It seems like Microsoft can certainly fumble a possible good PR move.

Personally, I would think Microsoft made sure this was the nicest damn code anyone had ever seen, because you know people are going to be looking at it closely!

According to some of the kernel engineers at lwn.net who’ve looked at it, this code is low-quality junk:

http://lwn.net/Articles/342341/

It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes for this stuff to move from -staging to mainline (if it ever does). Some interesting discussion on the motivations for this code release can be found here:

http://lwn.net/Articles/342470/

Actually, I think this is one point where we are in agreement. Let the kernel people decide on the quality of the code. They have the expertise and respect to make that sort of judgment.

Personally, I would think Microsoft made sure this was the nicest damn code anyone had ever seen, because you know people are going to be looking at it closely!

Magice :

Here is the first thing comes to my mind: only fools touch that code from Microsoft.
Let’s see, the whole Minix 3 code base consists of (as reported by authors) 4000 lines of executable kernel code. Coyotos claims to have 12,000 lines of code. The code donated from Microsoft, which is only the driver for something that we would never use, has 20,000 lines of code.
Think about it. Just for one driver, 20,000 lines of code. How many drivers are in the kernel again?

4 drivers. Let’s use the only source tree I have to hand, the 2.6.28 kernel, and take a peek, shall we? And do it NICE AND PROPER, so Jason can’t accuse me of being evil. Let’s analyse what we REALLY have, rather than making comments which are wrong from the outset (“1 driver”)

The HyperV source drop can be found here: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/gregkh/patches.git;a=tree;f=staging;h=ca18474218c7f5b2adfaa8b59404ca3d5cedd242;hb=master
It appears we have four devices – a virtual network card, a virtual storage driver, a virtual bus driver, and a virtual block device. let’s compare the 22k size against some drivers of those same types already in the kernel, shall we?

staging-hv-add-the-hyper-v-virtual-block-driver.patch is about 1600 lines of source. How big are some typical block drivers in 2.6.28?
1098 xen-blkfront.c
4582 floppy.c
1588 loop.c
606 ps3disk.c
1147 umem.c
406 z2ram.c
7249 DAC960.c
216 cryptoloop.c
Answer: between 216 and 7249 lines.

staging-hv-add-the-hyper-v-virtual-bus.patch is about 7100 lines of source. How big are some typical bus drivers in 2.6.28? This one’s actually hard to fully define, as busses aren’t generically abstracted in Linux. However, let’s look at a couple of smallish busses:
dma: 10114
virtio: 1946
Again, I’d prefer more numbers, but it’s hard to compare properly – the closest comparison is virtio, which here provides a virtual bus, (for a different set of virtual devices). However, I think we can all agree that Microsoft’s virtual bus is larger than virtio.

staging-hv-add-the-hyper-v-virtual-network-driver.patch is about 3500 lines of source. How big are some typical network drivers in 2.6.28? This one’s much easier to compare:
ps3_gelic*: 5362
atl1e: 5223
xen-netfront: 2917
virtio_net: 670
e1000e: 20136
r8169: 3849
sis900: 2811
sky2: 6797
I think you need to be hard-pushed to declare this one as outlandish. And, hell, the Sky2 driver is crap too – loads of hard lockups from that one.

staging-hv-add-the-hyper-v-virtual-storage-driver.patch is about 2400 lines of source. How big are typical storage drivers in 2.6.28?
megaraid: 18096
aic94xx: 13606
3w-9xxx: 2909
aacraid: 10801
I really REALLY don’t see how you can declare this one to be oversized. And I’m using RAID controllers here largely because SATA driver sizes are very difficult to isolate (as they sit on top of a shared ATA driver core), whereas like the Microsoft driver, the RAID controller drivers are independent citizens.

So. Debunked. I’m making NO comment as to the quality of the code (that’s up to the kernel folks to decide), but your size arguments are intended to deceive – attack them for the things which are true, not fabrications

“Microsoft needs us – we do not need them.”

I wonder why then do KDE developers release apps on Windows? And why Firefox is suckier on Linux then on Windows? It must be because we don’t need them.
We do need them if we want to spread Linux. Sorry too burst your bubble but that’s how it is.

Microsoft has included ready to go FLOSS solutions in past Windows releases. Microsoft has no problem with MIT/BSD style code – quite the contrary as it represents free and likely higher quality code than they can produce in-house.

TCP/IP stack anyone?

This is a “break from the ordinary” is a sense, true. But i think you if read the press release you’ll see Microsoft themselves acknowledging it is customer demand driving this. Again, this is because Microsoft needs us – we do not need them.

If we simply continue to do as we have done, we will enjoy what we have enjoyed: constant growth, improvement and acceptance. Linux has done that since the start despite Microsoft, and will continue to do so long after Microsoft is knocked off the top of the heap.

So, I don’t think there is much credit due. Microsoft it doing what it must, because of customer demand and economic realities. The credit goes to the Linux developers and the FLOSS community, not Microsoft.

Let’s see, the whole Minix 3 code base consists of (as reported by authors) 4000 lines of executable kernel code. Coyotos claims to have 12,000 lines of code. The code donated from Microsoft, which is only the driver for something that we would never use, has 20,000 lines of code.

Think about it. Just for one driver, 20,000 lines of code. How many drivers are in the kernel again?

By pumping more and more and more code into it, Microsoft may be hoping to eventually bring the kernel to a point where it is impossible to manage. After all, isn’t that the state of Windows? It took 3 YEARS to clean up code for Vista and release Windows 7. That’s 6 cycles of Fedora! (btw, Ubuntu ceases to exist a while ago, so let’s not count that in). Heck, that’s longer than Debian average and CentOS/RHEL release cycles. Gosh, and that’s “rushing” for ya.

In conclusion, let’s stay away from that code. Gosh, I am still amazed. 20,000 lines of code for non-sense?

Perhaps you missed the part were MS is implementing ready-to-go FLOSS solutions into it’s products. Or where they contribute code to FLOSS projects. Or are involved in development of Apache.
This certainly is change, even if you don’t see it.
Even MS acknowledges that is “a break from the ordinary” in the first line of it’s press release.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not defending their douche bag moves. But give credit were credit is due.

The message it sends is exactly what I have said all along: we can deal with Microsoft on our terms. We do not need them; they need us.

I do not reject Microsoft on the face of it, rather I reject any concession to Microsoft – no matter how small or seemingly insignificant. So long as they contribute to the community under the exact same terms and conditions that a respected company does, fine.

The main thing of interest to me about this is to see which idiots begin piping up using this event as some sort of “proof” that Microsoft has changed.