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Comment by ralish | Hacker News Reader

Agree that the phrasing could have been a lot clearer, but really, Microsoft removing cmd just doesn't pass even a basic sanity check. I remember seeing the original news articles and just ignoring them as obviously rubbish. It's pretty sad to see so many tech news sites & aggregators just pick-up and run with stories like that which anyone at all knowledgeable about the subject area would immediately know is hyperbole.

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They implemented bash into Windows 10, and their web-ish/app-ish "platform" Silverlight does not work in their own browser in Windows 10 and isn't intended to.

Microsoft have improved leaps and bounds in the last few years but saying that a story is immediately hyperbole because "X-good-technical-reason" isn't something I'm willing to commit to for any large corporation.

Sure, but the degree of usage of cmd makes Silverlight's usage look like a hobby project. It's used everywhere, including all over Microsoft's own software. It'd easily be the single biggest backwards incompatible change ever made by Microsoft and would affect software going back to the 1980s. The engineering effort involved to migrate anything that is using cmd is mind boggling, to the extent of being completely infeasible. It's a safe bet that for as long as Windows is around, cmd is going to stay with it.

And this is exactly because of this mentality that windows next move is to add a Unix subsystem (Ubuntu) aside all the old crap instead of just being Unix compliant and progressively drop old chunks of code as year goes by like Apple started to do 15 years ago.

UNIX is oversold and if it was sold by the same price as other commercial OS back in the day, it wouldn't ever taken over the IT market.

I appreciate the option of running other OS more open to explore the ideas of Xerox PARC.

Also Apple just got UNIX by acquiring NeXT, with Be the music would be other.

Even on NeXT's case, UNIX compatibility, was a means to allow software into the system, not out of the system.

No valuable NeXT application, or for that matter Mac OS/iDevices, made that much use of UNIX APIs.

http://www.nextop.de/NeXTstep_3.3_Developer_Documentation/

Still I find interesting that Apple and Microsoft again choose different strategies to try fill the gap between them and FOSS supporters: -Microsoft is gonna include an FOSS unix subsystem -Apple for the first time in his history is going full FOSS for Swift development

It's just the Swift language itself that is open source and a few libraries. Most of the OS X layers above BSD are still closed source.

It's not "more open" than C# and .NET in that regard.

Sorry if I was wrong I absolutely now nothing about c# & .net.

Does it mean one could actually review code and fork theses languages too if need be?

Certainly: https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn

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