Embrace, extend, extinguish.
I wish they’d open source the name.
It should be called the “Linux Subsystem for Windows”.
This is actually due to trademark/copyright.
The first thing can’t be Linux due to that
However I agree.
No, Windows has various subsystems. This one is for Linux.
When Windows NT 3.5 launched, it came with subsystems for POSIX, OS/2, and Win32 because in the WinNT world even the Windows frameworks are a subsystem. Disclaimer: I didn’t check if in Win11 this is still the case but I guess so.
I totally agree it is wrong. It is historical.
When Windows NT was new, they had this idea that it would be compatible with many different application ecosystems via “sub-systems”. So there were going to be many different “Windows sub-systems” for various things.
There was the “Windows sub-system for OS/2” for example. And the “Windows sub-system for POSIX”. The names still sound backwards to me but I guess it makes sense if you think “This is a Windows sub-system, which one is it?”. And if you have 50 Windows sub-systems, saying “for Windows” at the end of all of them also seems a little weird.
So that naming convention was already in place when they added support for Linux. Hence the “Windows Subsystem for Linux”.
It’s so annoying, because both are technically grammatically correct, but the current one just sounds the opposite
Microsoft really has a knack for that. I also like
WoW64, which contains the binaries for running 32 bit applications on Windows 64 bit. For historical reasons, the 64 bit binaries live insystem32, obviously.Again, it is because it is part of a series.
They already had WoW (Windows on Windows) which was Win16 on Win32. The new one is Win32 on Win64.
And if say “Windows on Windows 64” it makes sense. It is Windows emulation on top of Windows 64 (64 bit Windows). When they named it, all Windows was 32 bit Windows and 64 bit Windows was the future thing. So “emulating current Windows on Win64” was what WoW64 was doing.
It did not age well though. I agree.
There you can see that only drunks work at Microaoft.
It’s a subsystem of Windows. Therefore, a Windows Subsystem. I don’t know what else would make sense. A “subsystem of Linux for Windows” wouldn’t make sense. They don’t call their other features “Notepad for Windows” or “Defender for Windows.”
This depends entirely of what you mean by “of Windows” and what you mean by “for Linux”. This terminology is ambiguous.
Are you a Lemmy user for lemmy.world, or are you a lemmy.world user for Lemmy?
It’s also inconsistent because when they say, for example, “Microsoft Azure Linux Container Host for AKS”, they are talking about running a Microsoft Azure Linux Container inside of AKS, not a container that is meant to be used for running AKS within it…
On Windows MS may not call it Defender for Windows… but for Azure, it’s Defender for Cloud, Defender for Containers, Defender for SQL Databases, etc.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud overview
So really it’s just more of Microsoft’s generally crappy naming conventions… I’m looking at you Entra ID!!
edit: added link
🙂
@randomcruft @fakeplastic I’m not real comfortable with my data on someone else’s computer, but triply so if that somebody is Microsoft, Gargoyle, or Amazon.
You say “The Windows Memory Subsystem” not “The Windows Subsystem for Memory”.
Windows Linux Subsystem would likely be most clear.
Does ‘Notepad subsystem for Linux’ sound to you like a Windows or Linux subsystem?
It sounds like a subsystem of notepad because that’s the word used as the modifier.
It’s a subsystem of Windows
If I say “the life support system for the USS Enterprise”, nobody thinks that that’s a system running on the life support that gives you the USS Enterprise. It’s a system running on the USS Enterprise that gives you life support. Windows Subsystem for Linux sounds like it’s a system running on Linux that gives you access to Windows.
If I say “the life support system for the USS Enterprise”,
Unfortunately contact mean that example dose work both ways.
If we say enterprise system for life support. People will also understand.
But voyager system for enterprise could apply either way. To be fitted to enterprise or allow enterprise activity on voyager. Or voyager activity on enterprise. For is just bad language in this context.
Here Microsoft should’ve used a possessive. Voyagers enterprise support system would be more normal.
Or Windows Linux support system.
But marketing and a history of no other OS matters means Mickey$oft insists on it’s own layout. Over language clarity.
Now make windows run just for compatibility on a Linux Subsystem. How we actually need it in daily life…
That…is wine.
Windows makes wine?
Does it run wine? Does it run on wine? I need to recurse.
What exactly is a windows subsystem? Is it like VM?
Pretty much. It’s hyper-v under the hood giving you a linux VM that’s integrated just enough to keep up some sort of linux workflow. I’m happy to shit on it as much as the next person, but for many who are locked into a ms corporate ecosystem because work policy, it’s a decent little window in your jail cell.
So if I use a subsystem of linux in windows, then i wouldn’t risk losing data and it would be much more efficient than VM?
It’s not going to randomly disappear your data, but I don’t particularly trust it either. As with anything, keep to a back up strategy. As far as efficiency goes, if you bear in mind it is still a VM but with most of the configuration hidden away for a simpler experience, I would say it is more convenient than a VM under virtualbox or vmware player, especially if you have no need for a full linux desktop environment.
Open source or not WSL is just a long game embrace, extend, extinguish and particularly designed to stop *NIX OSs gaining a foothold in the enterprise development space.
NGL, I spent a minute wondering why Microsoft would be going after NixOS in particular.
OSS or not, if its Windows I will take a shit on it
Wake me up when they open source windows…
From the repo’s CONTRIBUTING.md:
Most contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA)
Meh, a permissive license + a copyright transfer means this shit is just a potential rugpull. MSFT can change the license of the project to source-available or even proprietary at any time and you’ll be powerless to stop it.
CLA is basically a requirement for any larger scale open source project. It would be mental to add a “this single edited line is licensed under X license” to every tiny commit. Microsoft’s CLA does not tranfer rights btw, it just licenses your contribution to M$ under “basically BSD 0 clause license” terms.
I guess sure they could do a ragpull but it does not make much sense. Reasons:
-
they have open sourced it themselves
-
It’s made by M$ for M$. They don’t have competition in the Windows space, so there is no point to hide the code.
Also what would be the worst thing that could happen if they did that? You would either use a fork, because WSL2 is basically feature complete at this points, or you would be have to use a proprietary app on a proprietary OS. Imo the licensing of WSL specifically is the least of Windows’ issues.
You absolutely do not need a CLA with a copyright transfer. There are plenty of large projects that use a Developer Certificate of Origin that protects the company while not allowing them to change the license of your contribution.
I’ll grant that my original post was pissy and angry and not a great take, however. You make good points here.
CLA and copyright assignment are different things. In some jurisdictions copyright assignment is impossible. That was among the clashes European FOSS contributors had with the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallmann in the 1990s and 2000s.
-
They can change future versions to that, not already released ones.
You’re correct, but I don’t believe that a company shouldn’t be allowed to take my code and change its license in the future. If they want to take something proprietary, they can go ahead and remove my contribution from it first.
If you want to enforce that, you need to fork it and put a copyleft license on it. This is very rarely done because it’s more work to maintain software than to write it…
Hence my initial whinging about how this was released with a permissive license and a copyright transfer. The longer I’m involved in this industry, the less I like permissive software licensing. There’s obviously a place for it, but my tolerance for permissive licensing is directly tied to my trust for the person or organization backing the software. I don’t trust Microsoft, and I don’t think I will ever personally contribute to their software unless my contribution is made under a copyleft license and with a DCO, not a copyright-transferring CLA.
MIT license already allows this, with or without CLA.
That’s why you can also take Microsoft’s MIT code and make proprietary software out of it.
Sure. Let’s make sure that people know what this really means though.
Microsoft cannot “undo” the current license. If such a “rug pull” happens in the future, we all retain access to the code that exists at that time including all contributions from Microsoft. We can also all continue to not only use it but contribute to it under an Open Source license and keep it a vibrant, useful project if we want. Microsoft is powerless to stop us. We could fork it then or even now without the copyright assignment requirement. We have that freedom.
What the “rug pull” allows Microsoft to do is to decide, in the future, to change their policy and to make further changes themselves and not give us access to those future changes. They have that freedom.
Again, even if Microsoft did this, we could fork and carry-on. Look at Valkey and Reddis as an example.
So, the situation is that Microsoft is Open Sourcing a bunch of work that they did. The maximum possible downside is that they could stop giving us even more in the future. Our reaction is “meh”.
What concerns us is not that Microsoft can take away our freedom. They cannot. What upsets us is that they may retain or receive freedom we do not want them to have.
That is all fine. We are all allowed to think about it as we like and I guess we al value “freedom” in different ways. Sometimes though I think people misunderstand and think somehow that all the code could be “taken back”’. It cannot. Similarly, we might worry that our freedom (even the 4 freedoms) could be lost. For this code, that is not the case.
You should still be able to fork, right? Under a non copyrighted name (see: firefox to icecat)
I guess it won’t be long before someone launches Windows 3.11 Subsystem for Linux.
MIT license, for those wondering.
