Azure Linux 4.0 is Microsoft's first general-purpose Linux

> Here is a general purpose Linux distribution, give it a try!

Where does your mind go? That this is a server-only distribution meant for a specific provider? Or that it's something like Debian, that could be run on servers and desktops alike without much tinkering, or meant for any provider?

FWIW, Microsoft themselves don't seem to call this a "general purpose Linux distribution", I could probably guess why, what Microsoft themselves say is "Purpose-Built for Azure" which sounds much more accurate. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/linuxandopensourceb...

I think the author might have confused (unintentionally or intentionally, who knows?) "general purpose" with "Purpose-Built for Azure", since Microsoft's own announcements get this right, while submission article is littered with this mistake.

I think it's misleading and linkbait. The mods would decide what to use instead, this could be "Azure Linux 4.0, Microsoft's Linux distribution for its cloud" or something like this.

For others who did not get the joke, Kindall was kind of a big deal:

https://computerhistory.org/blog/fifty-years-of-the-personal...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/shows/internet-of-things-s...

I would rather say UNIX won the server room, Linux just happens to be the UNIX clone most people hack on nowadays, and can change tomorrow as companies take over and people like Linus eventually pass the torch.

You can already see that on embedded, other FOSS OSes are being adopted, without GPL licensing, like Zephyr, NutXX, FreeRTOS,...

You embrace a popular open standard, add new features to your software that build upon the standard (but are proprietary), then watch as your competitors die off because customers become locked into your proprietary features.

Similar to how Apple hijacked SMS to add iMessage and introduced all kinds of features and the blue/green bubble styling.

For the longest time, they refused to support RCS, trying to keep people on iPhone by making texting between iOS and Android suck.

Of course, a lot of people switched to third party messaging apps because of how much Apple was intentionally ruining texting, so now Apple has had to adopt RCS.

So the “extinguish” part can be hard to pull off given sufficiently strong competition.

I don't think anyone mentioned Google killing their products? I think you misunderstood my reference that was exclusively Microsoft[0] specific and has nothing to do with shutting down projects. Extinguish doesn't mean close it down in this context. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish was a phrase from some Microsoft exec or VP about embracing some open standard, extending it beyond what it does, and then extinguishing the competition.

Google made Chrome, it was great, then they added things and features that sites often (VERY MUCH LIKE IE USED TO) say "You must use Chrome to visit this website." even when I'm on Firefox, and masking my browser agent enables the website. This is very "old evil" Microsoft like shennanigans.

Google made gmail, people used to have email clients, hell AOL had its own built-in email client with a GUI and all. Now everyone browses email via a browser and is hooked to gmail.

Before YouTube people used Kazaa, Shareazaa etc to share clips much like they do with YouTube, but now there's censorship and automatic censorship via copyright claims that the little guy cannot defend against. I follow amazingly good music YouTube channels that go deeply into how songs are made, which requires playing short samples, its 100% fair use, and gets me to listen to the original songs in many cases, but the record companies want to snag the easy cash so they're heavily discouraged since its time consuming work, fair use, and some goon at a Music company is jut flagging all their videos and profiting off someone else's hard work.

There's also Android, which embraced Linux, extended it and extinguished the competition (Ubuntu phone anyone? You know, an ACTUAL Linux phone).

There's also Google Talk / Google Voice / Google Chat / GChat (and the 5000 other names for it!) which was built on top of XMPP. I even tested logging into gmail once, and messaging my facebook account (FB Messenger used to be XMPP!) and it worked. They eventually shut down the openness of XMPP and closed them up (both Google and Facebook[2]).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5714557

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9266769

They did, well - not the suing part, but everything else in your sentence; including helping Oracle "pull an Oracle". In 2013, Microsoft filed an Amicus brief in support of Oracle's[1] position, appealing against a judges ruling that APIs cannot be copyrighted. At the time, Microsoft were also trying to get an Android-compatible runtime on Windows off the ground, which was incredibly awkward. They came to their right mind by the time 2019 rolled by and the case had been appealed to the Supreme Court. At this occasion, Microsoft switched teams and filed an amicus in support of Google. I don't know if Microsoft's 2016 release of WSL had anything to do with it.

1. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/02/microsoft-forese...