[LTheobald]

I kind of feel sorry for the MS chaps here. They admit it's wrong, say they will try to fix it but it'll take time because of bureaucracy. But then they get attacked in the thread because they are Microsoft. It's sad to see when they are generally trying.

[DominikD]

Why do people call structured governance a bureaucracy? About a month ago there was a well received post on GTK's rotten foundations that boils down to several core points, one of them being: if you keep breaking stuff all the time, there's no point in investing in your API.

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.

[PakG1]

Why do people call structured governance a bureaucracy?

Being pedantic, but that's what a bureaucracy is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy

I'm sorry for being pedantic....

[finid]

> No matter that US v MS was 15 years ago when he was 10.

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.

[noir_lord]

One of the reasons I haven't open sourced some stuff is because I don't want to deal with parts of the open source community, it's not even about having a thin skin (Which I don't) it's simply I'm not interested in dealing with them.

[appleflaxen]

Microsoft is a convicted monopolist in the EU. That's black and white criminal (and immoral) behavior.

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).

[rdtsc]

> How many of the people arguing for immediate change are an actual and/or potential consumers of PS?

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.

[SloopJon]

Each time Microsoft releases free software, there has been discussion about whether they're really participating in a community. When Jason closes a PR, saying that it needs an RFC, and oh, by the way, you aren't allowed to start an RFC, I'm skeptical. When Jeffrey provides a work around, opens an RFC, and is generally diplomatic, I'm more hopeful.

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.

[kohanz]

> 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.

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.

[2close4comfort]

Very true! When those decisions were made PowerShell was never planned to be run on anything that ran those cmds natively. Now that they have changed the rules this should be expected as they move to a more neutral ground. I would be the 1st to call M$ on being jerks, but in this case give them a break the ship just did a 180 if you setup your furniture a certain why I guess you will have to set it up again...deal with it.

[Aissen]

wget has been on windows for 15 years: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net...

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...

[shmel]

>>PowerShell was never planned to be run on anything that ran those cmds natively.

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.

[warfangle]

On the other hand, curl.exe has been available for five years.

[emilsedgh]

Microsoft is being hated because there's a double standard here.

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.

[wang_li]

> If Linux tools used Microsoft utility names, someone would've been sued.

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?

[kohanz]

Agreed. That thread is a mixture of some useful and constructive dialogue and others just "piling on" offering problems without solutions. Those type of commenters would frustrate me to no end.

[jclulow]

That's basically what happens in open source, once you get enough people in and around your project.

[superswordfish]

Best unintended consequence of GitHub adding comment "reactions" is the redditification of discussions (thumbs up/down brigading). Lovely.

[laurent123456]

If only it was just thumb down and up, but it's also smiley faces, fireworks, hearts and probably many more. It feels like reading a conversation between teenagers on MSN Messenger.

[eric_h]

Fortunately the "reactions" are purely metadata, and do not effect the visibility of the comments. Who cares if there are a million thumbs down.

[Karunamon]

Unlike Reddit, no action is taken upon a certain number of "reactions". Your comment isn't censored after receiving an arbitrary amount of :-1: 's

[emodendroket]

That's not exactly what they say and I agree with them that it would kind of suck if you wrote a bunch of scripts using the alias and MS broke them overnight.

[scott_s]

Agreed. I also think people are not appreciating that even if you agree a part of your interface is bad, it's not a given that you should change it. There's a trade-off between improving your interface, and making breaking changes for your users. Evaluating that trade-off requires discussion and investigation.

[AimHere]

Given that the Powershell that ships with Windows 7 doesn't have these aliases, whereas the one that ships with Windows 10 does, It seems that that Microsoft was already happy to have made the diametrically opposite breaking change without the corresponding discussion.

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.

[kyberias]

Yeah, I don't understand what that gevaerts guy tries to accomplish.

[tylerritchie]

I think he's trying to accomplish being an asshole, he's succeeding. The whole thread is terribly saddening. It's a breaking change, they have a process for making breaking changes and the creator of PowerShell specifically says, "We need to fix this, let's get that process rolling. If you're on Windows here's how to work around it."

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.

[ynniv]

It's okay: this is also an opportunity to show that they can play well with others. Done correctly they can build trust within a community that has traditionally disliked them.

[codesterling]

That's a "Standing up to the bully adds character" argument. I prefer to foster a culture that didn't have the bullies.

[erlehmann_]

To me it seems they only try to fix it because they got caught (and now publicly shamed).

[unmei]

Agreed. The first post from a PS team member was essentially "no, we don't want to do that, if you have a problem with it open an RFC" ... only later when it was plainly obvious that they were wrong did they agree to do the RFC themselves

[Amezarak]

They're talking about changing it on the Windows version of Powershell too; I don't think it's something to be "ashamed" of, I thought it was a huge convenience - I knew that wget wasn't literally wget, but when I needed to fetch a webpage I knew the command to use without looking up Invoke-WebRequest or whatever it is and without having to go out and download the real wget.

I think taking the alias out is actually disappointing and a very slight change for the worse on Windows.

[wineisfine]

Let's not forget MS real motive here, which is indirectly, selling more of their software and bringing in more cash.

[JeffreySnover]

Everyone has a family to feed right? There is no shame in trying to make money.

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]

[thewhitetulip]

Apparently a lot of people have this MS hates Open Source idea. A totally different experience you'll get when you follow the dev of VSCode, the team is just amazing, I don't know them, I don't like or hate MS but recent changes to MS has made MS embrace FOSS. Gone are the days when they pushed hard for the windows platform, now everyone runs multiple OSes, says the blog entry announcing PS.

[ElijahLynn]

Going to work for MS in the first place, you kind of take that risk.

[wangchow]

Wow people are too lazy to simply create a new alias to the Curl/Wget that they want.. What's the world coming to.

[UnoriginalGuy]

The problem isn't about laziness, it is about defaults.

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.