Blogging Ottinger (tim)MS Linux?
If you read Don Dodge’s article you will find that lots of people did, but this time around the most lines-of-code change rested on the shoulders of twenty people, and the rest did the rest. 
It might surprise some to know that RedHat and IBM are not the obvious owner/beneficiaries of Linux that some schills make them out to be. Linux is MUCH more than just Redhat, IBM, and SuSE (though these companies are strong players). IBM accounted for only 7% (that we know of), and Redhat only 12%.
This will be disappointing to Gundeep who thinks M$ should buy Linux. From… umm… some of the companies who distribute it. I’m not getting how that is supposed to work. Wouldn’t they have to buy it from someone who *owns* it? He did mention that Linux is not as “independent” an operating system as Windows. That’s true enough, I suppose, if “independent” means “totally owned by a single entity” so that a slave is independent, whereas a small business owner is “not as independent.”
We need to consider that Linux is “owned” by a lot of nonprofits in many countries, and a lot of them aren’t interested in “selling out” to Microsoft (though enough money makes possibilities out of impossibilities).
The ugly sound bite:
What would prevent Microsoft from killing Linux just so Windows could continue to be the dominant OS maker? Nothing, to be honest.
I’m sure they’d love to, but as Dodge’s article states, Linux isn’t the product of three distro vendors, or five, or ten. It’s the work of a lot of people. If someone buys out three or five major vendors, there are hundreds now waiting for their chance. Any of them could be the next RedHat, the next SuSE, the next Ubuntu. And Ubuntu is a relative newcomer to the camp, and the next dominant distributions may be newcomers with the energy to run with it.
Gundeep’s article says as much. Linux would rise from the ashes if the major distributions were bought out and collapsed. The strategy would not work.
What we need isn’t for Microsoft to buy Linux out. What Gundeep Hora suggests is for them to buy into Linux. Allow their people to work on it and contribute changes under the terms of the GPL. Keep their DRM and licensing and competitive measures out of it, and participate. He suggest making Linux a division of MS. I think it would be okay for Microsoft to have a Linux division that contributed code on the same terms as IBM and Apache and all the rest.
Hora suggests it would be good for Microsoft. I bet it would. They could learn a lot from it. If they want the greatest possible next-generation PC operating system, maybe they should pitch in their 7-to-12% and help the Linux team continue building it.
