Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Publishes OpenSSH For Windows Code (msdn.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has published early source code for its OpenSSH-for-Windows port for developers to pick apart and improve. In a blog post on Monday, Steve Lee – the PowerShell team's principal software engineer manager – said Redmond has finished early work on a Windows port of OpenSSH 7.1, built in a joint-effort with NoMachine. Their rough roadmap from here: 1) Leverage Windows crypto APIs instead of OpenSSL/LibreSSL and run as Windows Service. 2) Address POSIX compatibility concerns. 3) Stabilize the code and address reported issues. 4) Production quality release.
Why not leverage Open|LibreSSL since they've done all the heavy lifting? Unless MS wants to make things subtly incompatible with all other implementations, and Embrace/Extend/Extinguish.
Also, I'm sure the rest of the planet would love to be locked into a US company backdoored, unauditable crypto.
It kind of boggles my mind why Microsoft bothered to make PowerShell so unique and so incompatible with a well-known Unix shell like Bash.
PowerShell isn't always totally awful, but where the heck is stuff like less, tail, head, etc? IIRC the last time I went looking for it, PowerShell's version of tail and grep are totally retarded and difficult next to the relative simplicity of $foo | tail -n 10 or something.
They could have just made it a near-bash clone, along with a non-retarded shell window that supported putty or ConEmu-style terminal features and it would be SO MUCH better.
My question is whether it was just part of the "we're microsoft" culture of pretending that nothing else exists or whether it was some deliberately conspiratorial move to force an investment of time and effort on the part of Windows admins to keep them in the fold versus learning a skill that could be portable to Unix shells.