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Microsoft Engineer Sends Rust Linux Kernel Patches For In-Place Module Initialization
(www.phoronix.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2024
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Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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The article is making a big deal that he works for Microsoft but also says he’s been doing this back since his days working at Google. It never says that this work is part of his official job at Microsoft, though, and I don’t know if we could even know that unless it’s part of his job title. Do we know that Microsoft hired him to do this or could it just be this has been his longtime passion project and he’s doing it outside of his work responsibilities, and he just happens to currently work for Microsoft as his day job?
If you browse the LKML (Linux Kernel Mailing List) for 5 minutes, you'll probably see a bunch of microsoft.com email addresses, and it's been that way for years. I understand why it bothers some people, but also Linus (and a couple others) approve everything that actually gets merged, whether it's from a microsoft employee, or a redhat employee, or anyone else. Even if microsoft wanted to pay employees to submit patches that would hurt the kernel, the chance that they'd actually be approved is so low it wouldn't be worth their time.
To be clear, I wasn’t thinking Microsoft was sabotaging Linux; if they’re contributing officially I assume it’s because they’re also using it or want to increase adoption of something they’re creating by making it widely available.
I figured you were being genuine, but there's usually a few people who point at Microsoft's "embracing" of Linux as the first step in the "embrace, extend, extinguish" trope, and see any involvement by Microsoft as nefarious. When the reality is just that Microsoft's Azure cloud services are a much larger share of their annual revenue than Windows, and Linux is a major part of their cloud offerings.
@jqubed @MrMcGasion Microsoft uses Linux for it's Azure Cloud services and internally for building purposes
Microsoft from what I can see seem to love Linux, with the advent of dotnet core, azure Linux, official Microsoft guide for installing Linux on your machine, wsl etc etc
It is slightly concerning but you have a good point of everything they contribute is vetted and I'm glad to have more time and money invested into its development
Microsoft has been working with a number of open source projects for some time now. It shouldn't be that surprising anymore.
It ain't Steve Balmer's MS!
Developers, developers, developers, developers!
Edit: why not
Yes, that’s why I thought this article was odd that they seem to be making a big deal out of it
I agree that it is reasonable for them to work on it for fun, most companies, I'm guessing Microsoft too, make all code written by employees their IP which could be an issue.
At least in the UK I was under the impression it's pretty illegal to try to claim anything employees do out of work time as company property
I know that in my particular field (offensive cybersecurity) many, if not most, places that I’ve heard of, will carve out allowances for personal projects to remain yours. Some companies will even be fine with you setting aside a portion of your time each week to dedicate to developing and maintaining your own open source community tooling or contributing to projects you use regularly, without that whole “your ideas are our IP” thing. With that said, these are all smaller shops that are competing to hire hyper-specialized talent in an industry that until recently wasn’t as overrun with people as the development space is, so maybe none of this is applicable to a place like MS, I don’t really know.