http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1768172,00.asp How to Kill Linux 02.22.05 Dvorak Total posts: 11 By John C. Dvorak While chatting over dinner with the executives of a middleware company during the recent RSA conference for encryption and security in San Francisco, I heard about a secret project. It concerned the development of a version of Linux that runs smoothly as a task under Windows. The project was completed and then shelved. Whether it will ever reemerge is doubtful, but it does offer some interesting possibilities and hints as to what Microsoft may be up to with MS-Linux. ADVERTISEMENT The immediate usefulness of Linux running under Windows is obvious. You can use all the Windows drivers for all the peripherals that don't run under Linux. Drivers have always been an issue with Linux as PC users have gotten spoiled with Windows driver support. Today's user wants to grab just about anything and not worry about installing it and making it work. That said, there is no way Linux under Windows would be practical with all the overhead involved. So this notion comes to mind: How about eliminating the middleman? The idea here would be to cut the driver layer out of Windows and attach it to Linux directly. This would become MS-Linux. If Microsoft actually produced an MS-Linux that was the standard Linux attached to the driver layer of Windows, giving users full Plug and Play (PnP) support of all their peripherals, nobody would buy any other Linux on the market. Well, except for the fact that Microsoft would be unable to produce such a product without allowing the other vendors access to the driver code as part of the open-source Linux license arrangement (GPL). You can be sure that Microsoft lawyers are studying this as closely as possible to see if there is any way they could market a dominant Linux distribution without killing themselves. So how could they do this? Open-source law is new and not completely tested. I'm certain that Microsoft got involved with the SCO versus Linux lawsuit partly to reach a better understanding of how to proceed. Well, here's one idea: This concept will benefit only Microsoft and probably result in the death of Linux altogether. Let's call it the lopped-off head approach. Microsoft takes its distribution of Linux and sells it as a lopped-off head. Continue Reading -- Diego Saravia [email protected]