When Microsoft talks about open source, people in the FOSS community tend to generally take it with a pinch - or more likely a kilo - of salt. Revealing the crown jewels of its empire - the Windows source code - has never ever been canvassed.
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Anybody up to writing good directory software?
Tue, 2007-02-20 11:17 — David JonathanSince the very beginning, directories (of any kind) have had a very central role in the internet. (I have recently grown fond of Free Web Directory. Even Slashdot can be considered a directory: a collection of great news and invaluable user-generated comments. As far as software is concerned, doing a quick search on Google about software directories will return the free (as in freedom) software directories like Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat and so on, followed by shareware and freeware sites such as FileBuzz, PCWin Download Center and All Freeware (great if you're looking for shareware and freeware, but definitely less comprehensive than their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).
Is better education the key to finding better software?
Sat, 2007-03-03 03:25 — Edward RusselI read David Jonathon's article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software? the other day, which got me thinking about software directories in general. As David mentioned, many of the software directories one finds when doing a quick google search are free as in beer, not as in freedom. But what interests me is the software directories that already exist, providing a combination of both free as in beer software, and open source software. Sites such as Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download don't advertise themselves as providing free as in liberty software, but each of them have a good selection of open source software available... if you know where to look.
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4 years 10 weeks 2 days 15 hours ago
Free Windows is Excellent
I know this is idle speculation, but a free Windows software environment would be excellent. I am assuming "going open source" means liberating the program to the user.
A liberated Windows would be a major win for the users of it as they would no longer be subject to Microsoft for that collection of programs. Microsoft would not have the sort of power that users give them now and would probably compete with other software companies on a fair basis as they would be unable to leverage their monopoly to force their products onto the market.
It doesn't matter at all if this libre Windows was incompatible with the GPL because if it was truly free, we would be able to take the logic and apply it to our programs even if we couldn't apply the code directly. It doesn't matter if Windows was incomplete because MS had to take away the proprietary code that they don't have the rights to. We will be able to replace the bits that are missing.
The one major problem I could see from a liberated Windows would be software patents. Even if the licensing terms of the hypothetical libre Windows seemed free, software patents or the threat that they can be used as a weapon to take down other projects would make a move essentially useless for anyone with the misfortune of living in a jurisdiction that suffers under software patents.
motters
4 years 10 weeks 2 days 29 min ago
Very implausible
I think this scenario is highly unlikely, since it's completely ideologically the opposite of everything which Microsoft have stood for right from the original inception of the company. For this to happen some senior figures would really need to have some kind of spiritual revelation/conversion.
Even in the extremely unlikely situation where Windows was open sourced it's really not just about chucking source code overboard and hoping people will do something with it. In order for open source projects to function there needs to be a community built around it, which in practical terms would mean that MS would need to open up at least some of their internal software development process.
I think a far more likely scenario is that Microsoft releases a free (as in beer) distro of Windows, which can then compete for market share with GNU/Linux users who are more concerned about price than freedom. Richard Stallman has warned about this sort of situation a few times.