkan works almost flawlessly, but doesn't seem to handle single-faced triangles, so the hologram of Cortana in the opening scene looks bad as you see the back of her head transparently through her face).
> but doesn't seem to handle single-faced triangles
Highly unlikely that this is a problem with backface culling, that's too basic to screw up without also affecting countless other games.
I haven't played Halo but if [0] is how it is supposed to look then there is proper occulsion (i.e. depth testing) between different parts of her body. This would also make backface culling only a performance optimization if everything else is working correctly so may have been left disabled.
I suspect it that this is like the usual situation at MS, most employees think this strategy is dumb, but there's that one guy who's still living like it's 1991 and he's got good connections with management, so they let them run unchecked. That's the person who's coming up with such idiotic strategies.
I'm not so sure. It's possible all the employees who thought this was dumb left before or shortly after Windows 8, so all that's left are people who don't care and the incompetent.
> and they weren't called in front of Congress recently over antitrust concerns
Congress hasn't exactly been a hotbed of anti-trust activity over the past 40 years. I wouldn't take the absence of action here as anything particularly meaningful.
Microsoft has all kinds of ways they do vertical lockin, it is not has overt as say Apple, but do not think for a second that the company that promoted Embrace, Extend, Extinguish does not have methods to lock in users
I suspect they will buckle -- but only partially, with an allowlist of browsers blessed with this ability. This will quiet the noise, but will also make it harder for small and innovative browsers to compete, as I doubt Microsoft will build out the processes to become blessed due to cost/benefit.
Probably, but for security reasons the only correct thing to do is remove the ability of Edge to set default browser within the browser.
The only option app developers - including internal Microsoft ones - should have is open some OS settings app in a supported way, but the user has to accept the selection.
It should work like an Android permission prompt. The OS should have an official method for apps to request to become the default (not merely link to the default apps page of settings). The OS prompt should look like this:
Would you like to make <APP NAME> the default app for <APP CATEGORY>?
[No and don't ask again] [Yes]
Any app that wants to become the default (including Edge) should go through the official prompt. If the user has already said no, and the app wants to continue nagging, at this point the app will be able to link into the settings (but not pop up the official prompt).
> I kept thinking to myself "Microsoft is going to boot Firefox from Windows" before realizing that MS doesn't have that sort of power (compared to say Apple).
Actually, when it comes to Windows and macOS, Microsoft has about the same power as Apple does when it comes to limiting what software can and can't run on their operating systems.
Defender on Windows works like Gatekeeper does on macOS. Defender gets to decide what runs or doesn't run on a Windows system, using a similar approach to Gatekeeper.
Both Apple and Microsoft require developers to regularly buy certificates to sign the software they intend to distribute to macOS and Windows users, and they require developers to remain in good standing with either company. Unsigned software is treated as if it is radioactive by both operating systems, and macOS on M1 Macs goes one step further by deprecating unsigned binaries entirely.
If Apple or Microsoft want to, they can revoke a developer's certificates, and any app that was signed with them will be prevented from running by Gatekeeper or Defender. They can also choose not to renew a developer's certificates, preventing apps from running when the certificates they were signed with expire.
To 99.9% of users, apps signed with revoked or expired certificates will be portrayed as either being broken or malicious by macOS or Windows.
Which is similar to what Apple does for MacOS (and Google for Android).
They haven't prevented people from installing untaxed software, but they have made it a scary and difficult process for the average user, and made it very difficult for anyone to sell software without giving Apple/Google a cut.
It would be funny if Firefox would warn you about downloading Firefox because it is marked as malware. Would server Mozilla right for letting Google maintain that list, who have shown they do not care about false positives.
Microsoft were doing this for ages... From the NT kernel to the shell. To stay above competition, they have tons of different undocumented APIs they keep for themselves to use, and don't guarantee it to exist or stay unchanged in future. In fact this is the response. Nothing special about this particular one. Developers reverse engineer those, and try to rely on them, all the time.
Every OS and library has some form of undocumented/internal APIs that they don't want users of that library or OS to be relying upon.
Hell, Linux even uses DRM (not the Direct Rendering Manager, Digital Rights Management) to check if your LKM is licensed properly to call those APIs. GPL-incompatible libraries only get to link to functions that are rough equivalents to syscalls.
Calling what you describe DRM is pretty deceptive. Can you get access to DRM-ed materials by promising to share them freely under an open license?
That said I'm surprised by what you describe as I'm struggling to understand how that works -- you're saying the Linux kernel has a secret API, surely one can read the source and/or documentation and find the API details. Or are you saying calls to kernel APIs are cryptographically protected? Could you give details of what this system is called, thanks.
Under the GPL, a "combined work" must also be distributed under the GPL. Given that use of certain kernel APIs requires the inclusion of large GPL'd header files, the kernel developers require that any modules that include this GPL'd code be also released under the GPL.
In order to make it more difficult for developers of kernels modules that break the law by running roughshod over the GPL, the kernel developers decided to only make these available to modules that claim to be under the GPL [10]. Please note that module developers can still easily distribute modules that use the "GPL only" APIs but they have to explicitly state that they are using GPL only code (thereby signalling that any copyright infringement is willful).
Calling this "DRM" seems a little disingenuous to me. Anybody can legally remove these protections from their own kernels without any legal repercussions. Removing DRM protections (in the USA) is a felony that carries up to five years in prison. DRM is intentionally obfuscated and poorly documented. The kernel makes its license clear and obvious.
Under DMCA 1201, this sort of measure would probably be legally considered DRM. All you need is a technical mechanism that controls access to a copyrighted work. You do not need obfuscation or encryption in order to make 1201 claims.
Whether or not GPLv2 precludes a DMCA 1201 claim is still in question. On one hand, the GPL says you can make whatever changes you like. On the other, the Linux kernel module loader is specifically enforcing GPL's share-alike requirement, which is a predicate of the right to make modifications to the kernel. This is the heart of what DMCA 1201 is trying to do: extend copyright protection to software that enforces copyright.
If Linux had been re-licensed to GPLv3, this wouldn't be an issue, because v3 specifically has a clause intended to disclaim any and all construable technical protection measures under DMCA 1201.
The zfsonlinux developers complained a while ago that some API they were using became GPL only and I think they had to write a wrapper in GPL to get around it.
I'm on mobile so I can't give you more details but you can probably find more if you look in that direction
Kernel is GPL, so only GPL modules can touch its internal APIs. For non-derived works, there is a subset of APIs, that are declared to be fine if used by non-GPL code. ZFS had a problem, where they were using something that should not be used (fp in kernel), which got removed and they had to find a replacement, which was GPL-only.
It is also necessary to say, that this is honor-based. Any module declares its license and the linker either allows or not allows resolving a symbol. There are no checks whether the module is really GPL or not, it is to show intent, and if you want to cheat, you must do it willfully, not by accident.
> ZFS had a problem, where they were using something that should not be used (fp in kernel), which got removed and they had to find a replacement, which was GPL-only.
All that symbol did was tell the kernel to save the fpu registers.
It's dishonorable of the relevant kernel developers to pretend that's something relevant to the GPL.
It was more complicated than that. Some architectures do not support that.
And what's more pressing is, that it is an internal implementation details. Preserving it for ZFS would mean that they have to keep internal implementation detail for an external project, that does not care to cooperate!
These two symbols were obsolete for almost two decades. Should they keep them just for ZFS? Or should ZFS switch? If it were GPL project, or better, part of the kernel, it would be already fixed and everyone would go on with their lives.
There were two sets of exports. __kernel_fpu_begin/end and kernel_fpu_begin/end.
The only meaningful difference was that one was marked GPL and the other wasn't.
Removing the one with __ can be justified pretty easily.
Insisting that the ones they kept should still be marked 'GPL' is where it gets ridiculous. Going in and out of FPU mode is not something that makes your code derivative of the kernel code.
it seems quite clear ZFS is not a derived work of the Linux kernel, given it was developed for and extracted from Solaris, and that same code works on FreeBSD and Illumunos
> In other words: it's still very much a special case, and if the question was "can I just use FP in the kernel" then the answer is still a resounding NO, since other architectures may not support it AT ALL.
They do have some control though. If you don't list with their app store they default to accusing your software of being malware and hiding the run button.
This isn't completely accurate, if the app is being seen only in very small numbers the run button is hidden under "More Info" but when Smartscreen has seen your app enough that it can be more confident it's less harmful the "Run Anyway" button is surfaced.
FWIW, on iOS, links from Google apps open up on Chrome if it's installed, regardless of what your default browser is. Apple seems to be okay with that.
Any app can do app specific URLs on iOS to invoke particular apps with content. I would guess that Google apps detect the presence of Chrome and modify the URLs to be Chrome specific rather than generic https URLs. Its ok with Apple because that is a standard supported mechanism on iOS.
As a user who expects all https links to open within my default browser, Google's exploitation of this workaround breaks the guarantees I expect out of the OS.
There are a lot of other "features" that are technically feasible but not allowed on AppStore. This to me should have been on that list.
Good point. Yeah, I don't like it either. Thinking about it a bit more, I share your surprise that they allowed this. I guess they need it for google.com links to make things work together, but Apple could have told them non-google links should be opened in the default browser.
> MS doesn't have that sort of power (compared to say Apple)
That's an interesting question. I suppose Apple could refuse to sign the executable, which would make things tricky but could they actually boot Firefox from MacOS?
Do I remember Apple updating XProtect to remove a Zoom component that allowed attackers to potentially hijack users' webcams? I do. Zoom had installed a hidden web server on users' computers that was (a) exploitable and (b) not removed upon deletion of the app. As a result, users who had previously deleted Zoom might not even realize they were vulnerable to this potential attack.
Zoom worked with Apple and updated the app hours later.
You can kill XProtect if you want by disabling System Integrity Protection and modifying the malware signature file.
I suspect Microsoft will modify their undocumented API that they have no obligation to maintain as-is so that it only accepts EXEs in Edge's program folder or something.
My guess is they'll just leave it. You'll have the one-click for Edge, whatever this workaround/RE is for Firefox, and everything else will be the same. Maybe Mozilla will open source this workaround.
Just wait for those "store-only" versions of windows to grow in distribution, then Microsoft touting store policy for not allowing Firefox in the store...
So I was at my parents house some time ago and my mom's computer is for some reason set allow installing software from the Microsoft store only. Nobody knows how that was set, my mom's computer usage is characterized by randomly clicking on things until the website she wants open, but somehow that option have appeared for her to click on.
I've been wondering. What happens if Edge beats chrome?
Chromium is developed by google, and used by Edge. Will google continue developing chromium just to have Microsoft reap the rewards. If not, is google going to abandon chromium? Will microsoft pick up the slack? If so, are they going to fork chromium and develop on the form, or are they going to work on the original repo? What about the chromium name / trademark.
If this goes wrong, what is google going to think of open-source development. If the second biggest (I think) open source application turns out to have been a failure for the company backing it, what is that going to do to commercial open-source development?
Desktop browsing is the minority and shrinking every year. Google will always have more Chrome users on Android than there are Windows devices in existence.
If it goes well enough for Microsoft, I'd expect Google to change the license/stop publishing and Microsoft to fork from there.
The point of the chromium name is to provide a name that's not the general product name. I haven't looked at the license, but I don't think Google can take that name back; but if they do, Microsoft would just change it to something else, no big deal.
Google has already turned their back on open-source development; so much of Android isn't in AOSP, and I don't think it's coming back. Chrome so far has stayed open-source, but whenever it becomes inconvenient for that to stay, I expect it will. Such is corporate life.
No. The Mozilla Corporation is the largest contributor to the Mozilla Foundation, though most of their money comes from selling the default search rights to Google.
No, I think it was "yes but I want to be pedantic about it". If you had just said "Mozilla" the answer is an easy yes. But you made the mistake of specifying MoFo (as opposed to MoCo).
That said, I work for Mozilla and in practice we're very independent. Our user base, small as it may be compared to the past, is still a valuable bargaining chip. We are still very much fighting for an open and accessible Web in the standards arena (where technical and philosophical arguments work well with the actual Google people doing the work, even if the outcome is not optimal for google the advertising juggernaut.)
> Our user base, small as it may be compared to the past, is still a valuable bargaining chip.
Your userbase is not just small, it is shrinking. While initial attrition may have been do to anti-competitive practices by other browser makers (who you could have taken actions against, if you were actually independent of them), your continued loss of even the hard-core userbase that has stuck around this long can only be explained by your own disregard for the wishes of those users.
You might be right. I would probably even agree with respect to certain decisions.
But I'm also doubtful of your and my armchair quarterbacking, especially when it's hard not to bring in a self-serving angle (as in, it would obviously be better to prioritize X, where X is something I really want). Mozilla does a lot of surveying of current and potential users, and evaluates things in terms of maintenance costs that might not immediately be obvious. I'll bet that neither of us would be able to accurately predict all of those findings.
Stories like "...but power users are who are going to drive adoption, so investing in them is clearly the right strategy even if they're a small component of current users!" are intuitively persuasive. But again, someone who has studied the situation extensively is going to know things that we won't. Off the top of my head: "power users" is an amorphous group (and "self-reported power users" only weakly overlaps with "users who depend on advanced features"); the range of things that cater to power users is vast and all over the place; security, privacy, and maintenance concerns are far larger than the "why can't you just..." crowd ever seems to realize. None of which mean power users are unimportant, just that the tradeoffs are not at all clear.
Again, I'm not saying you're wrong. (Well, except maybe about the anti-competitive bit. The time frames of any legal or governmental action on those grounds is far too long, and often far too sidesteppable. Those things are good for dead companies to eventually receive justice, and for the playing field to be leveled out for future companies. The ROI of $1 spent on chasing down the legal or regulatory rathole pales in comparison to $1 spent on development or marketing.)
Which in this case is equivalent to 'if you owe 10k to Bank its your problem, but if you owe 10M its the bank's problem'.
One way or another Mozilla relies on Google remaining its customer for vast majority of money, while Google being their biggest competitor who eats out ever more of Mozilla's market share every year, further reducing any reason for Google to remain their customer going forward.
They've had other customers in the past and present, and could have others in the future. Should they take less money to not take the money from Google?
This idealism is nice but if you remove privacy unfriendly customers you rule out basically every customer and don't have the money to make a browser at all. Behind Google are Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, and Baidu before you reach duckduckgo who somewhat respects privacy.
If I didn't like to admit it, I wouldn't have clarified that most of the Mozilla Corporation's money comes from Google.
As the other poster mentioned, there's a meaningful distinction between customer and contributor. If Google stopped buying the contract for the default search, someone else would buy it. Like Yahoo did in around ~2014. Or like various other search engines already do in other countries/languages.
It's really interesting how MS will approach this. Unlike Apple, MS doesn't have direct control over which apps go on the operating system, they aren't even in a position like Google where their app store is the dominant platform for getting apps.
This will be interesting, interesting to see how MS responds. Will they give in and let users easily set their default browser or will this turn into a cat and mouse game.
Lastly I think what MS is doing with the default browser is foolish. Did they learn nothing from the antitrust cases of the 2000's