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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aboutblank
16 years 5 weeks 3 days 3 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
16 years 5 weeks 2 days 11 hours 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.