The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
blogs.windows.com
Today we’re very excited to announce the open-source release of the Windows Subsystem for Linux. This is the result of a multiyear effort to prepare for this, and a great closure to the first ever issue raised on the Microsoft/WSL repo:

Today we’re very excited to announce the open-source release of the Windows Subsystem for Linux. This is the result of a multiyear effort to prepare for this, and a great closure to the first ever issue raised on the Microsoft/WSL repo:

https://github.com/microsoft/WSL

  • simple@lemm.eeEnglish
    264·
    6 hours ago

    Does Lemmy even know what EEE means anymore or are we regurgitating words we heard from some article now?

    What’s it going to embrace and extend? WSL has existed for ages and is just a way to run Linux in a convenient container on top of Windows. That’s it. It’s not an attempt to “extenguish” Linux, literally just make the development experience on Windows less painful so people don’t switch to another OS. This has nothing to do with EEE.

    Open sourcing it with a permissive license can only be a good thing, and again they’re doing it to be more appealing to devs and maybe get free bug fixes from the open source community. It isn’t some grand conspiracy. But of course this community will react to news of “proprietary blob is now open source” with pessimism.

    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      203·
      5 hours ago

      literally just make the development experience on Windows less painful so people don’t switch to another OS.

      You said it right there yourself and don’t seem to realize it.

      Why have a laptop or a dual boot with Linux when you can now more easily stay on the proprietary OS ?

      This is called market retention.

      Preventing migration to another OS, another software ecosystem.

      The ‘Embrace’ and ‘Extend’ parts of EEE.

      And if it works, then in a few years, MSFT will figure out how to further monetize some other part of its software ecosystem that is either reliant on, or much much easier for an average user of WSL to use than switching their whole setup or stack all the way over to Linux.

      Call that EEM for ‘monetization’ if you want, or ‘enshittify’ for another E…

      …the commonly used term to describe software or services or platforms that suddenly jump over to making previously free stuff cost money, put ads everywhere, break the previously free features and put the ‘new’ working versions behind some kind of paywall…

      … All after you’ve captured your market and dominated as many competitors as possible.

      Standard monopolist strategy throughout the entite history of capitalism, same general concept goes back even further.

      • The_Decryptor@aussie.zoneEnglish
        41·
        3 hours ago

        Why have a laptop or a dual boot with Linux when you can now more easily stay on the proprietary OS ?

        This is called market retention.

        Preventing migration to another OS, another software ecosystem.

        The ‘Embrace’ and ‘Extend’ parts of EEE.

        That’s stretching the definition to the point it’s nearly unrecognisable.

        What the term meant was for things like Internet Explorer, where MS adopted an existing standard (Embrace), started changing it in incompatible ways (Extend), while using their market power to lock out competitors (Extinguish)

        e.g. IE used an incompatible method for sizing and laying out elements than any other browser, so a site that laid out properly in NN4 looked broken in IE6, and vise versa. So most devs targeted IE6 as it was more popular, and NN4 users got more and more broken sites.

        ACPI was similar, Windows had an extremely lax implementation of it, so motherboards often shipped with bugs that Windows would ignore but would stop anything else from booting. Intentional? Doesn’t really matter, since it sure was helpful in slowing the adoption of things like Linux, that had to come up with workarounds for all the broken hardware.

        • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          3·
          2 hours ago

          Linux is a standard they have Embraced.

          As a for-profit tech monopolist, they will, very predictably, Extinguish the ability of people who use WSL instead of just actually Linux… to be easily able to… fully transition to a competitor (Linux).

          The Extend part just looks different, because the scope of software competition offered by Linux is much more vast than just a particular standard for a particular kind of software.

          … Potato, potato.

          I used to work for Microsoft.

          The ethos is absolutely still there: Create vendor lock in, create ecosystem dependence in every way possible, as well as in ways that 99% of people would not even think are possible.

          EEE is just the term they came up with to describe their own, overarching, monopolist general strategy, and if you wanna quibble over the precise technicalities of an internal corporate slogan, well then you’d be the kind of person MSFT is filled with that made me no longer want to work for them.

    • FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.auEnglish
      43·
      6 hours ago

      Careful now, you’re gonna be called a bootlicker for that lol. Everything Microsoft do is evil according to Lemmings.

      You’re 100% right though. People on here regurgitate catchphrases and terms that they heard other people in their echo chamber use without understanding what they mean, and because the person who they heard using it also didn’t know what they meant, it’s just a comedy of incorrect usage of terms.

      It’s amazing that people still don’t understand Microsoft’s goals despite them being very open and telling everyone over and over and over - they want to be the defacto solutions on everything, so their stuff needs to run on everything. They will start releasing all of their stuff on linux eventually, because even if only 1% of people use Linux, Microsoft want them using Microsoft services.