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Poettering works for MS now? That's the best news I've heard in a long time.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
You are at the second step.
This sounds a bit ridiculous. If Linus started working at MS I wonder if people would suddenly think Linux was a MS project and start hating on it.
Hopefully Microsoft will never make a guide on how to install Firefox because then we'd have to have a panic about that too
people keep saying this, but what is their extinguish plan? how could they realistically extinguish linux? it’s not a company they can buy, or even a single thing they can ruin.
If you know the history of Linux, plenty of people almost did. Microsoft has especially tried. Usually through software patents, FUD, and suing the shit out of everybody. If everyone had to rip SystemD out of their systems tomorrow, would it kill Linux? Nah, probably not. But it would be enough to keep those with large pockets from ever picking it over Microsoft's offerings.
They've effectively kept Linux out of their domain for a very long time now.
That is my point, they have tried and failed completely before when their main product was windows licenses. Now, linux is incredibly important to their azure business, they wouldn't want to potentially cause detriment to that and is far more important to them than windows licenses.
Also why would we have to rip out systemd, even if they tried to claim ownership of it and make it proprietary, it could be forked from before the license change and we would keep on going like nothing happened.
I guess you don't remember when Google forked java in Android and still got railed in the courts by Oracle, who simply bought SUN Microsystems in order to gain the rights to do so. It's not as simple as "oh we'll just fork it!" when it comes to patents, intellectual property, etc.
What are you even talking about? systemd is currently under an opensource license, they cant retroactively change that. Any changes would be for it going forward if it is even possible for them to buy the rights to it (which I'm not convinced it is as Lennart Poettering is not the sole contributor and Red Hat / IBM and many others also have a significant stake in it). Sun patented Java on it upon its creation and when oracle bought sun, they bought the rights to those patents. They aren't comparable situations. Java was never open source, it was source available, but still proprietary.
SystemD was just an example my guy, it could be anything.