What's in it for microsoft though? What is their end-goal? If they support opensource I'd rather they port some major programs to other platforms to make those platforms more viable.
Microsoft seems to be undergoing a huge sea change towards acceptance and promotion of open source software, and moving into a devices and services model for revenue as opposed to a software licensing model. It seems that most of the open source community still thinks they are "up to something" but I'm starting to believe that they are genuinely becoming a much better company than they were under Ballmer and Gates.
Either way, I'm happy to see them putting their money where their mouth was, literally.
MS has always been pragmatic. The shift is happening because they have gotten into the cloud business, with a primary focus on the infrastructure tier (Azure).
This means that as long as someone is renting compute time from them, MS don't really care what is running higher in the stack.
Burning CPU time and memory bandwidth is what ssh does on purpose to make things secure. So from this perspective, ssh seems like a great match for them making more money.
Azure is so terrifically overpriced for compute, so it stands that they'd love people using it even if they ran stuff that actively went against Windows. Azure's prices are more than double Google Cloud Compute. Up to 5x the price. Azure could resell GCP and still make a hefty margin.
I agree with much what you wrote, but why is this cause for happiness? It's basically the end of programming as a profession should every company go that way.
I was referring to "moving into a devices and services model for revenue as opposed to a software licensing model" - which I think is likely.
If every company starts doing this (using open source!), the majority of software will be written and maintained by volunteers begging for donations from said companies.
What will be left is devops jobs, "full stack" engineers, i.e. all jobs where you can't really focus on developing software.
Very few interesting jobs may remain in Microsoft Research.
The other possibility is that if every company starts doing this (using open source!), the majority of software will be written and maintained by employees of said companies.
This is already the case for many projects, isn't it? In the case of OpenBSD, several of the core developers are either owners or employees of companies that use OpenBSD in their operations. Some of these companies are infrastructure providers, some are device / appliance vendors, some are consultancy shops...
Microsoft are adding OpenSSH support but NOT in Windows 10 RTM, and likely not this calendar year in general. The first Microsoft OS to receive OpenSSH support is likely Windows Server 2016 (or whatever name they finalise it on).
I just don't want people to run up Windows 10 on July 31st and then ask "but where is OpenSSH?!" Windows 10 might receive OpenSSH support in the future, but you'll be waiting a while. They only just announced the effort, engineering may not have even started yet in earnest.
Yes but you don't get Powershell. If you're even remotely into actual scripting on Unix you'll love Powershell's consistency and separation of data/presentation.
I spent fifteen years scripting on Unix for a living. I consider powershell to be garbage. Lack of 'separation of data/presentation' is what made unix ubiquitous. It's also what made HTML ubiquitous. I think it's great that powershell is getting full, native ssh support -- because then I can manage windows computers in a non-ridiculous way, regardless of what PL wankery Microsoft shoved into the syntax.
> I think standardization and easy scripting made Unix ubiquitous. Making a regex to search for start time in ps output did not.
So was it easy or not?
> Most HTML on the internet uses CSS for presentation.
...now. That was extremely not the case during the period that HTML grew popular.
> So it's non ridiculous, but you'd still be using Powershell, which you just said is garbage. I'm not following.
It's non ridiculous because my control scripts can be written in a real scripting language, dispatching generated powershell commands to windows machine over the same protocol that real computers use. Powershell itself isn't really the attraction in this case.
> You seem /really/ pissed off. I'm not sure why.
I'm not sure why you would think that. They're just opinions. I can consider something garbage without getting emotional about it. Actual garbage in a garbage can, for instance.
I suppose an internet router running OpenBGPD on windows approaches the "kill it with fire" level of visceral repulsion, but something more realistic like bundling openssh client or CARP or LibreSSL could totally happen.
Goodwill if nothing else. I mean it's probably less than they spend on toilet paper in a month. At their scale, it's not an amount that has to have anything "in it" for them.
I'm thinking since they're working hard on their enterprise products (which includes virtualization, cloud computing/storage) that they're trying to bulk up their suite of products in one fashion or another. Especially since it looks like their enterprise offerings are making big gains in countries like the UK.
When a company best known for quashing competitors using very questionable means, whose modus operendi for years was to take other people's products and change it into their own thing (Java -> C#, for example), and one which loudly opposed Open Source, starts donating money, well, maybe they've had a shocking change of heart. Or, maybe there's some other reason.
That said, there's more and more evidence accumulating that Microsoft seems to have had a change of heart. I had a gut feeling I would like the new CEO. So far, so good.
