Great news! But to be clear, I think they are only talking about BASH and servers. But even so, it's not the first time they've given things out for free in recent years (apart from MsSQL): they've been giving out free versions of Visual Studio (personal edition or something like that), for example. It's significant, but it depends on what you're looking for. Maybe the offering is too simple or spare. It didn't look too bad when I tried it once, but I wanted things it wasn't offering. I would suppose that VS could bw useful to anyone looking for something to play with. Currently, my Windows-based language of preference (for executables) is Lazarus. For scripts it's Perl. For a *NIX-based system on WIndows, I have Cygwin. I would be truly impressed if MS was contributing to Cygwin. Not sure if that ever happened. Downloading and installation is still as sloppy as it ever was (and if you are not careful, a painfully slow post-install of LaTex font packages), so probably not. Although, their X-windows managers have come a long way. Paul King On 15 Apr 2016 at 16:37, James Knott wrote:

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-truth-comes-out-microsoft-needs-linux/?ftag=TRE684d531&bhid=12825460

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