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Comment by 2close4comfort | Hacker News Reader

Very true! When those decisions were made PowerShell was never planned to be run on anything that ran those cmds natively. Now that they have changed the rules this should be expected as they move to a more neutral ground. I would be the 1st to call M$ on being jerks, but in this case give them a break the ship just did a 180 if you setup your furniture a certain why I guess you will have to set it up again...deal with it.

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wget has been on windows for 15 years: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net...

PowerShell first appeared 9 years ago.

Edit: curl has been on windows for at least 14 years according to this: https://curl.haxx.se/mail/archive-2002-06/0114.html

Edit 2: 17 years: http://ftp.sunet.se/mirror/archive/ftp.sunet.se/pub/www/util...

They have been on there, but not as standard Windows components. Perhaps they had lofty goals to replace the tools with a "better" version and changed direction.

Replacing something with "better" version is step #2 of EEE.

Replacing something with a better version is also the basis of the success of life.

It's all in how you approach things.

If you are going to argue that Microsoft is out on a new EEE trip you are going to have a hard time now that it releases everything as Open Source.

> now that it releases everything as Open Source.

Windows?

Office?

SQL Server?

Seems to me, that Microsoft now releases "everything" as open source only by the most ridiculously limited definition of "everything".

There have been EEE accusations against e.g. systemd, so it's not clear that other OSS couldn't get the same. Actually now that I think about it I don't see why EEE would depend on unreleased source at all.

They aren't, but the only reason for these aliases in the first place is that type of attitude. curl is a commonly used utility, so lets replace the command with completely different.

Open source projects should really register trademarks and sue companies like Microsoft. It really doesn't pay to be the good guy. After all, if anybody used the word Windows for an alternative OS, I'm pretty sure Microsoft wouldn't be happy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Lindows.com....

You shouldn't be able to trademark function names and executable file names. Therein lies madness.

OTOH, if I (or a big entity like, say, Apple) released something called Java which didn't really behave like Java™, that would also result in a bit of madness.

I think trademarks are good; and when compatible alternatives exist, of say, a product named 'Foo™', they should be able to market themselves as 'Foo™ compatible' (and obviously not as 'Foo™').

So assuming they have a similar problem where 'ls' is aliased to 'dir'. Who should have trademarked 'ls'?

>>PowerShell was never planned to be run on anything that ran those cmds natively.

Really? I thought that windows versions (native versions, not even cygwin) of wget and curl existed for more than a decade. I am not very good at googling old stuff, but I remember using curl natively in 2004 or so.

"Native" for Windows means comes out of the box or as an official release from Microsoft, according to many enterprise security teams. PowerShell was not allowed on stuff here until Microsoft started including it with the OS, even though Microsoft fully supported it on downlevel OSes.

On the other hand, curl.exe has been available for five years.

PowerShell was originally designed so that you would mostly just run CmdLets with it so colliding with an actual program wasn't considered an issue. And these aliases haven been available since 2007.

They even admitted it them self that it was stupid and needs to be fixed though so just wait I guess?

edit: As a separate note I really would like to have versions of curl and wget that actually have all the params working but return the correct PowerShell objects (so the web request result thingie) instead of a String object. Or maybe have it do that with a flag or something.

I get the feeling there are a lot of commands that are going to need to be customized for actual typed output. It would be an interesting project to do a usr-bin for PowerShell.

curl on Windows existed many years before PowerShell.

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