Remember when OS/2 was advertised as “A better DOS than DOS and a better Windows than Windows”? The advert was correct, I could set up two DOS VMs running two DOS programs that could not run on the same DOS configuration and I could have three Windows VMs running three Windows programs of which no two would run on the same Windows configuration.

Now of course you could have one OS emulate another (as NT emulated Windows 3.11) and if you try really hard then you could get it to work as well as OS/2 did. Another possibility is to have multiple VMs running complete OSs (which means different login sessions etc which is painful to use).

The benefits to MS of taking Linux kernel source, making some simple changes for gratuitous incompatibility and then using it for a new OS are significant. After all it has worked reasonably well for Apple. :-#

Developing an OS kernel to run on a small set of hardware is much easier than writing a general purpose OS to run on lots of different hardware manufactured by a variety of 3rd parties that you don’t control. If you add in scaling from embedded to HPC then it becomes even harder again.

A company such as SGI could easily write an entire OS kernel if they reassigned the people who currently work on Linux kernel development. Of course the OS kernel in question would not do all the things that Linux does.

Alphag: A layer to make POSIX APIs work on an NT kernel is not the same thing as an OS kernel.

Having 9 viable kernel teams requires having 9 groups of competent programmers. I doubt that there are enough people in the world who have such skills.

Absolutely the new interface is both GUI and command driven, they need to cater for the ponytailed sandel wearers who can’t use a mouse, but do want to script their life and make it easier. With the new version of Exchange and the powershell there is actually more features driven from the command line than the GUI which I think is a first.

(I do predict that MSFT will have to throw out its driver model, either doing drivers itself based on docs the hardware vendors provide, or insisting that vendors commit them to a Novell-like build/test farm. Making the stability of an OS depend on joe.random@hw-labs.example.com is futile in the long run.)

I don’t know what the “new” command line functions are. I am sure that they get “inspiration” from GPL code. But this is far from taking an entire kernel from BSD or Linux, which is what I predict.

skelter: They had lots of grand plans for filesystem integration with databases etc. Those plans were abandoned, apparently due to kernel development issues.

didn’t they “get” their whole TCP/IP stack from the BSDs already - years ago, while they were still fighting Novell on the server market?

And don’t some of their “new” command line functions remind us of Unix since a while?

I bet that they “borrow” lots of code from there already - and with BSD licenses, that’s an ok thing to do AFAIK (or understand that legal stuff).

cheers,
Wolfgang

I doubt that MS could pay 15 kernel teams, I doubt that they could find so many good programmers. If I wanted to start 15 kernel teams I would start by creating a large number of primary schools that teach children well as the start of a 15 year process. Creating 15 independent kernels of the quality that users want would be a project of the scale of the Manhattan project.

Your point about borrowing ideas is good.

Joe: They don’t drag that much legacy around. Programs written for proprietary Unix systems in the 80s are still being run on Linux today while programs for Windows 3.1 generally stopped working a very long time ago. I know people who support systems such as Windows 95 (long out of support from MS) because it runs programs that don’t run on newer systems.

MS are quite good at going to great lengths to work around bugs in popular programs, but in general they aren’t so good at preserving compatibility.