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Some exceedingly odd news today from the world of Microsoft:
Today's customers live in a multi-platform, multi-cloud, multi-OS world – that's just reality. This world brings new challenges and customers need tools to make everything work together. Microsoft is working company-wide to deliver management tools that empower customers to manage any platform, from anywhere, on any device, using Linux or Windows. This shift to a more open, customer-obsessed approach to deliver innovation is one of the things that makes me most excited to come to work every day.
You've heard Satya Nadella say "Microsoft loves Linux" and that's never been more true than now. Nearly one in three VMs on Azure are Linux. Nearly 60 percent of third-party IaaS offers in the Azure Marketplace are open source software (OSS). We have forged strong industry partners to extend choice to our customers. We've announced SQL Server on Linux, as well as open sourced .NET. We added Bash to Windows 10 to make it a great platform for developing OSS. And, we're active contributors and participants to numerous open source projects (e.g. OpenSSH, FreeBSD, Mesos, Docker, Linux and many more) across the industry.
Today, we are taking the next step in our journey. I am extremely excited to share that PowerShell is open sourced and available on Linux. (For those of you who need a refresher, PowerShell is a task-based command-line shell and scripting language built on the .NET Framework to help IT professionals control and automate the administration of the Windows, and now Linux, operating systems and the applications that run on them.) I'm going to share a bit more about our journey getting here, and will tell you how Microsoft Operations Management Suite can enhance the PowerShell experience.
I have no words. Well, I do but they're mostly of the four-letter variety and in random order.
(Score: 5, Funny) by jmorris on Friday August 19 2016, @06:58AM
Didn't bother digging into the source tree, just making a prediction. We all kinda realized RedHat OS/Pottering OS, whatever mutant thing is growing around systemd and the rest of the 'alien tech' RedHat is pushing was just the first steps of porting Windows to the Linux kernel. Now PowerShell can run. Just wait, they will port the new ABI and the Windows Store. Then they buy RedHat and make Pottering a VP.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday August 19 2016, @04:29PM
The invasion (infection?) of Windows software on Linux is a sign of one thing.
The following business model has failed . . .
This system has had Windows 10 installed.
To restore this system to a usable state, please send 3 Bitcoin to Microsoft.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @07:10AM
This sure looks like the second "E."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @07:22AM
There's only one E in Evil Corp.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @09:13AM
I believe your parent was referring to 1)Embrace, 2)Extend, 3)Extinguish.
This has been a recurrent pattern with things that particular company has messed with in the past.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @07:21AM
Are you afraid? Very afraid? You should be very, very, afraid. MS comes. They have chosen the form of the Destroyer! There is no hope for any that remain. All users of Gentoo, of course, have been raptured to a very safe place, as have all the runners of Slackware. Apres Deluge, Bill. Let them eat emacs. No one will ever need more than 640K. Networking is only for mainframes. Halloween, Homebrew Computing Club, and only now do you see the true power, of the software libre side! Ha!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @07:31AM
I had a sizable collection of PowerShell scripts about six years ago, when I needed to do some heavy duty XML parsing, and wouldn't you know PowerShell has an XML parser built right into the language, which enabled very rapid prototyping by saving me the trouble of evaluating a suitable XML parser for the job. But that was then, and I've since rewritten the prototype scripts, because PowerShell wasn't portable enough at the time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @08:20AM
Six years ago today the Wikipedia page on PowerShell contained an example like this:
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday August 19 2016, @06:05PM
I'll bet someone well-versed in Python could do the exact same thing in about the same amount of code.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @07:27PM
Obviously yes, by importing an XML parser, of which there are many to choose from. However, XML is a basic data type in a handful of languages such as PowerShell, for which an XML parser is unnecessary. There was a language called ECMAScript for XML (E4X) which added an XML data type to JavaScript, but E4X was considered obsolete until Facebook reinvented E4X as JSX.
(Score: 4, Informative) by isostatic on Friday August 19 2016, @08:08AM
Quite, 4 letter words sprang to my mind too.
Bash. Perl. Grep. Tail. Head. Sort. Uniq.
(Score: 2) by gringer on Friday August 19 2016, @08:56AM
A few 3-letter words as well:
cut, cat, sed, awk, top, scp, ssh, man, tee, bwa
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Friday August 19 2016, @01:53PM
Not sure where you'd use top, man or "bwa" (some genome thing?) in a script.
However other 4 letter commands sit across many genres of my scripts on my laptop, just not ones that sprang to mind immediately: sudo, lsof, wget, gzip, find, curl, zcat
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Friday August 19 2016, @01:49PM
I think TMB thought more of checking his file system, for fear Microsoft might have corrupted it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by computersareevil on Friday August 19 2016, @05:55PM
Fsck. Fsck. Fsck. Fsck. Fsck. Fsck. Fsck.
That's the only one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @12:21AM
I await Microsoft Fuchsia [soylentnews.org].
(Score: 2, Disagree) by vux984 on Friday August 19 2016, @08:46AM
This may be useful in the many places where Linux co-exists with Windows; I don't see anything to be worked up about. Its implausible that this replaces bash etc.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by turgid on Friday August 19 2016, @08:51AM
The correct solution is to put Cygwin on the Windows box. We should resist dumbing down to the lowest common denominator.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday August 19 2016, @02:05PM
Dumbing down everyone to the lowest common denominator.
No System Left Behind.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @02:54PM
No Systemd Left Behind.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @08:55AM
Co-exist nothing. Replace Windows. Just think of all those legacy .ps1 scripts you can run on a cheap Linux box now without a Windows license. You know, because the only reason you were using Windows is you hired an insane coder who wrote everything in PowerShell and was killed before he documented anything when he sleepwalked into traffic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @11:30AM
You still need most of the window backend API for that to work :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @03:41PM
PowerShell can do other things than automate Windows.
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=15074&cid=389989 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday August 19 2016, @09:26AM
Someone deep in the bowels of the dark satanic code mill in Redmond, someone of unnatural birth will be attempting to create an ungodly union between the Linux Kernel, systemd, PowerShell and whatever the latest infernal incarnation of the Microsoft GUI layer in these days.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @09:47AM
Windows 11, sounds like it's gonna be awesome.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Friday August 19 2016, @11:21AM
There may never be a Windows11. I get the idea that Windows10 will always be upgrading itself to the latest incarnation - and you will have no choice in it. Not much different than the DRM'd DVD format where they take over control of the player when they want to.
I may be wrong, but I forsee lots of ads in the future. Unskippable ads. Just like you were watching OTA TV. Unless you run the corporate edition.
And this brought to you by the OS, not the browser. Anytime you have the system online, the OS itself will be listening for ads to show to you. Just like TV.
I believe this relentless relieving the user of control of the system, along with this DMCA type legislation to make bypassing illegal, is leading up to this.
Note already any user that powers down his machine without permission is going to be greeted by delays on next startup. This goes against everything I was taught in CS - where I was supposed to have disk files open just long enough to write an updated file. If things were changing all the time, that was what RAM was for. If the system power failed or system lockup occurred, well, you lost the last interval of data that was being processed. Which I thought in the grand scheme of things wasn't much worse than the occasional loss of a meal if something that did not agree with you got in.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Friday August 19 2016, @01:53PM
There we have it. Windows doesn't go up to 11.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday August 19 2016, @02:07PM
So you're saying Windows can henceforth be known as: Windows OS X ?
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday August 19 2016, @02:30PM
#hahaonlyserious
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday August 19 2016, @09:06PM
They'll just make windows 10 +1 louder.
Is this the end of windows?
Well, I don't really think that the end can be assessed as of itself as being the end because what does the end feel like? It's like saying when you try to extrapolate the end of the universe, you say, if the universe is indeed infinite, then how - what does that mean? How far is all the way, and then if it stops, what's stopping it, and what's behind what's stopping it? So, what's the end, you know, is my question to you.
--Satya Nadella
Why doesn't Gaaark use windows?
You can't really dust for vomit.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday August 20 2016, @12:34AM
> I get the idea that Windows10 will always be upgrading itself to the latest incarnation [...]
Can't be arsed to look it up, but I seem to recall that an announcement was made to that effect. If the Windows 10 brand is ruined enough, they can change their minds about sticking with it.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @12:19PM
even if it's not awesome, 11 will be louder...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @03:01PM
They're just porting BSOD over to Linux.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Joe Desertrat on Friday August 19 2016, @08:29PM
And they will call it Lindows!
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday August 19 2016, @08:55PM
Doesn't DeadRat already make that? :-)
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jimshatt on Friday August 19 2016, @09:57AM
OS management-related tasks seem a little far-fetched atm, but who knows...
Ultimately, I think MS is trying to create more common ground and less differences between Linux and Windows so that the OS itself isn't a reason to choose Linux anymore. It never was for me, I choose Linux because it's Free, not because it's a better OS per se. That's just a happy coincidence :)
(Score: 3, Informative) by tonyPick on Friday August 19 2016, @02:06PM
You mean other than the bit where it deliberately does introduce breaking aliases for widely used commands which will confuse users, create interoperability problems, lead to unnecessary dependencies on powershell, and create problems for every other implementation? The bit which "coincidentally" looks an awful lot like the "Extend" part of EEE?
https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/pull/1901 [github.com]
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/08/19/removing-the-powershell-curl-alias/ [daniel.haxx.se]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Friday August 19 2016, @11:49AM
I don't think it's "exceedingly odd news" as much as the next step in their plan to transition from selling software to selling services. PowerShell may not fit very well with Linux, but both MS and their integration companies have probably written tons of PowerShell scripts to automate installing and deploying software, and managing it. So MS is getting serious about transitioning away from Windows as a cash cow to cloud computing as a cash cow. They see that Amazon dominates by being first, and that they could actually be disruptive if they port their software like SQL Server (which is used by about every vertical-market package out there) to the cloud. Running Windows from the cloud is painful, so porting this stuff to Linux is natural.
What I don't get is PowerShell's heavy integration with COM objects. Are these going to be ported to Linux, too? I guess with the .NET framework that has been ported to Linux, you can create .NET runtime COM objects that PowerShell can manipulate. I don't know enough about this ecosystem.
No one who develops native Linux would ever want PowerShell. But that's beside the point. MS never open sources anything unless it's part of their own strategy.
What Amazon ought to do is get PostgreSQL and make it drop-in compatible with SQL Server's custom SQL syntax. Now that would make things interesting. If Amazon had that story to tell vertical-market companies which use Windows and SQL Server as their back end, they'd be on to something. Or they would have been if they'd beaten MS to having it available.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2) by goodie on Friday August 19 2016, @05:39PM
To be picky, I'd just argue that both pgsql and t-sql are custom sql syntaxes. As are most vendors'. In many cases, ansi-sql is simply not fully implemented or forgoes some functionality that made you purchase the dbms to begin with. but it'd be nice if it did not matter which dbms runs in the background. something like a standard of some sort... wait... never mind ;)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @05:52PM
Someone already made a layer that will run MySQL "SQL" on Postrgres...
...so it's possible. MySQL is even more brain-damaged than T-SQL.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @01:51PM
Linux users miss the advantages of storing all their application and system configuration information in one place, where it can be easily modified by software!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by isostatic on Friday August 19 2016, @02:25PM
It's called systemd
(Score: 4, Funny) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday August 19 2016, @03:04PM
Do not want! Now I'm going to have nightmares!
systemd, binary logfiles, PowerShell, a crippled Dot Net runtime, next the bloated, GUID-infested registry! Roaming profiles that make logging into a new computer take 20 minutes because it insists on copying everything locally! My Documents becomes the root of the filesystem with hard links and virtual remappings spewed everywhere in a non-Euclidean mess! VNC as the only way to remote into a Linux box! Parsing XML with regexes [stackoverflow.com]! The dead rising from the grave! Dogs and cats living together! The pony, he comes!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by number6 on Friday August 19 2016, @01:53PM
The author of 'curl' (Daniel Stenberg) has requested Microsoft to remove all aliases to 'curl' inside PowerShell.
Here is the pull request at GitHub [github.com]
Here is his blog post on this [daniel.haxx.se]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Bot on Friday August 19 2016, @02:13PM
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday August 19 2016, @02:30PM
Please. We had namespace wars in Unix since the BSD vs. GNU sed \ awk flags wars. To this day, you have people complaining about bash stealing cd and ls aliasing...
It's why sane distros use busybox in their initramfs. Not the size. That doesn't matter in x86. But because they don't want to delve into the politics.
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:41AM
It's not a namespace problem though. Powershell has a feature called "aliases" which allow you to wrap commands around a shorter syntax. The problem with this is that the Powershell team, in all their wisdom, decided to simply wrap a number of Unix commands to "aliases", probably so they could be cool or something, or just to help some seasoned CLI users with quick commands ("ls" invokes "dir", while "curl" invokes "Invoke-WebRequest).
The problem is it shits on itself once they open-source it. Or when any sane user chooses to install curl.
What they should've done is provide these semantics as a default in the profile.ps1 configurations they have for users. That way, it kills two problems quickly: namely where do you find the customizable shell script for your user (profile.ps1 isn't created by default) and 2) this issue when users try to install more sane tools than the ones provided by Windows.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @10:05PM
I guess the awk flags are correctly documented in manpages, for each implementation, and people are going to look there when something breaks. Aliases are quite easy to edit without having to fork. This is different, if you want a linux equivalent you gotta look for that very controversial piece of software who took over PID 1 whose creators are allergic to being BASHed for obvious reasons.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @11:16PM
Other than adding that to Microsoft's chops, what's the point?
Linux/Unix already has more languages to choose from that any other OS I know of.
(Score: 1) by jb on Saturday August 20 2016, @03:05AM
I would have assumed that pretty close to the top of the requirements list for any shell explicitly intended to be used "for system management" would be that it is linked statically.
After all, a shell that you can't run in a DR situation when /usr can't be mounted, and that you can't run on a brand new system before its plethora of dependencies have been installed, doesn't really seem cut out to be used for "system management" tasks...
Surely dependency of any sort of external interpreter / vm / runtime library would be a deal-breaker for those use-cases...
...or have I missed something? Does "system management" not include actually getting the system working any more?