I think today embrace, extend and extinguish applies more to cloud providers like AWS. They take a lot of open source, wrap it into their own code and then lock people in. MS is one of the perpetrators but Amazon and Google are no better.

embrace-extend-extinguish refers to Microsoft's adoption of existing technology. It's not a great fit here; Powershell is their own thing.

This is just speculation on my part, but the technology being adopted is likely Linux. First Microsoft declares its war on Linux over (Microsoft loves Linux), then the Windows tooling is extended into Linux so the lines blur, then WSL was made so you don't have to leave Windows to use Linux tooling.

In my paranoid scenario, a happy ending (for Microsoft) would be: the release of its own Linux that "just works" with the mixed tooling, and young developers considering pure Linux just for small projects.

Amazon has it's own Linux. Why not Microsoft?

Thank God you realize this. Just yesterday I noticed that systemd uses azure pipelines for testing and somebody as wise as you told me that Microsoft is slowly adding windows Installer code to systemd and in a few years you may think you're installing linux but upon first boot systemd will actually install windows.

Do you have a link where I can read more about the Windows Installer code thing?

Unfortunately, the person you're responding to was being sarcastic so you're not going to get a link. :(

> unfortunately

Found Bill Gates's account.

People too young to remember the anti-trust days will deny it, but there is no good reason to trust that this isn't Microsoft's long term plan. You'd be a fool to believe Microsoft has the best interests of the open source community at heart.

Why can’t it be both?

Microsoft has their own selfish reasons for wanting people to use powershell, while at the same time MS open sourcing powershell and providing it as a cross-platform tool people can use on their platform of choice benefits the open-source community?

Do you honestly think the open source projects from the likes of Apple, Google, Amazon, Twitter or Facebook is based on their good wishes and interests for “the open source community” (whatever that may be)? Really?

Those youngings probably don't remember what the Germans and Japanese did in the 40's either.

Or the good old day's when Ultrix ran like a racehorse on 4MB of ram (it did BTW!).

We don't do our credibility any favor when we live in the past and don't update our worldview based upon current facts.

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]

Current facts: Microsoft shoves ads into the start menu and file explorer, collects a ton of telemetry, resets application associations during updates, and does its best to hide the ability to setup a local-only account during install in its pay-for operating system.

So forgive me if I'm cynical of your company's current PR efforts.

And the people that remember take notice of how google/apple are doing a lot worse in that space.