This is the mail archive of the cygwin mailing list for the Cygwin project.


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]
Other format: [Raw text]

RE: MS offers "Services For Unix" free of charge


Before one gets too excited, one might wait until one sees the licensing
terms.  I seems to remember that MS was all hot and bothered about what they
were calling viral software.  (Misnomer, Outlook is viral software, in as
far as it is designed to help viruses propagate.  GPL might be better termed
a viral license.)  Will the license let one do what one wants to do?

Does this mean that that MS finds that Cygwin (and U/Win, MKS, et al.) is a
threat?  Or that they were not making much from SFU but cannot drop it for
various reasons, so are going for brownie points?

I also liked the part about 
   "The real driver behind this [pricing]
   change is this interoperability issue,"
   Oldroyd says. "We want Windows to be the
   best platform for interoperability."
Since MS has long desired that "Windows be the best platform for"
productivity suites, will Office soon be available for free?

-----Original Message-----
From: Robb, Sam [mailto:sam.robb@timesys.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 2:43 PM
To: cygwin@cygwin.com
Subject: MS offers "Services For Unix" free of charge

Thought this might interest some of the folks who frequent
this list... particularly those who have to support Cygwin
installations, and might now have to deal with a parallel
(conflicting?) install of SFU :-/

-Samrobb

<http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=17300643>

Microsoft Offers Linux-Interoperability Software For Free
Jan. 13, 2004

Microsoft has decided to drop the $99 licensing fee previously
required for its Services For Unix software and plans to make
a new version of the interoperability product available this
week at no cost on its Web site.

...

The three main components of SFU--Unix's Network File System
and Network Identity Service and Microsoft's Interix layer of
Posix APIs--have all been tuned for better performance, with
some commands running 50% faster, Oldroyd says. SFU 3.5 also
features first-time support for P-Threads (for Posix-compliant
multithreaded applications), a broader set of Posix APIs, and
updated utilities and libraries.

--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/

--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]