The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source.
The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
Today we’re very excited to announce the open-source release of the Windows Subsystem for Linux. This is the result of a multiyear effort to prepare for this, and a great closure to the first ever issue raised on the Microsoft/WSL repo:
Don't you think this is another Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish strategy from Microsoft?
That's exactly what it is. Any time now you'll see "the best way to run Linux: on windows" or similar.
Does Lemmy even know what EEE means anymore or are we regurgitating words we heard from some article now?
What's it going to embrace and extend? WSL has existed for ages and is just a way to run Linux in a convenient container on top of Windows. That's it. It's not an attempt to "extenguish" Linux, literally just make the development experience on Windows less painful so people don't switch to another OS. This has nothing to do with EEE.
Open sourcing it with a permissive license can only be a good thing, and again they're doing it to be more appealing to devs and maybe get free bug fixes from the open source community. It isn't some grand conspiracy. But of course this community will react to news of "proprietary blob is now open source" with pessimism.
literally just make the development experience on Windows less painful so people don't switch to another OS.
You said it right there yourself and don't seem to realize it.
Why have a laptop or a dual boot with Linux when you can now more easily stay on the proprietary OS ?
This is called market retention.
Preventing migration to another OS, another software ecosystem.
The 'Embrace' and 'Extend' parts of EEE.
And if it works, then in a few years, MSFT will figure out how to further monetize some other part of its software ecosystem that is either reliant on, or much much easier for an average user of WSL to use than switching their whole setup or stack all the way over to Linux.
Call that EEM for 'monetization' if you want, or 'enshittify' for another E...
...the commonly used term to describe software or services or platforms that suddenly jump over to making previously free stuff cost money, put ads everywhere, break the previously free features and put the 'new' working versions behind some kind of paywall...
... All after you've captured your market and dominated as many competitors as possible.
Standard monopolist strategy throughout the entite history of capitalism, same general concept goes back even further.
Why have a laptop or a dual boot with Linux when you can now more easily stay on the proprietary OS ?
This is called market retention.
Preventing migration to another OS, another software ecosystem.
The ‘Embrace’ and ‘Extend’ parts of EEE.
That's stretching the definition to the point it's nearly unrecognisable.
What the term meant was for things like Internet Explorer, where MS adopted an existing standard (Embrace), started changing it in incompatible ways (Extend), while using their market power to lock out competitors (Extinguish)
e.g. IE used an incompatible method for sizing and laying out elements than any other browser, so a site that laid out properly in NN4 looked broken in IE6, and vise versa. So most devs targeted IE6 as it was more popular, and NN4 users got more and more broken sites.
ACPI was similar, Windows had an extremely lax implementation of it, so motherboards often shipped with bugs that Windows would ignore but would stop anything else from booting. Intentional? Doesn't really matter, since it sure was helpful in slowing the adoption of things like Linux, that had to come up with workarounds for all the broken hardware.
Linux is a standard they have Embraced.
As a for-profit tech monopolist, they will, very predictably, Extinguish the ability of people who use WSL instead of just actually Linux... to be easily able to... fully transition to a competitor (Linux).
The Extend part just looks different, because the scope of software competition offered by Linux is much more vast than just a particular standard for a particular kind of software.
... Potato, potato.
I used to work for Microsoft.
The ethos is absolutely still there: Create vendor lock in, create ecosystem dependence in every way possible, as well as in ways that 99% of people would not even think are possible.
EEE is just the term they came up with to describe their own, overarching, monopolist general strategy, and if you wanna quibble over the precise technicalities of an internal corporate slogan, well then you'd be the kind of person MSFT is filled with that made me no longer want to work for them.
You: “Let me explain Embrace, Extend, Extinguish to you”
Also you: clearly doesn’t understand what Embrace, Extend, Extinguish actually was
Microsoft aren’t trying to change Linux with proprietary things that only work on WSL. That would be EEE. Microsoft are just letting you run Linux inside Windows, so people who need or want Linux can do it on their Windows machine instead of also needing a Linux machine.
This won’t stop anyone who hates Windows from using a Linux machine, because this is inside Windows.
Does Lemmy even know what EEE means anymore or are we regurgitating words we heard from some article now?
So either all people of lemmy don't know shit (you are not included here - implied) or only your assumption is valid: Wrong sources.
What's it going to embrace and extend?
It embraces the Linux ecosystem and DX on windows. Microsoft is extending the Linux kernel and other Linux projects.
WSL has existed for ages and is just a way to run Linux in a convenient container on top of Windows. That's it.
To you, yes. Can you speak for any project? Is there not a single project where the userbase are consisting of WSL users with compatability issues? Did you research about it? If so, prompt sources.
It's not an attempt to "extenguish" Linux, literally just make the development experience on Windows less painful so people don't switch to another OS. This has nothing to do with EEE.
Trying to bundle the userbase in their subsystem is literally rendering a dedicated Linux machine obsolete. If all would stay there the rest of the distro community would extinguish.
Open sourcing it with a permissive license can only be a good thing,
Can it? Contributing substracts work hours from other projects. So "only be a good thing" is wrong. There are more perspectives then just yours.
and again they're doing it to be more appealing to devs and maybe get free bug fixes from the open source community.
You got sources about their intentions? You just said it: They are conquering the labor market of personal devs.
It isn't some grand conspiracy. But of course this community will react to news of "proprietary blob is now open source" with pessimism.
Did you already review the code? No concerns left? How about pulling private servers for data? Is everything mirrored onto their servers? Any binary blobs there? Tracking/monitoring? Is it safe in regards of privacy and security?
Hopefully you see that you ain't holding all answers and opinions of the entire world. Cheers.
Careful now, you're gonna be called a bootlicker for that lol. Everything Microsoft do is evil according to Lemmings.
You're 100% right though. People on here regurgitate catchphrases and terms that they heard other people in their echo chamber use without understanding what they mean, and because the person who they heard using it also didn't know what they meant, it's just a comedy of incorrect usage of terms.
It's amazing that people still don't understand Microsoft's goals despite them being very open and telling everyone over and over and over - they want to be the defacto solutions on everything, so their stuff needs to run on everything. They will start releasing all of their stuff on linux eventually, because even if only 1% of people use Linux, Microsoft want them using Microsoft services.
I think it's an attempt to keep people on their platform who need easy access to a unix-like shell. Linux has it and so does mac os. Windows didn't until they introduced wsl.
Well windows had cygwin and mingw
I had to move back to those a few times instead of using WSL during the early days. There were quite a few growing pains.
Fixed it fully by installing Linux.
Ye, and cygwin, mingw and msys are terrible compared to wsl
has, they still work great and keep me sane
MSYS2 is my current choice for GNU/Windows
It's kind of the opposite in my mind, WSL is (was) Microsoft capitulating to the fact that Linux is not going away, same with Azure. WSL is mostly for companies. Some companies have a huge contract with Microsoft and manage all laptops with it. Then they grow big enough that they can't ignore Linux because they have people who need to work on Linux. WSL is the way Microsoft keeps their clients, because otherwise they move to Apple based IT.
EEE would have been investing in PowerShell, PuTTY, or similar.
I think it’s more embrace. They have to compete against so many more entities now.
This is my thought, they've all but lost the battle for cloud servers and they'd rather the developers computers were Windows. WSL allows that.
Azure is their primary revenue source now, they didn't lose anything
Yeah but imagine if they could collect licence fees after every AWS server as well.
The world is not enough for these companies.
My client is spending waaaaaaay more money on Microsoft Online than it ever used to on software licenses. Every single user in the business is costing 🇦🇺$30 per month alone just for their Office suite. That's before you get to the Azure stuff. Some hosted apps cost over 🇦🇺$1k/month to host in Azure.
Before you go too strongly after Microsoft for charging so much, this is cheaper than what we used to pay for running our own SharePoint, Exchange etc farms as well as the infrastructure required to host websites/database etc. All that has been outsourced to Microsoft Online and saves significant money.
Microsoft is doing very well out of its own cloud fees and can cope with AWS, Google and all the smaller private cloud operations getting some of that action.
I know they are doing very well, trust me, I've seen the inside of the beast. It's not Microsoft either, any megacorp will talk to you in terms of how much they lost by not fully monopolising a market segment.
And that is my point, not that they don't make insane amounts of money, but that it will never be enough.
Poorly. WSL is awesome but it's I/O performance is not at a level which will make developers on bigger projects happy.
they’ve all but lost the battle for cloud servers
Azure is enormous, what are you talking about?
I meant running windows on them, its enormous and its all linux servers. I know you can run windows but it'll be a tiny fraction.
Microsoft don’t care what you run on azure, just that you’re using azure. In fact running Linux on azure instead of Windows benefits them because it’s more lightweight so their hardware stretches further.
I think you’re probably right. Microsoft seems less invested in winning an operating system battle at this point. They’re positioning services and abstractions that care less about the end device’s operating system, more so that they’re at least on that device.
I wouldn’t be surprised we see Microsoft “embrace” Proton and Wine in the next 5 to 10 years as it’s far easier to let “the community” predominantly handle supporting legacy Windows versions that have to handle it themselves.
They can’t suddenly lose that entire OS revenue machine however and would need to transition. But I doubt that Redmond are naive to the disruption Wine and Proton are having and how technical users are starting to jump ship.
Xbox is transitioning to "release on everything", so their upcoming games will all work on proton (apart from COD etc that have anti-cheat, although wouldn't surprise me if they make that linux compatible eventually). Microsoft would rather you subscribe to game pass to play their games on Linux than not subscribe to game pass and not give them any money. It wouldn't surprise me if they eventually released a Linux Xbox app.
I don't think that, as Microsoft hasn't done a lot (any?) of that stuff in recent years. It's good to be cautious but really what is the problem with opening the source for something that already existed for a while and is embraced by many?
It's because they have pivoted to subscriptions on office, ads on windows and general data harvesting.
Projects are receiving issues about WSL compatibility issues. So this directly influences FOSS projects.
They would go as far as put bounties for PRs just to get more hold in the community. Just swapping to a permissive license appears to be enough to get contributions.
They can keep their secrets; I won't ever check this repository out.
Normally I would say yes, but WSL is so incredibly necessary for a developer that it might be legit.
It’s not necessary. I’m a full stack developer and I only use it for docker, which isn’t even necessary as you can use docker without it.
Personally I never use it except for docker desktop. I just use powershell
That's their playbook. But honestly I think anyone who plays with WSL will either get a taste and begin learning/transitioning to Linux or device to stick with their "safe" windows machine
WSL is just a way to actually get some shit done when there's a terrible business reason for requiring a native Windows install.
My Microsoft Surface became vastly more useable once I installed Linux on it.
WSL allows me to develop in a Linux environment while still enjoying my very custom Windows setup and programs that I am used to. So no, WSL did not make me choose a side, but instead helps me to get the best of both worlds at once.
Maybe. But Microsoft owns the workplace, so when you get a job they'll demand you can only use Windows, or if you're lucky enough to be allowed to use Linux, the Microsoft management software will suck so much you'll want to use Windows. Microsoft is silently implementing their EEE strategy, and this is only a small part of that. Before long they'll release their AI-focused cloud-connected Linux distro with Windows Desktop compatibility.
No real reason to extinguish here, Microsoft is a services company and can offer those services on Windows and Linux.
I’d wager you’re more likely to see an official compatibility layer on Linux supported by Microsoft before you see them move to extinguish.
💯
Surprisingly few seem to understand the difference between 90s Microsoft and Satya’s Microsoft. Under Satya Microsoft have completely transformed into a services company who aim to have their services run everywhere on absolutely everything. MS services on Linux is coming. Some people still can’t believe that Xbox games are releasing on PlayStation despite it being telegraphed for years.
EEE isn’t a thing they want to do anymore. They want to embrace every platform so they can dominate that market too - not by extending and extinguishing, but by being a one stop shop that no one else can match.
Docker doesn't exist in a usable state on Windows, so its an attempt to allow management of servers using Windows, as Windows Server fades away from usage entirely.
Docker works with windows containers, plus wsl can be used as the backend for docker. I use it all the time
That was 30 years ago, you're going to have to move on one day.
It could be another Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish strategy from Microsoft, because if the increase in Linux user share leads to an increase in malware, most of those users aren't experts.
So there will be an increase in antivirus software for Linux, but that will also lead to DRM in Linux, and Linux may become what I swore to destroy. While BSD distributions, Redox OS, and other systems take over to become the new Linux as it was in its beginnings.
Anyone who's running WSL is probably closer to an "expert" than the average windows user
I wish people would let the EEE meme die. It's not the 90's anymore grandpa. Parroting the same pointless meme without applying critical thinking gets old.
Are you suggesting an alternative motive for Microsoft that does beyond profit?
The profit is getting nerds on the internet to fix bugs in wsl for free
What does that have to do with the price of tea in China? Maybe don't just toss around non sequiturs.
long obsolete dos text editor
It's a full rewrite in Rust, with no direct relation to the old program.
