Eh, I disagree with a lot the fundamentals here.<p>I don’t believe that windows devs who have avoided Linux so far are going to ‘try out’ WSL at all, let alone be converted. I work in a .Net house, and the only people who use WSL at all are those who have Linux experience. The rest? Nothing could change their view that windows ‘works’ and ‘is secure’.<p>Also he mentions shells - in Windows we have PowerShell, which is pretty great actually. It’s not as concise as Linux (Resolve-DnsName vs dig), which hinders interactive programming, but the scripts are more readable. In that example, the Linux version requires knowledge of dnsutils, while the powershell is obvious. I’m still more inclined to write scripts in PS than in bash, for this reason.<p>WSL isn’t about giving windows users the ‘Linux experience’ - it’s about keeping people on Windows. With linux dominance in the cloud, there’s more reason than ever for devs to shift to Linux. WSL _extends_ those developers by _embracing_ them, then finally _extinguishing_ them because it’s still a bit $%#= and if they develop for Linux they’ll end up transitioning.
Open source is good enough. At some point it catches up to the proprietary software on core things that matter and then it becomes hard to justify proprietary. Not always, but that story has played out quite a few times now. To fight that, proprietary software needs to change quickly to keep ahead. But change is expensive and users hate it.<p>Fundamentally, what advantage is Windows going to maintain with a closed source kernel? How many customers care that MS isn't using the Linux kernel? Not many. The bean counters are eventually going to start ask questions, like "why are we paying to maintain our own kernel when we could just use Linux?".<p>I don't see what strategic edge MS is going to hold maintaining a parallel OS long term. If they change rapidly they lose the legacy advantage, if they don't OSS will catch up. It isn't like NTFS is giving them a huge advantage over ext4. The key patents will all be starting to expire too.<p>The only effective resistance to OSS seems to have been this service-based cloud model that exploded onto the scene in the last, what, 10-15 years?
Hasn’t it been fairly obvious for some time that Microsoft “adopted” open source to sell azure?<p>I think the more interesting question should be, what do open source want with Microsoft.
100% agree with the video. I am a macOS user just to have some of the GNU tools and VMs or containers (Vagrant, and Docker for desktop) on the fly when I need to work and get shit done. I still believe that WSL is some sort of slimmed/powered down to nothing version of any gnu/linux distro, and after using it for a while I felt the pain of getting things done and went back to macOS and VMs. I still believe that Microsoft is improving, but I am not sure how it is helping with WSL...
[Rant]<p>It's all business for them. They don't love Linux anymore than they do FLOSS. Argument would be, "but Microsoft is one of the biggest open source contributors". It's like philanthropy, you give money to those in need, but don't fundamentally address the problem, but make it look like you do.<p>All the corporations that contribute to open source projects in terms of man power & finance, do so because they can create more business opportunities & make them noble in eyes of public. But, what they do is take open source projects that have "permissive license" & are growing in popularity. Then contribute, add in proprietary code, sell them as enterprise solutions. In the end, the user of that program is denied any freedom to study the code & modify for their own needs.<p>A big tech that open sources its internal software can do so for any reasons and let me say one of them. They get a community that basically maintains the software, writes documentation, add features & fix bugs for frere. The tech could then hire people trained with that software which they open sourced, saving them training costs.<p>Licenses from OSI & BSD suffer from their "permissive" nature. They think about freedom, but not for who. They think that the ability for a user to not turn a open source software into a proprietary one, is restricting their freedom.<p>But, Free Software thinks the opposite, and puts people who are denied freedom . Free Software with its Copyleft license, guarantees user the absolute freedom to do anything with the program they got for free/money, provided they give the same freedom to others. Basically make the freedom go viral.
They want developers. OSX gave us Unix AND a sane desktop.<p>Ultimately MS over between 2010-2020 lost developer mindshare and they weren't going to get it back. So pivot time and now we have Linux all the things.<p>Once they have developers back..., well, who knows what they'll start doing then.
Microsoft is company. It will do anything(ofc legal) for money.<p>They knew where the market exist,so embraced Linux. They wanted to prevent migration of windows users to MacOS/Linux ,so created WSL2 which lured many MacOS users.<p>It also added DirectX for WSL2 , which is proprietary extension.
It based it's edge browser on chromium because they were lagging behind chromium wrt performance.<p>They want profit. So,they do these things. Some actions benefit floss while some don't. Problem of capitalist company. They care about capital more than us.