7 ms·

A lot of resistance some will have to WSL will be old battle scars from Microsofts past behaviour. Microsoft have done a lot over the years to troll the Linux c

by laumars 10y ago

A lot of resistance some will have to WSL will be old battle scars from Microsofts past behaviour. Microsoft have done a lot over the years to troll the Linux community. While many of the younger HN members will be familiar with the "new open source Microsoft" some of us oldies have had to endure IE breaking the web plus ActiveX / Silverlight and other MS web lockins. Comments like "open source is communism" from top MS execs. Fragmentation of Java (which eventually spawned into .NET but there were years of pain before .NET became a thing of beauty). To be honest more sins than i have time to list. So many of us are now cynical by default with regards to MS. Take WSL for example, I'm sure their motives are just to encourage people away from Linux and OSX for sysadmin and dev workstations. I can see that strategy working for many people too. But at least with WSL, if they do decide to cripple it once they have the customer base then it's pretty trivial for users to switch away again (which was less doable with many of the other tech they've dominated the market place with). So while the trolling remarks of the OP are clearly unconstructive, i can at least emphasise with why he feels the need to speak out against MS. He just did so in a pretty lousy way.

flukus 10y ago
> A lot of resistance some will have to WSL will be old battle scars from Microsofts past behaviour. I'm also not convinced they've changed at all when I see what they've done to things like skype, where they have somewhat of a monopoly (thanks to office).
- fragmede 10y ago
  Or more recently, Microsoft's refusal to remove "curl" from Powershell, where "curl" was an alias to a totally different Windows function that barely resembled curl. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319670
lloeki 10y ago
> at least with WSL, if they do decide to cripple it once they have the customer base then it's pretty trivial for users to switch away again Now that they're embracing the typical Linux userland, I can't help but ponder if they'll try shifting to the extend+extinguish part later on. I guess old habits die hard, especially when you got burnt multiple times already, although I'm not cynical enough to think this would be all planned beforehand but more like at some point some exec would notice this as a strategic opportunity to seize. That said they're certainly winning some Linux users back, and if anything, this may even help in getting some Windows people used to Unix and Bash, reducing the gap for them to try their hand at some Linux distro. All in all, cross-pollination is good both ways.
pmontra 10y ago
I also remember the standardization process of OOXML. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML#Examination_of_fast_track_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open... I also think their current strategy could be the one you describe. We're at the Embrace phase. It's not sure that Extend will follow but I wonder what it could look like. Maybe it will be something convenient you can do in Linux only if you're running it inside WSL. Given how Linux is used it should be something server side, Internet facing (no Active Directory, Exchange, SQL Server, those are Windows markets anyway). A bonus would be some compatibility tool to do that on native Linux too. If enough software is written to run for Linux+WSL and it gets deployed in production, then the Estinguish phase will be ready to kick in: deprecate the compatibility tool and hijack all the Linux market to Windows. The timescale for playing out these strategies is at least 10 years, so let's talk about it when approaching 2030. If Microsoft is really thinking along those lines, a way it could fail is if Linux expands to other markets. That would make it hard to Extend to most of the use cases. However what WSL is doing it to make those MacOS users that deploy to Linux consider moving back to Windows because there is a Linux subsystem there too. Actually, a real Linux instead of a look alike. By the way: why did they named it Windows Subsystem for Linux instead of Linux Subsystem for Windows? It's Linux running inside Windows, not the other way around.
- partycoder 10y ago
  They might have switched business models. Microsoft's revenue from patents collected from companies such as Samsung and HTC is like $1 billion.
  - pmontra 10y ago
    I'm not saying that those money are peanuts but it doesn't compare to what they were doing (are?) with software licenses. Maybe they plan to cannibalize the desktop with subscription services and Azure. I see things they could do with a WSL+Azure integration but I don't want to give them the idea :-) Anyway, they are collectively smarter than me (and more focused on their businesses) so they'll already thought about that for sure. That's why I'm somewhat worried.
- 10y ago
partycoder 10y ago
My remarks were directed at the product being discussed ("Bash on Windows"), a name that I think is incorrect for objective reasons. You can agree or disagree, but the comment was technical in nature, not trolling. People do not use "Bash on Windows" just for the sake of using Bash (the shell), they use it to access GNU/Linux software through the WSL ABI.
- ghshephard 10y ago
  I'm wondering if you are misguided here - and what Microsoft is working on right now is "Bash on Windows" - I.E. The console environment that people want to interact with when writing quick scripts, connecting to remote servers, maybe running a little bit of a local web instance. Speaking for myself, personally - if I want to run GNU/Linux software through the Linux ABI - I'm not going to be doing it on WSL - I'll do it on a VM or on a farm of VPS/EC2 instances somewhere. The attraction to me for WSL is the ability to have all my rich windows software, tools in the same environment that I'm connecting to those hosts from (which I normally do with OS X). Note that the vast number of improvements (consoling, ping, vt100 support, launching windows apps from linux, etc...) in Creators Update are about improving the CLI/Shell experience for users.
  - partycoder 10y ago
    Bash is merely a Unix shell, one of many. What you describe is the GNU/Linux userland. They are working on people being able to execute unmodified Linux binaries on Windows machines through an Application Binary Interface that implements the Linux system calls and translates them into Windows system calls, among other things... and doing it in the most transparent way possible (not requiring specific builds of each software, like Cygwin). This is the inverse operation of what WINE does. No need to rush to downvote a comment that is actually correct.
    - laumars 10y ago
      Everyone you're replying to understands how WSL and UNIX shells work. The error is on your part because you keep misunderstanding that the Windows executable one runs to invoke WSL is literally C:\Windows\System32\bash.exe Sure, once you've started bash you can then probably switch to whichever shell you want afterwards (NOTE: I say that but I've not tested to see if other shells work). But to use your WINE example, the Windows Bash.exe PE is the equivalent executable to the wine ELF. Now you are welcome to rant about how the WSL "invoker" should be isolated from the POSIX shell, but that's very different from the point you keep raising and thus keep getting down voted for.
Lio 10y ago
This is a very good point. Whilst I really appreciate some of the things Microsoft is open sourcing I also find their current telemetry and privacy stance troubling.
Const-me 10y ago
> IE breaking the web For several years it was the best browser available. Invented a lot of things, including DOM and XMLHttpRequest. > ActiveX / Silverlight and other MS web lockins Everybody did that. Have you forgot internet with A/V streaming locked to RealNetworks, and vector graphics and animation locked to Macromedia?
- wtetzner 10y ago
  > For several years it was the best browser available. Invented a lot of things, including DOM and XMLHttpRequest. Yes, they made it just good enough to kill the competition, and then let it stagnate.
- laumars 10y ago
  IE4 was better than Netscape communicator but not significantly. Before (IE3 and below) things were a lot more even. However by IE4 MS had already won the browser wars. It was a fair while after that point when AJAX became a thing (and Netscape and Opera did support a competing API to XMLHttpRequest btw). The problem with IE was that it wasn't standards compliment, only ran on Windows desktop and Mac (even Windows CE didn't really have a decent working version of IE) and even with their lack of regard for the standards offer very little innovation compared to the 10 years they had leading the market. Think about how much the web advanced once Firefox and Chrome gained traction and how far behind IE quickly got left, then tell me that what Microsoft did for web was a positive thing. Real Player and Flash were cross platform (albeit Flash outside of Windows was and still is garbage). ActiveX was Internet Explorer on Windows desktop only and Silverlight was only partially cross platform (parts of Silverlight was ported to OSX and only OSX so it's a bit of a stretch to even compliment Silverlight for being "partially" cross platform).

by laumars 10y ago

flukus 10y ago

> A lot of resistance some will have to WSL will be old battle scars from Microsofts past behaviour. I'm also not convinced they've changed at all when I see what they've done to things like skype, where they have somewhat of a monopoly (thanks to office).

fragmede 10y ago
Or more recently, Microsoft's refusal to remove "curl" from Powershell, where "curl" was an alias to a totally different Windows function that barely resembled curl. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319670

lloeki 10y ago

> at least with WSL, if they do decide to cripple it once they have the customer base then it's pretty trivial for users to switch away again Now that they're embracing the typical Linux userland, I can't help but ponder if they'll try shifting to the extend+extinguish part later on. I guess old habits die hard, especially when you got burnt multiple times already, although I'm not cynical enough to think this would be all planned beforehand but more like at some point some exec would notice this as a strategic opportunity to seize. That said they're certainly winning some Linux users back, and if anything, this may even help in getting some Windows people used to Unix and Bash, reducing the gap for them to try their hand at some Linux distro. All in all, cross-pollination is good both ways.

pmontra 10y ago

I also remember the standardization process of OOXML. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML#Examination_of_fast_track_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open... I also think their current strategy could be the one you describe. We're at the Embrace phase. It's not sure that Extend will follow but I wonder what it could look like. Maybe it will be something convenient you can do in Linux only if you're running it inside WSL. Given how Linux is used it should be something server side, Internet facing (no Active Directory, Exchange, SQL Server, those are Windows markets anyway). A bonus would be some compatibility tool to do that on native Linux too. If enough software is written to run for Linux+WSL and it gets deployed in production, then the Estinguish phase will be ready to kick in: deprecate the compatibility tool and hijack all the Linux market to Windows. The timescale for playing out these strategies is at least 10 years, so let's talk about it when approaching 2030. If Microsoft is really thinking along those lines, a way it could fail is if Linux expands to other markets. That would make it hard to Extend to most of the use cases. However what WSL is doing it to make those MacOS users that deploy to Linux consider moving back to Windows because there is a Linux subsystem there too. Actually, a real Linux instead of a look alike. By the way: why did they named it Windows Subsystem for Linux instead of Linux Subsystem for Windows? It's Linux running inside Windows, not the other way around.

partycoder 10y ago
They might have switched business models. Microsoft's revenue from patents collected from companies such as Samsung and HTC is like $1 billion.
- pmontra 10y ago
  I'm not saying that those money are peanuts but it doesn't compare to what they were doing (are?) with software licenses. Maybe they plan to cannibalize the desktop with subscription services and Azure. I see things they could do with a WSL+Azure integration but I don't want to give them the idea :-) Anyway, they are collectively smarter than me (and more focused on their businesses) so they'll already thought about that for sure. That's why I'm somewhat worried.
10y ago

partycoder 10y ago

My remarks were directed at the product being discussed ("Bash on Windows"), a name that I think is incorrect for objective reasons. You can agree or disagree, but the comment was technical in nature, not trolling. People do not use "Bash on Windows" just for the sake of using Bash (the shell), they use it to access GNU/Linux software through the WSL ABI.

ghshephard 10y ago
I'm wondering if you are misguided here - and what Microsoft is working on right now is "Bash on Windows" - I.E. The console environment that people want to interact with when writing quick scripts, connecting to remote servers, maybe running a little bit of a local web instance. Speaking for myself, personally - if I want to run GNU/Linux software through the Linux ABI - I'm not going to be doing it on WSL - I'll do it on a VM or on a farm of VPS/EC2 instances somewhere. The attraction to me for WSL is the ability to have all my rich windows software, tools in the same environment that I'm connecting to those hosts from (which I normally do with OS X). Note that the vast number of improvements (consoling, ping, vt100 support, launching windows apps from linux, etc...) in Creators Update are about improving the CLI/Shell experience for users.
- partycoder 10y ago
  Bash is merely a Unix shell, one of many. What you describe is the GNU/Linux userland. They are working on people being able to execute unmodified Linux binaries on Windows machines through an Application Binary Interface that implements the Linux system calls and translates them into Windows system calls, among other things... and doing it in the most transparent way possible (not requiring specific builds of each software, like Cygwin). This is the inverse operation of what WINE does. No need to rush to downvote a comment that is actually correct.
  - laumars 10y ago
    Everyone you're replying to understands how WSL and UNIX shells work. The error is on your part because you keep misunderstanding that the Windows executable one runs to invoke WSL is literally C:\Windows\System32\bash.exe Sure, once you've started bash you can then probably switch to whichever shell you want afterwards (NOTE: I say that but I've not tested to see if other shells work). But to use your WINE example, the Windows Bash.exe PE is the equivalent executable to the wine ELF. Now you are welcome to rant about how the WSL "invoker" should be isolated from the POSIX shell, but that's very different from the point you keep raising and thus keep getting down voted for.

Lio 10y ago

This is a very good point. Whilst I really appreciate some of the things Microsoft is open sourcing I also find their current telemetry and privacy stance troubling.

Const-me 10y ago

> IE breaking the web For several years it was the best browser available. Invented a lot of things, including DOM and XMLHttpRequest. > ActiveX / Silverlight and other MS web lockins Everybody did that. Have you forgot internet with A/V streaming locked to RealNetworks, and vector graphics and animation locked to Macromedia?

wtetzner 10y ago
> For several years it was the best browser available. Invented a lot of things, including DOM and XMLHttpRequest. Yes, they made it just good enough to kill the competition, and then let it stagnate.
laumars 10y ago
IE4 was better than Netscape communicator but not significantly. Before (IE3 and below) things were a lot more even. However by IE4 MS had already won the browser wars. It was a fair while after that point when AJAX became a thing (and Netscape and Opera did support a competing API to XMLHttpRequest btw). The problem with IE was that it wasn't standards compliment, only ran on Windows desktop and Mac (even Windows CE didn't really have a decent working version of IE) and even with their lack of regard for the standards offer very little innovation compared to the 10 years they had leading the market. Think about how much the web advanced once Firefox and Chrome gained traction and how far behind IE quickly got left, then tell me that what Microsoft did for web was a positive thing. Real Player and Flash were cross platform (albeit Flash outside of Windows was and still is garbage). ActiveX was Internet Explorer on Windows desktop only and Silverlight was only partially cross platform (parts of Silverlight was ported to OSX and only OSX so it's a bit of a stretch to even compliment Silverlight for being "partially" cross platform).