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Comment by ThJ | Hacker News Reader

Two perspectives on the recent grand entry of Microsoft into the Linux space:

1. Linux won in the embedded (ARM devices), mobile (Android) and server spaces, and this is Microsoft bowing to that.

2. This is Microsoft's embrace, extend and extinguish strategy from the 1990s in a new wrapper. They just had to do it to an operating system this time.

Not sure if these perspectives are correct, but I'm just throwing them out there as food for thought.

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> This is Microsoft's embrace, extend and extinguish strategy from the 1990s in a new wrapper

We're all right to be cautious about trusting large companies' motives when they embrace an open standard. But I don't think there's any reason to invoke EEE! until they have introduced a proprietary (i.e. closed-source) implementation of something and then added non-standard extensions.

Since much of Microsoft's recent activity has been released as open source (MIT licensed, no less), I have a hard time believing Microsoft would go down that road again any time soon.

Rather, I think they're building their business on providing the best and easiest-to-use hosting and cloud services provided you're using their excellent and free developer tooling. And I'm OK with that, since they're not doing anything that is unfairly competitive. (Even AWS could start providing VSCode extensions and they'd be on equal footing with Microsoft, though to win they'd have to compete with MS's cloud directly.)

I really agree with your point around "best and easiest-to-use". I like this even more than how Google became defacto choice by being the "better" search engine (I put it in quotes because its pretty fuzzy now if it is better, but when it started it was certainly cleaner and probably better).

I like when a company wins by just being superior (and hopefully in a way where they aren't deliberately building a moat)

Someone mentioned that MS is not publishing the C# debugger. What good is all that open source code if that key component for development is missing?

If they go defunct or if the C# debugger somehow becomes unavailable, that’s a strong incentive for someone else to build one, given C#’s market reach. Perhaps that person would even be kind enough to open-source it.

Either way, because C#/.NET and Roslyn are open-source, the likelihood of .NET shops being left high-and-dry without a debugger is very slim, since it wouldn’t be all that hard for an experienced developer to build another one.

What good is all that open source code if that key component for development is missing?

What good? All that open source code.

The constant goalpost moving here is ridiculous. “Oh, Microsoft released n projects as Free Software? Well by god they should have released n+1.”

> But I don't think there's any reason to invoke EEE! until they have introduced a proprietary (i.e. closed-source) implementation of something and then added non-standard extensions.

That would be WSL wouldn't it? Their goal is clearly to avoid having people moving to Linux as a development platform, and keep them on Windows.

The extensions are the ability for Linux processes to integrate with Windows software running on the same machine. In a way, they're extending Linux with Windows services.

> Their goal is clearly to avoid having people moving to Linux as a development platform, and keep them on Windows.

I think it's the opposite. There's little danger that Windows shops are going to move to Linux. However, I know a bunch of devs currently using Macs that would probably switch to Windows with nice devices like the Surface Pro and access to real gaming and such, if only Windows was a suitable Unix environment for their work.

They want devs using Macs and such to move to Windows, and I think it's going to work.

This comment tells me Purism et al need tablets next.

The only implementation built by Microsoft of any standard in WSL is the bridge that provides a Linux kernel interface (it proxies Linux syscalls to the NT kernel). But their only goal there is to support Linux userspace, so it would be rather pointless to add extra syscalls or extend the existing ones. (And besides, they haven't even finished implementing all of the system calls...)

For WSL 2, they're taking the Linux kernel whosesale and dropping it into a VM in Hyper-V. If anything, they're backing away from anything that could be construed as a possible EEE.

It would seem to be bowing to what their customer base wanted (whether their customers realized it or not). Most of my personal/work devices are Windows and prior to the big change, on each one I'd have a virtual machine with a linux distro in it so that I could do some work that was outside of ASP.NET (which I'd do in Windows).

Now, ASP.NET can be developed in OSX/Linux/Windows and they've cut out layers involved so that developers can work within Linux on their Windows machine.

Is the goal to upsell you on Azure? Most likely. Nothing wrong with that though: every company that intends to make a profit wants you to use the thing that gives them said profit. The fact you can use the two previously mentioned things without any requirement to use Azure is probably what they should be measured on in regards to those two things. On the bright side, Azure is a pretty diverse setup whereas it could've been Windows Server w/ IIS and Windows Server w/ SQL Server instances as far as the eye can see.

Another possible perspective is that Apple has more or less given a passing interest to OSX in recent years and Microsoft felt they could make inroads with developers using Mac products (that weren't there for iOS development. ie web). It's worked to some degree (anecdotally. Though the substantial enhancements to the OS on the Windows side have been at a higher clip than on the OSX side for a bit though) and been a driver for a bit of good faith with development audiences so they probably view it as a win-win. But they're not doing a great job of extinguishing (if that were indeed the goal) because Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code have both found their way onto OSX (VSCode on Linux too). Would seem nutty to bolster OSX's appeal if this were the same old Microsoft just under new management.

This has nothing to do with the article. This is about openshift, not linux (albiet, openshift runs on linux).

They seem to be embracing openshift as a prominent k8s distro on their cloud, which I think is interesting. Instead of attempting to create their own EKS type service, they're providing an openshift platform.

Azure already has AKS, the equivalent of EKS: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/

Good to know. I'm not well versed on Azure. Interesting that they want to support both. They most sense some kind of demand ontop of openshift.

I see this move as Microsoft not being convinced that backing k8s is the best strategy at the moment. Also, Openshift and Red Hat are "closer" to enterprise IT and therefore a good chance to capture "containerization" opportunities in large IT orgs.

Red Hat is owned by IBM. Just trying to understand, IBM Cloud, Azure, Openshift, AKS, k8s together in this "octagon".

Or, maybe MS finally realizes that "Customer centric" is/will be the mantra to gain back the trust they have lost, you know.

> They just had to do it to an operating system this time.

Nope it seems their target is not linux but the whole dev(millenials)community

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