How To Kill Linux by John Dvorak

How to Kill Linux
02.22.05

By John C. Dvorak

While chatting over dinner with the executives of a middleware company during the recent RSA conference for encryption and security in San Francisco, I heard about a secret project. It concerned the development of a version of Linux that runs smoothly as a task under Windows. The project was completed and then shelved. Whether it will ever reemerge is doubtful, but it does offer some interesting possibilities and hints as to what Microsoft may be up to with MS-Linux.
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The immediate usefulness of Linux running under Windows is obvious. You can use all the Windows drivers for all the peripherals that don't run under Linux. Drivers have always been an issue with Linux as PC users have gotten spoiled with Windows driver support. Today's user wants to grab just about anything and not worry about installing it and making it work.

That said, there is no way Linux under Windows would be practical with all the overhead involved. So this notion comes to mind: How about eliminating the middleman? The idea here would be to cut the driver layer out of Windows and attach it to Linux directly. This would become MS-Linux. If Microsoft actually produced an MS-Linux that was the standard Linux attached to the driver layer of Windows, giving users full Plug and Play (PnP) support of all their peripherals, nobody would buy any other Linux on the market. Well, except for the fact that Microsoft would be unable to produce such a product without allowing the other vendors access to the driver code as part of the open-source Linux license arrangement (GPL). You can be sure that Microsoft lawyers are studying this as closely as possible to see if there is any way they could market a dominant Linux distribution without killing themselves. So how could they do this?

Open-source law is new and not completely tested. I'm certain that Microsoft got involved with the SCO versus Linux lawsuit partly to reach a better understanding of how to proceed.

Well, here's one idea: This concept will benefit only Microsoft and probably result in the death of Linux altogether. Let's call it the lopped-off head approach. Microsoft takes its distribution of Linux and sells it as a lopped-off head.

That means tearing away the entire top of Linux from the driver layer—and that would be MS-Linux. Users who needed to add the driver layers would be offered the standard Linux driver package, which would be attached with a utility program. The utility would sew the drivers back into Linux, resulting in an OS that would be more or less the same as everyone else's.


Or the user could pay for the Windows drivers and attach those to MS-Linux, resulting in an OS that had the PnP benefits of Windows. I see no reason why this could not be kept outside the GPL and actually sold as a licensed product exclusive to Microsoft. Thus the OS revenue stream would be protected.

Since plenty of commercial products "attach" to Linux and seem to be protected from the GPL, I have to assume that the scenario I describe is possible. Thus Microsoft could release its lopped-off head version of Linux and make the back-end Windows driver extensions a commercial product.

The long-term implications of such a scenario, I believe, would be essentially to kill Linux. Microsoft's MS-Linux would quickly become the dominant Linux and the company would begin to profit from all the open-source development work that would go into Linux. Once the developers saw that happen they'd stop working on Linux and it would die. After all, who wants to do free work that benefits Microsoft? At some point in the future Microsoft will make its move on Linux, you can be certain. I've always been convinced that Microsoft's long-term Linux strategy was why the company sued, then bought off, the Lindows folks, although I doubt that it would now use the Lindows name.

The key to competitive success here is gaining dominant market share with a proprietary product. With Linux, Microsoft only needs that one driver element to be proprietary for the plan to succeed. When MS-Linux is announced, it will be as if Microsoft were doing the world a favor by "joining" the Linux community. Praise will be heaped on the company. Congratulations will flow. The end of Linux will be at hand.