The End Days are Here...MS to sell it's own Linux distro

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hmmm... I see no problem with MS using linux for server stuff, but if they ever make a actual desktop operating system using linux... it will truly be end times.

But that’s not the whole story. Linux has always been a tiny minority on the desktop, but it used to be acknowledged, and even there seemed to be some hope that it would become mainstream. A few years ago, noöne seriously argued it was dead. Now they do, and it seems to be the general consensus. If it’s considered officially dead, it’ll become harder and harder to start using it, and then to even know it exists, or it once existed. If almost everyone uses only proprietary operating systems, and doesn’t know there is an alternative, no need will be felt for free standards, so more and more everyday tasks will become impossible to do with free software thanks to patents and other impediments, and more and more hardware will be deliberately impossible to use with any operating system other than the mainstream, proprietary ones chosen by the vendor.

Personal computers traditionally let the user install the operating system they want, but this hole is being plugged now, making them more like mobile phones, for which this was never the case. If Linux is considered to be already dead on the desktop, there won’t be any resistance to making it impossible for the user to change the operating system a desktop or laptop computer is running in the near future, and then the Linux desktop will be truly dead and gone forever. Everyone will accept as a fact of life that the operating system is part of the package they buy with the machine, and its inner workings are meant to be secret, programming being an arcane subject with a costly barrier to entry, reserved to those who devote their life to it, and, even so, to be done only on top of a black box someone else owns. Oh, and the need for anti-malware will never be questioned.

Sorry for the multiple posts, but the captcha wouldn’t let through any larger pieces, especially those with quotations.

Public web servers:
As of this month, Apache was @56%, IIS@13%, nginx@25% (like Apache it is relatively cross platform)

http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/web_server/all

Underlying OS for said web servers:
Digging around a bit, they also report all forms of Linux on public web servers@ 68%, Windows @32%

Doesn't anyone around here remember when Microsoft had its own UNIX-like operating system called Xenix? IIRC, some of MS's servers still run Xenix, since NT Server still isn't very stable for heavy use.

But the real question is, is this GNU/Linux, or is Microsoft simply using Linux as a kernel, a la Android?

Not only was Linux essentially never proclaimed dead a few years ago; it was also very rare to hear or read someone claiming it was overall worse than MS Windows, let alone less secure. Now these claims seem to be much more common than their opposites. Furthermore, the world seems to have accepted that security through obscurity is good and leaving the source code accessible to anyone is nothing but a liability.

Free software, like science, had the potential to improve our lives drastically, but it appears to have been defeated by sheer might, like a little bully smashes his nerdy peer’s brain in time to prevent him from growing up into a brilliant scientist.