Microsoft insists on holding the remote

Summary: A little more on Mono, but mostly news about Microsoft's management of UNIX and Linux

IN WHAT appears like old news, one blogger has just shared what he calls "things to avoid on Ubuntu." The list is very obvious.

Moonlight

This is Linux port of Microsoft sliverlight apparently designed to compete with adobe flash. Silver light doesn't offer anything new that's not already offered by adobe flash.

Linux distros previously included some of the technologies that were controversial because they were widespread and to make interoperability easy for new users. We don't need this turd and it's not widespread.

Mono

Here comes another patent covered piece of junk aggressively pushed by Novell.

Microsoft controls the API and also software patents, so Mono and its siblings are just part of Microsoft's plot and they ought to be replaced. But the main new issue in this post is the following announcement about Microsoft's Operations Manager, which is not new, but nonetheless it continues to illustrate just how Microsoft wants to be in the driver's seat and decide what GNU/Linux can and cannot do.

Microsoft Tuesday opened its annual management confab saying it would ship the next version of Operations Manager by the end of June and laying out its efforts to manage data centers and virtualized environments.

[...]

With Operations Manager 2007 R2, Microsoft wants to deliver integration among Unix, Linux and the Microsoft System Center management software. Microsoft is bridging the gap between its tools and non-Windows platforms on the back of the WS-Management protocol it developed and OpenPegasus, an open-source implementation of the Distributed Management Task Force's Common Information Model and Web-based Enterprise Management standards. Both WS-Management and OpenPegasus are used to discover physical and virtual systems on a network and monitor and manage them.

We wrote about this before, e.g. in:

• Why Not Have A GPL 2.1 As Well?
• Microsoft and Novell Celebrate Marriage in Public, But Customers Still Choose Red Hat
• Xandros, Brought to You by Microsoft Show

Xandros too is helping Microsoft with this. It has just let loose the following press release.

Microsoft Management Summit - BridgeWays, a division of Xandros, today launched an initial set of application management packs in the extensive BridgeWays product line that enables system administrators to manage business critical applications on Windows, Linux, and Unix from a single console. The new line of management packs helps extend Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 to additional business applications on Windows and to the 85% of enterprise data centers with cross-platform environments.

It turns out that Novell is there as well.

Not only will you get the chance to learn from peers and industry giants, networking opportunities abound and over 60 sponsors and exhibitors, including triCerat and such companies as HP, Novell, Citrix, and Dell, will showcase their wares in the MMS 2009 Expo.

Speaking of Xandros, Linspire's Web site has only 4,890 pages indexed by Google at the moment and all are just leading to the Xandros Web site. So essentially, all those old Web pages from Linspire's Web site are permanently gone and the Web Archive may be the last resort for 'historians' who study the demise of the company. ⬆

"Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It’s a good thing we have museums to document that."

--Bill Gates