And here we are with initial OSS release of PS for *nixes. It's broken from the (valid) POV of its target audience and authors want to fix in an orderly fashion. But that's not enough. People at MS are "stupid or malicious", as some commenters put it, and it should be changed ASAP the way community wants, or else.
Or else what? How many of the people arguing for immediate change are an actual and/or potential consumers of PS? How many of people thinking it's a simple change (just do it) have actually maintained large piece of software deployed by thousands of users? I bet that with the exception of Daniel who opened the bug - none.
I don't envy folks maintaining PS. I used to share an apartment with dude who can't get over the US v MS to this day and anything even tangentially related to MS (or Gates) is definitely, without any doubt evil, devious and is some sort of extortion or at the very least embrace extend extinguish strategy. No matter that US v MS was 15 years ago when he was 10. This attitude is pervasive and turbo-counterproductive in cases like this one.
Being pedantic, but that's what a bureaucracy is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy
I'm sorry for being pedantic....
So why does "bureaucracy" have such a negative connotation? Like a lot of powerful tools, it is very easy to abuse. Unless you are very careful in design, you are likely to create a amplification attack of work. Most managers aren't careful, so few people have a positive experience.
US v MS is an ongoing thing. It's never been over... So MS is releasing OSS stuff, but making it hard to run Linux alongside their OS on the same hardware. It's like a guy giving you a hug while stabbing you in the back.
I don't think the venom here is justified at all, but I also don't think it would be justified if it was one malicious person who did it.
But the problem and the poor decision needs a ruthless critique, the reasons it ended up this way are a side problem that most people shouldn't care about.
This isn't some obscure situation tucked into the back corners of some IRC chat. Open sourcing and reaching out to the community is, apparently, the companies direction going forward.
As such, they could/should prioritize these situations as a way of showing real commitment.
Dragging their heels is going to make it feel like nothing but marketing bullshit.
It might also signal to MS rank and file to cut their territorial bullshit (which MS has a storied history of).
Satya could get this fixed today if he said "This is the future. Get it done."
Or, as Bezos would say, "?"
I think the takeaway from this is they should fix things like this before they decide to open source.
The PS team seems like it's doing its best, but you lose some degree of presumption of goodwill when you work for a criminal entity.
Ultimately, I don't think either side is right, but I also don't think either side is wrong.
MS made a choice not to cultivate goodwill in the OS community for years, and they profited from it. It's reasonable for that community to make them earn it back, and this is what it looks like (unfortunately for the individuals on the PS group).
As an aside, what was their punishment?
Google: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/feb/24/google-vi...
Uber.. hasn't been quiet in the courts.
I don't think the existence of other companies with (mabye even bigger) PR problems has any bearing. So what? You want to be equally critical of Uber? Ok. Let's make them prove their goodwill too.
Furthermore, Microsoft is unique in this regard, because at the time of their conviction, they were fighting the browser wars with two open communities: FF and chrome.
Right. I would think the _author_ of curl should probably have a bit of a say if someone adds a curl command to shell but it doesn't work like curl.
He's going to be the one receive angry tweets and in issues in gh.
> Or else what?
People will see how ridiculous this practice of adding aliases-but-no-aliases to existing tools is, and perhaps decide not to use PS for *nixes. Is that bad? Good? I don't know. I am guessing humanity will still go on.
> No matter that US v MS was 15 years ago when he was 10. This attitude is pervasive and turbo-counterproductive in cases like this one.
Yet decisions made at that point still have repercussions. Ship a stupid API -- reap pain for years to come. Don't think that's major news here.
This is not the first time. Microsoft did stuff like this before. Any web developers remember IE8 and its incompatibilities with everything else out there. WebRTC was discussing and working an API and Microsoft shows up at the last minute, and said "Yeah, we got a new completely different proposal". It's shit like that. Some people are more upset about stuff like than others.
One thing I find interesting is Frank's claim that "You have then ignored bug reports about this for years." It seems like users have a better chance of getting problems addressed on Github than the previous feedback mechanism.
Edit: after reading Daniel's blog post, which laurent123456 mentioned in another comment, this has indeed been a longstanding nuisance for curl users.
Maybe, but I see that more as just that the "new MS" is trying to become more open and integrated with the OS community. The change being in the company culture and approach rather than the reporting platform. Ignoring long-standing bugs on many products was just the modus operandi for the old MS.
Now if only UWP will either open itself or die, I'll finally say that old MS is gone for good.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/windows-10-microsoft-b...
http://www.zdnet.com/article/310-microsoft-patents-used-in-a...
http://techrights.org/2015/10/01/microsoft-loves-linux-brain...
They indeed changed. Back in those days they weren't violating their customers' privacy.
By the way, the thread to discuss about Windows 10's privacy issues is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12305598
Probably: https://xkcd.com/1170/
Your tech rights articles points out IV, but fails to mention they raised money from Google. They also like to equate Linux, Android, and ChromeOS. That article is just poor. Microsoft has done, and continues to do some shitty things. Windows 10 update and privacy is a debacle. But their releases from a tech standpoint are a welcome change.
OTOH, you're seriously linking techrights? They're like the Free Software version of Fox News for tech.
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...
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™').
It's all in how you approach things.
Windows?
Office?
SQL Server?
Seems to me, that Microsoft now releases "everything" as open source only by the most ridiculously limited definition of "everything".
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.
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.
If Linux tools used Microsoft utility names, someone would've been sued.
Microsoft used wget and curl `aliases` (while native versions were there) and not only the didn't get sued, they are causing problems for original authors.
Of course no hate for the engineers doing this. They are just doing their job and this is a tough compatibility issue they are facing now.
In a universe where Wine exists, you think someone would be sued if they released an app with a default alias mapping dir to ls?
curl and wget could be considered trademarks.
Personally I like the inflections and emoji brings, plus it makes statements that might otherwise be taken as hostile either as well intentioned or just good old fashioned ribbing.
It shouldn't be. Fuck emoji.
+1
;)
Groupthink: You mean a community that downvotes a comment about X suddenly has a positive notion about X because the votes are hidden?
An example to others: I see this as a good thing - it lets an outsider get a good feel for what community members like. A number is much easier to parse than thousands of comments.
"Shitting on others" is a very melodramatic way of "people saying they don't like a comment with numbers".
It seems that the users of faux-curl-on-powershell are now getting more consideration than the users of real curl under Windows a year or three ago, when Windows 8 or 10 made this change.
It's maybe a good sign. Opening the source and putting it on github means that curl and wget devs and users now feel empowered to ask Microsoft to change stuff in a way that they didn't before.
Then a bunch of jerks pile on about how it was a bad decision and all the Microsoft developers should feel bad.
The whole PR went from something pretty awesome to a great example of why we can't have nice things.
Don't people have better things to do than bitch about an alias??
Perhaps MS had goals on their inception to make the commandlets behave more like the true applications then changed directions.
Isn't that a trademark violation when a Big Corp is doing it officially in their software?
wget: https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Trademarks.html
wget is a GNU project (now at least, originally?). They seem to (makes sense) have a thing against acknowledging trademarks period. So I'm not sure it'd make sense for them to even try to enforce a trademark should someone make a product named (or alias their product to the name) wget.
Trademarks aren't a universal thing, not every country or culture will have an equivalent concept, legal or otherwise. And if products aren't trademarked then claiming trademark abuse is inaccurate.
Now that's a cordial and produtive tone.
I think taking the alias out is actually disappointing and a very slight change for the worse on Windows.
Satya was super clear on this point - he told us to get out of our offices and go talk to customers and find out what they needed to be successful. "Don't worry about the money - if you are making customers successful, we have smart people that can figure out how to make money".
To the all the engineers in our company - that was music to our ears!
I understand your skepticism but there is a new Microsoft at work here.
Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]
That's nice to hear from satya btw.
It was just the sentiment of now "feeling bad for MS" is also a bridge too far.
That said, a healthy, fit, "new" MS would be healthy for the whole ecosystem.
If Microsoft removed them, installing an update to PS could literally break existing scripts. Sure, you can trivially fix it by re-creating the aliases, but only after you realise that an Update broke it.