I strongly doubt they would ever do something that drastic. It offers few benefits and many roadblocks. It would be a monstrous amount of work, would throw into question many existing security-related certifications, break Microsoft's love of backwards-compatibility, etc.
Also known as, you don't know technically anything about Windows.
There is a very big difference between supporting UNIX, and Linux kernel syscalls ABI on top of pico processes, the technology from Drawbridge kernel taken out from Microsoft Research, which incidentally is also used to port MS SQL Server into GNU/Linux.
As for the rest I could provide examples of how the BSDs and Solaris failed in similar attempts to clone Linux syscalls table, despite being UNIX, before Microsoft's attempt, but who cares?
> As for the rest I could provide examples of how the BSDs and Solaris failed in similar attempts to clone Linux syscalls table, despite being UNIX, before Microsoft's attempt, but who cares?
the BSD approach is still supported and part of FreeBSD, so presumably someone cares about that
Why not just keep the existing kernel running with a small team? Drivers and backwards compatibility are critical to many of Microsoft's enterprise customers.
Now that isn't necessarily true for Windows running in the cloud. Drivers don't matter as much there.
I don’t disagree. How I think it will happen: Backwards compatibility will start to stray at Microsoft (their last bastion), leading to WINE becoming the go to tool for backwards compat support. Microsoft will create a linux variant or maybe just a DE and the rest will be history (just as Libre Office has begun to supersede MS Office). It is a matter of will and time that C-Suite will want to eliminate labor around Windows to maximize profits as it becomes more and more hardened in it’s feature set. Why maintain when you can utilize FOSS?
In what business segment is Libre Office superseding MS Office? Furthermore, NT supports "personalities". Why bother with a full Linux kernel when they could adopt the personality a la SUA?
