I'm a Unix guy living in a multiplatform world. I run Interix, since the OpenNT days, and agree that it's a very cool piece of technology.

(So long as the Win32 subsystem of NT isn't doing much, it can benchmark/perform right up there with BSDi and similar systems, on matching hardware - cool.)

As a product, it's actually gone throught the X/Open certification process, and has passed as a full blown, Posix2 compliant Unix(r) Operating System, just like Solaris, Unixware, etc, etc... which is more than Nutcracker will ever be able dream of. :)

I use it for integrating with all my Unix boxes - the SSH daemon I run on my NT boxes is the *same* source code (a couple minor tweaks) as I run on my Linux/etc boxes, the same config files get distributed to the NT boxes with rsync... all running natively in the POSIX subsystem.

And it all works seemlessly, as it ought since I have the *same* programs running on every box... :)

I don't beleve that Cygwin, MKS and so on can touch it for performance or functionality - all of the other products in this space run under Win32, and have to kow-tow to it's conflicting behaviours.

As best I can determine the development team working on the product hasn't changed greatly since the acquisition, so my biggest fear is that the product may not be accepted as part of the internal Microsoft Religious Panthion of Technologies, and therefore may indeed get shafted.

When the acquisition went down, I was thinking hey! Maybe nt5 will have the runtime enviroment shipped as a default part of the OS... but noooo.... so now I'm hoping that whatever internal BS they have to go through results in it at least shipping by default with Whistler...

You'd still have to buy the SDK, but the SDK is cheap anyway, so it's a small price to pay to be able to compile regular Unix source code with GCC on NT...