Microsoft = Linux or Microsoft vs Linux

There’s an interesting counterpoint at TechRights to the whole positive hoopla that has been surrounding Microsoft latest participation as a keynote speaker on LinuxCon and the apparent goodwill Microsoft has been showing towards Linux and OpenSource in particular.

I don’t subscribe entirely the text. I think the Linux Foundation is beyond the need for being corrupted by money. But I’ve been a critic of Microsoft movement towards Open Source on what concerns its motivations, and have been a particular loud critic of how the media has been reacting to the whole thing, giving the impression that the Open Source community is in fact welcoming Microsoft in its bosom.

In particular, I won’t forget how Microsoft beat IBM on exactly this type of game. When IBM started incorporating support for Windows applications into their OS/2, Microsoft was able to create a certain dependency on their technology by improving on their stack and allowing IBM’s OS/2 support to just water enough the appetite of users.

Things like bash on Windows and powershell on Linux are exactly the type of non-product that is meant exclusively to create a need where before there was none. Some very specialized users, amounting to a tiny fraction of the entire industry may find some corner usecases for these things, but the media coverage around it blows it out of its proper proportion and drives the masses in their direction for no benefit to the users whatsoever.

If then we consider the already existing problems in both solutions that reveal that Microsoft is in fact only interested in providing a controlled (by them) appearance of full compatibility (like the heated discussion just days after going live that was the wget and curl aliases on the open source powershell), it is very hard for me not to think that once again we are seeing the same thing. But this time It’s not IBM on the other side.

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I fear the greeks, especially when they come bearing gifts…

Ths kind of happened with MS-DOS too. Remember the Good old days where Windows ran on top of MS-DOS and if there was a failure in MS-DOS itself you’d be rendered unable to use Windows?

Now that DOS and DOS support is all but written out, Microsoft is probably attempting to do the same thing with Bash. The next logical step, if Microsoft is doing just this is to build a system entirely from Z-Shell and band around Z-Shell patched with full Bourne Again Shell support.