On the subject of Microsoft's new CLI, Monad: Why should you be worried? Were Microsoft to develop the best CLI ever conceived, it wouldn't take bash, tcsh or zsh or whatever is your shell of choice (pick your flavour, I'm not going to start a war here) away from you (and me and everyone else).
So best luck to them, and may life be less painful for our fellow Windows sysadmins! http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=152169&cid=12768136 Why should you be worried? Because there are a surprisingly large contingent of people who define themselves by the operating system they use, and whose self-esteem is directly linked to the perceived superiority of this operating system over Microsoft Windows. During the late nineties, when Windows was truly a buggy, crashy, piece of shit, these people positively basked in the glee that came from the vindication of their chosen OS - back then, Linux truly was light-years ahead of Windows in terms of speed and stability, and geeks rejoiced in the streets. Flash-forward to Windows 2000/ XP, and Microsoft apparently accomplished a miracle, producing a version of Windows that would literally run and run, and was still fairly nippy. Meanwhile, the writers of Linux Desktop Environments were discovering that it's very easy to be fast and light when you don't do much, or aren't particularly user-friendly, and that increased functionality almost always comes at the price of bloat. So these people saw two pillars of the superiority of Linux (speed and stability) snatched away from them. The truly curious thing is what happened next: instead of being spurred into action by this new competition and addressing these concerns on the Linux side, these people instead simply went into a state of denial, and refused to let go of these cherished (and rapidly shrinking) areas where Linux once scored over Windows. Read through any anti-MS slashdot article on any given day and count the number of horribly outdated criticisms of Microsoft you see (BSOD's; bloat; Clippy(!)) - as a passionate believer in F/OSS, it really grieves me to see people behaving like this, rather than aiming to improve Linux to the state where it once again has many advantages over Windows. Flash-forward to now, as one of the other areas in which Linux scores over Windows (a UNIX command-line is an awesome and enjoyable tool to use; the Windows command line, by contrast, is a rubber hammer with nails in the handle :)) may well be snatched away, and we see the same thing: people are hoping against hope that Microsoft foul it up, because if they don't another area of Linux superiority disappears, along with another shred of their self-esteem. This, I think, is why people care, and why they do not wish Microsoft well in this project, however helpful it may be to the common good.
