Comment by drnick1

15 hours ago

This is a nonevent, unless perhaps some genuine "general purpose" tools come out of this. MS will never contribute to things such as Wine and Proton and kill its golden goose.

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drnick1

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Krutonium  15 hours ago

You say that, but Microsoft has contributed to Wine!

Both in terms of code and help, on occasion. Microsoft gave Mono to Wine, and while Wine has a ban on accepting code from people who have seen the source of Microsoft Windows, they have, if I recall correctly, accepted documentation on Windows Internals from Microsoft themselves.

  • 999900000999  15 hours ago

    Which is rather kind.

    They could of also pulled an Oracle , claimed the APIs are copyrighted and sued.

    WINE, even if right couldn't afford to fight.

    I can even imagine official Linux support for the Surface tablets.

    Infact, Microsoft makes very little off its consumer OS. They could even give up the market entirely and bless a distro with solid WINE support for legacy applications.

    • overfeed  14 hours ago

      > They could of also pulled an Oracle , claimed the APIs are copyrighted and sued.

      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...

DeathArrow  15 hours ago

>MS will never contribute to things such as Wine and Proton and kill its golden goose.

I think Microsoft is contributing to Linux kernel. Their golden gooses are Azure and Office which have nothing to do with Wine and Proton.

It wouldn't be too weird if they will release a win32 compatibility layer for Linux in the future as they might not want to maintain a full operating system.

  • pjmlp  7 hours ago

    Nope, they just doubled down on Linux containers integration on Windows, with CLI and OS APIs to drive them from C, WinRT and .NET, that is the main way they see Linux going forward.

    Azure Linux 4.0 will be the new WSL default distro, after going into stable.

    Source, Linux sessions at BUILD 2026.

makeitdouble  14 hours ago

DeathArrow also touches on this, but to complete:

Windows stopped being the Golden Goose a long time ago, probably from the point Satya Nadella became CEO.

A visual aid from a quick search: https://visuwire.com/microsoft/

For instance Bing and LinkedIn combined bring in more than Windows at this point. And XBox is basically on par.

Their money makers don't rely on Windows either, so the OS isn't even a useable moat, which is why they can afford to enshittify the consumer version to death.

[Edit: fixed the CEO name]

santoshalper  15 hours ago

I don't think Microsoft would intentionally compete with Windows, but it does seem as though they are preparing for a world where Windows is no longer their golden goose, or at least hedging their bets. Given that Windows has already decisively lost the battle for servers, this seems prudent.