Before one gets too excited, one might wait until one sees the licensing terms. I seems to remember that MS was all hot and bothered about what they were calling viral software. (Misnomer, Outlook is viral software, in as far as it is designed to help viruses propagate. GPL might be better termed a viral license.) Will the license let one do what one wants to do?
Does this mean that that MS finds that Cygwin (and U/Win, MKS, et al.) is a threat? Or that they were not making much from SFU but cannot drop it for various reasons, so are going for brownie points? I also liked the part about "The real driver behind this [pricing] change is this interoperability issue," Oldroyd says. "We want Windows to be the best platform for interoperability." Since MS has long desired that "Windows be the best platform for" productivity suites, will Office soon be available for free? -----Original Message----- From: Robb, Sam [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 2:43 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: MS offers "Services For Unix" free of charge Thought this might interest some of the folks who frequent this list... particularly those who have to support Cygwin installations, and might now have to deal with a parallel (conflicting?) install of SFU :-/ -Samrobb <http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=17300643> Microsoft Offers Linux-Interoperability Software For Free Jan. 13, 2004 Microsoft has decided to drop the $99 licensing fee previously required for its Services For Unix software and plans to make a new version of the interoperability product available this week at no cost on its Web site. ... The three main components of SFU--Unix's Network File System and Network Identity Service and Microsoft's Interix layer of Posix APIs--have all been tuned for better performance, with some commands running 50% faster, Oldroyd says. SFU 3.5 also features first-time support for P-Threads (for Posix-compliant multithreaded applications), a broader set of Posix APIs, and updated utilities and libraries. -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
