It probably is, for all we know. VS Code, WSL, etc are all very obviously investments in getting people to stop switching to Linux.

I feel the same way, but at least I want to hear what other party has to say. At least we can discuss a little.

Its not an attack. Its more likely they don't want to use man hours to support certain scenarios.

WSL is part of Microsoft's internal push to embrace open source. Its feature development.

Source: I work on the windows kernel and have met people who work/ed on WSL.

Hey, thanks for the reply.

I have an honest question: How Microsoft is planning to restore trust in open source / free software circles?

We have seen pretty horrific things back in the day, and some of us can't trust you, even if we want, and some moves still relight this fire instantly.

I want a more friendlier computing environment overall, regardless of the OS we use, and want to be able to interop with other OSes on many levels (protocols, hardware, developers of said OS).

Does Microsoft has a plan for this?

Because Opening VSCode and slowly putting into proprietary domain & using GPL code in Copilot doesn't inspire trust, to be honest.

An engineer in the Kernel development does not have insights into any of these kind of strategies.

What you can see from the outside that this is a move of the Visual Studio management to preserve their revenue stream (against which they get bonus etc). It is just stupid incentive management with the idea that the developer division is a profit center (which it should not .. in favor of Azure).

This secure boot topic is IMHO related to some product manager thinking that Windows laptop should be protected walled gardens like Apple devices are.

Do you want the honest answer from someone else in the community?

They're not planning to, not really. FAANG + MS are so big that at this point they stopped caring about Open Source and Free Software. The licenses are intentionally permissive that every tool can be used internally if they need it (Linux, bash, etc) plus even more permissive licenses like MIT can be used in commercial products. With web services even GPL can be used in their commercial cloud services.

They control a huge chunk of Open Source anyway through their contributors.

Plus the level they compete at is so far from Open Source that Open Source basically doesn't matter. It's all services and clouds now.

Open Source had its moment circa 2005, now it's just asphalt. Yeah, we use it everyday, but nobody writes home about it.

And regular users don't care.

I believe that you believe that, but I cannot believe that's true. Microsoft is far too big to care about any trends, including open source. They are simply doing what makes the most money within the time scales they operate. If that means supporting certain open source projects right now, that's what they'll do. If it means hindering open source adoption overall, they'll do that. Sources: ODF vs OOXML, terrible support for Linux across their application suite, this article, and a tediously huge list of things happening several times per year at least since the 90s.

> WSL is part of Microsoft's internal push to embrace open source.

WSL is part of Microsoft's push to eliminate Linux. Microsoft has always weaponized support. With one hand they support Linux binaries and with the other they force hardware makers to disallow Linux.

It definitely isn't an 'attack', they just simply have not enabled the correct keys. I strongly doubt that lenovo consider any tiny amount of Linux users in any support scenario.

Source: I work on the Linux kernel and met people who work on Linux kernel.