Microsoft has killed off Windows NT 4, but it should now release its source code to the open-source community in order to fight off the challenge from Linux, Munir Kotadia claims. My Take: Sorry, but the suggestion doesn’t hold business-wise. Read more for my short commentary on the subject.Windows NT is a 8-years old codebase, no matter how you turn it and how many Service Packs you apply to it. It doesn’t support a *whole deal* of features that Microsoft has later added via 2k, XP and 2003 Server. It will take an additional 5-6 years of open source development to bring that OS up to speed in regards to hardware/feature-set. Therefore, there is nothing in it for Microsoft or even for the users today “as is”.
More over, all commercial OSes contain a lot of licensed code for drivers and other parts of these OSes. If Microsoft (or Be, or Apple) was to open source their commercial closed source OSes, they would be in the midst of legal trouble from the patent-holders and copyright-holders of these parts that are now in the open.
Replacing these parts of the OSes would require a lot of engineering, for example, it would be a 4-month team work for BeOS to make it patent/copyright-free. And please note that BeOS is a tiny OS compared to NT or OSX.
Sure, having an open source Windows OS that is still usable and valid (e.g. not win3.1) it would be great. But other than geek purposes and show of “good faith” from Microsoft, it would bring _nothing_ to Microsoft as a business in the battle against Linux. Plus, it would be expesnive for them to free that code. Therefore, the idea of open sourcing NT (under any license) doesn’t hold as a business solution.
Another problem is that if NT was to be free for all, it would actually compete mostly with Microsoft’s own products and not Linux (not as much at least). They would kill their own upgrade plan to Win2k3 Sever if they would do that. Support is not important for all companies (this is why many companies are using Debian with zero support, they manage it themselves — like in my ex-firm), so the companies who want Linux, they will stay with Linux. And the companies who want Microsoft Windows, they would stay with NT. And that would prove terrible bussiness for MS and Win2k3.
Personally, I see in the near future — if Linux really starts to squeeze Microsoft very seriously on all markets — Microsoft would make Longhorn free for download as an ISO image, instead of selling it. But they wouldn’t open source it (having the WINE people ‘stealing’ the APIs and implementing proper binary compatibility with Windows, would be a death knolt for Microsoft). They would just make it free as in beer. They can perfectly afford to do that, because their main income is coming from the server products and Office, in fact their consumer OS versions don’t bring much income at Microsoft. But these OS products are important strategically (so Microsoft can sell Office which is very profitable). So if they were squeezed, they would just free the OS itself from its price. It would be a business suicide to open source it though.
Microsoft open sourced some of their WindowsCE OS series, but the market and business are different in that sector. In the desktop/server sector, open sourcing NT would seriously compete with Microsoft’s own products and that is just not acceptable from any business point of view.
Why doesn’t he join current efforts: http://www.reactos.com
So MS can turn around and “SCO” us ~10 years down the road?
This is an interesting discussion, please keep it serious and talk business and not zealotry. Let’s have a serious discussion here today about what it takes and why.
Microsoft doesn’t open source anything.
Shared Source is a false misrepresenting way of making people think it’s about Open Source ™.
Well they might actually do release the full source code to show their good will. But only if none of it is left in any of their current software.
As long as it is “free to use” and the code is available for review and bug fixing, this is “open” enough for most people apparently. And it is “good enough” for users that MS would like to keep instead of moving to Apple or Linux.
I completly agree with you. They would be making more competition for themselves. How many open source/Linux advocates would really switch from an industrial strength OS to an outdated OS by the people they hate so much?
As you said, the only thing it would do is let companies off the upgrade-hook that has made MS so successful.
Apart from the reasons Eugenia has explained (I agree completely) Microsoft not only doesn’t want to lose market, they don’t want the market to change at all, they behave like the recording companies, they want to keep the market for themselves.
Also I will add that only 10% of the business out there use hardly any of the specific functionality of Win2k/XP, they still do the same things they used to do with NT. Many people use AD because of Exchange 2000 and many other use Terminal Server because need Citrix. Basically MS functionality is being used by MS own products.
Many companies which still use NT for their day-to-day operations are going to migrate to 2k/2k3/XP because official support expires this month.
And to finish, I must add that I’m a linux advocate, but is fair to say that even NT4.0 works beter as a desktop machine than any Linux distro.
MS is not going to disclose anything to anybody.
nuff said
Would be the only incentive for MS to open source NT.
Before I click the “Read More” link, three obvious objections to this idea occur to me:
1) Security. There are still lots of NT4 boxes in service, and there’s already enough exploits with it just being a closes-source OS.
2) The same reason the BeOS will never be open-sourced: licensed code in their OS that they can’t open source.
3) Build environment. Even IF the source were available, good luck getting it to compile outside of MSFT’s build environment (does anyone seriously see the releasing/open sourcing that stuff too?).
make microsoft give us all their money. that sounds much more reasonable.
So much for the serious discussion.
I completly agree with you. They would be making more competition for themselves. How many open source/Linux advocates would really switch from an industrial strength OS to an outdated OS by the people they hate so much?
<advocate=”devil’s”>
I think one of the areas where Linux has a large presence is among SOHO types who want to set up a cheap server on an old PC. If something like NT4 Server were freely available, they might use it instead.
>> In many ways, it could derail the Linux express train before it reaches full speed.
>>
Boy, are you kidding me?? Microsoft is a corporate Rex T. They wouldn’t even show or document all their APIs, so what makes you think they would want to open a full windows source? Heck, even with closed source, look how restrictive and invasive their EULA keeps getting.
I don’t think MS will open-source anything soon. If they do truly open the source, about the only thing that will happen is that linux and everything else will get to work better in and with windows. Does MS want that?
But we can at least hope for something less ambitious. If linux succeeds, free market competition will be restored, and consumers will continue getting an increasingly better deal from Microsoft. Heck, the OS market generates way too much money to be a monopolistic market. The database market isn’t nearly as large, and yet we have so many players.
I can’t even see them releasing ISOs. According to financials, the OEM market is almost half the revenue stream http://www.microsoft.com/msft/default.mspx . Albeit this includes preloaded office and server products, but the preload desktop bread&butter XP pro/light has to be the main part part. They’d be crazy to endanger this, either through an open, or freeware win32 OS option.
/Damien
If Microsoft open sourced one of their OS products it would probably distract a lot of people currently working on Linux, to the detriment of Linux. But, thankfully, the chances of Microsoft open sourcing anything are lower than low.
I don’t think it would be bad at all for Linux. People could analyse the code and improve their project’s windows compatibility. Just think of the WINE project. I think the programmers have been waiting for an opportunity to look at Windows internals for ages.
>Just think of the WINE project
And exactly this is why MS won’t do it.
>> if Linux really starts to squeeze Microsoft very seriously on all markets — Microsoft would make Longhorn free for download as an ISO image
>>
Very true. But by the same logic, it wouldn’t stop with Longhorn, it will also have to extend to server products. And ultimately to Office, because alternative Office Suites aren’t going to be stagnant. They will get to the point where they are just good enough for all practical purposes.
And I still don’t see how offering free ISOs would address the needs of corporations and countries who are seriously concerned about security.
Do you really think MS would give the tools to Linux programmers (Wine) to make more compatible software for Linux?
If MS share the source it will only do it to corporative user by the condition of not show it to someone else.
And ladies and gentlemen, that is NOT open source.
>So much for the serious discussion.
How can one have a serious discussion with such an off the wall topic?? Lets opensource everything.. the world will be a much better place without money.
>How can one have a serious discussion with such an off the wall topic?? Lets opensource everything.. the world will be a much better place without money.
One can at least explore the possibilities.
>> Lets opensource everything.. the world will be a much better place without money.
>>
What are you talking about? But anyway, that’s what MS should have thought about when it offered IE for free, to cite just one example. That’s how Netscape crumbled remember? Its called free market competition, and no, it doesn’t kill money. On the contrary, it retains a lot of money in the pockets of the end user, who is the real beneficiary.
Will Linux actually squeeze Windows anyway? Only God knows. So far, nothing of the sort is happening. I took my laptop to about 6 different pc shops the other day, in hunt of more memory. All the technicians I spoke to had heared of Linux, but all were quite surprised to see somebody actually running linux! From what I gather, none had ever seen, much less used, a linux desktop before. And these are the foot soldiers that deal with the end user everyday.
So what does that tell you? Linux is very far from being a threat to windows on the desktop.
>> if Linux really starts to squeeze Microsoft very seriously on all markets — Microsoft would make Longhorn free for download as an ISO image
>>
can’t believe it, this would be a complete 180° turn compared to XP which has the highest license-restriction of all Windows 😉
NT 4.0 is dead as far as Microsoft is concerned. They gain nothing by opening its source and in fact might lose some legal rights to important parts of it (by machinations which only lawyers understand).
But I can imagine they are thinking about opening up parts of .NET, possibly under some sort of dual license (GPL for free products, per-server royalties to MS for commercial products). They took baby steps with the Rotor project, but there was no reason for anyone to take that seriously since it wasn’t the real .NET.
Not that I expect them to, but they could use a bold tactic to gain mindshare from Java.
Nobody seems to catch the obvious reason that Microsoft will not open source NT4. Win2k, Win2k3, etc. use the same code base as WinNT. “Under the hood” there is not a great deal of difference between NT4 and XP. If they open source NT4 they might as well open source their entire Windows product line. It would have been incredibly stupid of them to release the source for Win95 when WinME came out, why would it be any less so with their NT line of OS’s?
Trying to “open source” it won’t do any good. MAYBE it would have some sort of impact (and it would sure help out the WINE guys) if Windows NT were released under a BSD style license. Just releasing the source code doesn’t do a damn thing. At least that’s what SCO says.
> Nobody seems to catch the obvious reason that Microsoft will not open source NT4. Win2k, Win2k3, etc. use the same code base as WinNT.
Don’t flatter yourself, we all know that they are the same codebase. But simply, NT is a much older version of the XP or the 2k3 codebase.
Merely considering this ignores the large amount of OS/2 code that is the basis of NT and the potential legal wrangles which would arise.
MS would never never release NT source code – if you think that Linux is causing them sleepless nights – an open source Windows would Kill them in no time. While opening NT might slow Linux but really many firms that install Linux come from the Unix world not Windows. Opening NT would not greatly affect this shift, it would give everyone using Windows an easy path to Open Source.
Personally, I think win98 would be more useful than NT for any open source purposes. Win98 driver model while screwed up could be invaluable for linux users with older hardware–think of the possibilities for a DriverWINE! that would let you use the boxed win98 drivers of a device on linux–that’d be really cool!
As far as any of this actually happening, you have a better chance of MS going out of business before opening any source for windows OS would ever happen.
I think most Linux users don’t have much contact with “pc shop technicians”. I have always found a rather primitive, albeit focused, level of user on the other side of the counter in such locations.
They never released any DOS code.
They never released any Win3 code.
They never released any Win95 code.
They never released any Win98 code.
They never released any WinME code.
Why should they release WinNT code?
M$ is a money making machine – if they don’t see how to make money from releasing any code, they don’t do it!
Also they would loose market share (and money) to the newNT-OS. From a financial standpoint it’s a bad move.
Programm xyz runs only compiled seperatly for SlackwasNT, Red-HaNT, Sue-NT, DebiaNT or GeNToff
“What is …compile?” ask millions of beginners… *grin* 😉
Windows NT is a “dead system”, although it would be nice to have the source code to improve it. But wouldn’t it be better to have the source code from a real innovative OS? I think of Beos. OK, it’s also (almost) dead, but it has some nice features.
If all that is not possible, maybe we should wait for Apple to release MacOS for x86.
I’m only dreaming…
>Don’t flatter yourself, we all know that they are the same >codebase. But simply, NT is a much older version of the XP >or the 2k3 codebase.
So?
Still have the same base.
Nobody would work on such a beast.
If you look at Linux, its internal structure reflects its modularity – very easy for multiple disparate teams to work on it. Windows is not quite the same, it would be much harder to co-ordinate large distributed teams working on it.
Not to mention that nobody in their right mind would really want to work with Win32 more than they had to.
The codebase for NT has been revised yes, but the basis and theory of the architecture is still the same. Opening the source to the public would put OSS developers only a stones throw away from “GNUdows”. Creating a threat than linux could ever be by fully supporting Windows bianaries.
If OpenOffice keeps getting better and more widely used, they may end up being squeezed on the Office part too…
…wouldn’t comment. They won’t do it, and I can think of a dozen reasons that everyone else knows.
Probably the most important one is that we have no idea how intricately they have intertwined themselves into other companies, especially the small software companies they eventually eat. However, it may not matter what they do.
My “signifcant other” is an astrologer. She talks a lot about the “Age of Aquarius,” and she’s a bit familiar with Linux. She says Linux comes as no surprise to her, and that it will take the Age as long as 5 hundred years to come into full swing; when I raised the issue of the SCO suit, she said: “There may be some glitches along the way, but Linux (or something like it,) will prevail.
I think 500 years is long enough, and she thinks Linux is the first, clear, indication of what is to come.
These “suck everything up and own it” businesses are doomed. It may take 500 years for everyone to know it, but they’re doomed. The previous Age of Pisces was a “service to the master” and “I believe” age. The Age of Aquarius is a “service to each other” and “I KNOW” age. People who celebrate this change sometimes call themselves “world servers.”
If NT is ever open-source, it will be because it’s an anochronism, or because Microsoft changes significantly.
I also believe the ubiquity of personal, portable communication devices is another indication of the changing of the ages. There will come a time when any person will be able to interact with any other person, without impunity, as long as they are civil.
>Windows NT is a “dead system”
For almost a year I have been considering installing something different to get a little better USB support but there is nothing “dead” about my Windows desktop machine running NT.
Might the source code of NT be a decent educational tool for students?
If Mocrosoft were to open source a Win32 based os it would probably be Win 9x as that is considered completely obsolete by the company. In fact I think Windows ME is the only Win 9x os still being supported by the company in any way. However DON’T HOLD YOUR BREATH. I’ve even heard that Microsoft routinely DESTROYS its obsolete source codes against the possability of their friend Disney’s not getting one of the imnnumerable copyright extensions so that they will NEVER enter the public domain. This sort of activity adds DESTROYING VALUABLE COMPUTER HISTORY to Microsoft’s long list of CRIMES against computing and users and is another good reason for using “Eminent Domain” Landmark Protection or some other legal device to public domain this stuff BY LAW when companies declare it “obsolete”.
So this is completely out of the question, even if it would make sense from a business point of view (which it doesn’t, obviously). The only thing that can _ever_ threaten Microsofts monopol-like status is Open Source. That’s why they continuously throw mud at Free Software and stress how much they believe in proprietary software models.
If Microsoft would embrace the Open Source model, they would basically admit, that they have lost.
Suggesting that Microsoft should use Open Source to compete against Linux is completely missing the point that not Linux is the rival but Open Source in general. Admitting that Linux is a better kernel than Windows NT would do them much less harm than admitting that Open Source works well for operating systems in a business sense.
if I’m not mistaken, there has been allegations that M$ stole their IP stack code from BSD. If this is true, who knows what else they have copied and sold as their. Open sourcing means letting the masses examine their code, which, knowing fully well what micrsoft “ethics” is capable of, is probably dirty.
why would they volunteer to let the programming community examie their code … nothing to be gained here.
even if they did release a small amount of code, the chances of it REALLY being NT4 code is very slim. and even if it was real it souldn’t be much code at all, or something insignificant, like solitaire or notepad or something =)
First announce they are doing it. Even if they never do, vapourware has always worked well for microsoft.
Take a large team of programmers and split the source code down into two parts. That which they have the rights to and that which they do not have the rights to.
Then they should split it again into the parts that they should keep proprietary and those that they shouldn’t. Based on the value of the knowledge to the rest of their buisness.
Now all the stuff that they cannot release. They don’t own or they don’t want o share they can but into binaries. The rest they can release under a restricted open source liscence.
This way they get open source but still keep what they need.
This would distract people from linux (the foolish ones anyway) and not interfere with there plans too much. i don’t think much will come of it but who knows?
I recently made a similar suggestion to my MP, that since the government is a major hirer of IT types, and Linux and Open Source Software are obviously going to be a major part of that education, and Microsoft is going to muscle heavily onto them in favour of “competition”, “level playing field” etc, if Microsoft really wants to compete on a level playing field – or be seen to be doing so – it should publish the source code to its now-defunct, unsupported, discontinued software. And it should be published under the BSD license, and when it is world-readable on the local universities’ web sites and ftp sites, then Microsoft will be free to contest government supply contracts.
And they don’t even have to open-source the entire source tree, including drivers, etc – all that is needed to do is open-source the central code and the stubs where you can hang the extension off of. But then Microsoft just released the entire source tree of WinXP to the government of the Peoples Republic of China, didncha read?
http://www.iprights.com/publications/chinaipexpress/ciex_154.asp
The which being of course, in response to this
News Burst: China goes Open Source
http://www.extropia.com/news/news2000.html
All it takes is a major source of income choosing a competitor, and they’ll lie back and take it like their weakest ISV aka competitor.
If MS did take their IP stack from BSD, it was not “stollen”. Using BSD code in a proprietary product is completly acceptable under the BSD liscence.
I am a linux user (even on my desktops) and I hate M$ but even if linux becomes a danger for the evil monopoly of Windows, M$ will prefer to GIVE Windows as freeware than open any source code. They will at least can sell your applications (M$ Office and etc).
In the past M$ promote piracy as an strategy to addict people. Now, they are giving discounts of 90% to european cities to try to stop linux. These discounts can become 100% (freeware) if linux advance more…
they are theoreticaustically only answerable to their shareholders. The problem is that the shareholders are demanding the same sort of return that they were getting when they were setting up their monopoly shenaigans – and you can’t get the same sort of return from a plateaued monopoly as you can from one just learning its power.
It’s much a bet-your-business idea, opening the source, but when major purchasers are defecting to Linux and Open Source, and the same getting better and better at a rate faster than Microsoft, they’re stuck in a cul-de-sac which it’ll take something as radical as open-sourcing the Windows NT and Windows 9x source trees, to help find the exit.
NT would most definately *not* be something good to study for students. First of all, its horribly IP-encumbered. Several universities already have access to the NT source code for classes, but students are forbidden from using anything they learn from it in the real world. Of course, this makes the whole operation totally pointless.
Second, word has it that its hard to understand. NT is missing something critical in terms of academic roots. Take, for example, the VM. Its supposedly full of all sorts of complex heuristics and tunable parameters. This might work in practice (most of the time) but its very hard to understand, and even harder to verify correct. In comparison, the Linux, NetBSD, Mach, Minix, and FreeBSD VMs (all of which have excellent documentation online, if you’re interested) are designed as proper algorithms — a few key principles form the basis of the whole system. In an academic setting, this approach is much easier to comprehend.
Lastly, its huge and highly overengineered in places. Just take a look at the driver API sometime. They take simple things like memory management (accomplished, in theory, by two calls) into a complex API containing a dozen calls.
In OSnews did Loli Queru
A stately super-dome decree:
Where Alpha, the sacred processor, ran
Through code measureless to man
Down to a source-less sea.
So twice five miles of fertile fiber
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And here were datacenters bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an nonsense-bearing tree;
And here were punch cards ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of intelligence.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a closed source cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her beos-lover!
…the secret will blow up and many cases will line up in court!
I doubt…
The open sourcing of NT 4.0 would bring about monumentaly complex licensing terms that would be so limiting in scope as to postpone any free community that we can even concieve. No thanks. I’ll stick with more free licenses like the BSDL and GPL. You can keep your pratical benefits Microsoft. I’ll keep my freedom.
> They can perfectly afford to do that, because their main income is coming from the server
> products and Office, in fact their consumer OS versions don’t bring much income at Microsoft.
Actually, the majority of Microsoft’s income comes from their desktop OS’s. It’s been their cash cow since the DOS days. These days, the server and office software count for a fairly high percentage of their income, but still not nearly as much as the desktop. Just check their SEC filings sometime. They try to blend office and desktop OS’s together, but it still accounts for most than anything else. In fact, on most end-user systems, the Microsoft OS is the only legal MS software on the computer.
> But these OS products are important strategically (so Microsoft can sell Office which is
> very profitable).
The only people who buy Microsoft Office are people who absolutely NEED it for their day to day operations, or big businesses, who get deep discounts because of the mass purchase of licenses. Most home computers with office either came with it preloaded, for those who could justify the $300 price tag, or was installed from a disc that a friend had.
>Microsoft open sourced some of their WindowsCE OS series…
The source code they released was done so under a license far from any Open Source license. It was done under the Shared Source license, which is basically “look, but don’t touch”.
It just occurred to me that Microsoft could strike out at the FOSS movement by releasing Win 3.1 and MS-DOS under the GPL. Some bright people would take on the project, and never be heard from again 🙁
By making NT 4 open source they would have to completely remove Internet Explorer from it, but as they said in court that would be impossible!!!! Because a Web Browser is such a critical part of the OS. Plus when they clean the code, they not only have to make it copyright free. They might have to remove all the open source code they might have stolen from the community.
You all recall that recent “Developers, Developers, Developers” chant that Balmer was taped doing.
MS has it right. If they can keep the developers on their platform, they will maintain their market.
I, as a developer, would be mucho interested in looking at the plumbing. Even if it is ~10 years old, it’s better than nothing.
I think opening the code would cause more developers to stick with the MS platform. It’s tough to stray when you are buried in source.
Its no secret that Microsoft uses BSD code. For instance, you can open up winsock2.h or winsock.h and see all the ‘taken from BSD file’ comments in there. You can’t say that it was stolen though, considering the BSD license allows just that.
That brings up pet peeve of mine. You can’t still code. Its an idea, information. You can’t still music. You can’t still software. What you do is called copyright infringement, not stealing. I hate it when the big IP boys try to confuse the subject.
The article was just filling an editorial void. It made no sense business-wise, none whatsoever.
It is also not possible for Microsoft to release NT source code even if they had an insane day and decided to do something that stupid. NT is full of licensed elements from other companies that are crucial for the OS to operate. MS has no right to release them, and if it removed those elements, the OS would not be operable anymore.
Its no secret that Microsoft uses BSD code. For instance, you can open up winsock2.h or winsock.h and see all the ‘taken from BSD file’ comments in there.
As far as I can tell, they took structs and #defines and reused them for compatibility. It doesn’t look like, at least from the headers, they stole any code.
First of all, “ironical” isn’t a word.
Second, seeing this article after having thought something along similar lines yourself is coincidental, not ironic.
For instance, this is irony:
Person’s Statement: “Ah, Mr. Gates, how wonderful to see you!”
Person’s True Thought: Oh damn, he’s the last person I wanted to see today!
This is not irony:
Person: “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if MS opened the source to one of their old operating systems?”
Person sees article arguing that MS should open the source to one of their old operating systems.
Why is this so hard to grasp?
And, finally, there is NO WAY Microsoft is going to open ANY Windows code. Remember the MS guy who got on the stand during the antitrust trial and said, (paraphrased) “In places, the Windows source code is of such poor quality that revealing it could constitute a clear and present danger to national security.”
So, no source code for you or life as we know it will come to an end. The evil terrorist hackers would run amok!
Anarchy, mayhem in the streets, stock traders and bankers flinging themselves from tall buildings, little old ladies losing their bingo money, cats and dogs living together …
Well. Either all that or the MS guy, whoever he was, perjured himself. But we all know that could never happen … I mean, come on, who actually believes the Windows source is anything less than pristine and perfectly efficient??
Eugenia I understand you want us to have a serious discussion here.
When I first read Munir Kotadia comments, it did actually sound like an extremely long forum troll. Who sat there typing away in hope that his comments would be read by Microsoft, and that he could actually fool them into releasing it source code. LOL!
What I would like to know is people think it would be too detrimental for MS to release Win95 version C.
My thoughts on that is that some can take the entire Win32 layer, provide the necessary interface to make Linux work with it, and then you have a WinLinux. (Obviously with older API).
The thing about these old API isn’t Microsoft discarding them? In favour for some of the newer stuff they are putting into windows 2003 and later to clean it up.
No.
Because we will embrace and extend…
You’d have 98% of the source code from Windows 2k/XP and 2003 then
Then all the hardware that NT supports that Linux doesn’t would quickly be supported by Linux, and WINE would improve exponentially overnight, thus essentially rendering Windows NT irrelevant to Linux users.
It won’t help Mac users, and Windows users already have the much more stable XP.
Linux isn’t widely used because people can’t get hold of MS Windows if they want it, its widely used because it’s better in many ways.
Microsoft could open source XP tomorrow and Linux wouldn’t ‘die’, why would it?
The source code for Linux has been available as open source for years but it hasn’t killed any other OSes.
Linux code has helped the BSDs, the HURD to function on x86 hardware, the various BeOS API-clones to have a working framework, and as blueprints for how an OS works to many OS projects.
The same is true of the BSD’s – the availability of that code lets developers of other OSes look at the ‘BSD way’, contrast it to the ‘Linux way’, and make their own decision.
The availability of Linux code has only made these other OSes stronger – and in many cases it would simply not have been feasible to start such projects without the open sourced linux code.
An open sourced Windows would simply show everyone Microsofts approach to solving the problems they are attempting to solve, but there would be no sudden rush to support Windows as ‘The One True OS’, any more than Linux’s Open source license has led to it’s position as ‘The One True OS’.
Open sourced Windows, providing it was a ‘true’ Open Source or Free Software license, would help everybody.
Which is exactly why Microsoft would never do it.
If the world were a bit more down the road to 1984 with Microsoft DRM/Palladium/TCPA everywhere, then it would be a strategically brilliant move to open source Windows.
With the code ‘out there’, Microsoft would have free reign to sue everyone who wrote any code that worked on a PC, similar to what is going on with SCO.
And not just a PC. Basically any code anywhere would be at the mercy of Microsoft’s lawyers.
With Microsoft’s IP base, it is critically important to avoid a Microsoft Palladium/DRM lockdown.
Not only would a lockdown make the switching costs off of Windows 1000X what they are today, it would also enable Microsoft to put out their code and then sue everyone else into submission.
So be very careful of supporting DRM/Palladium. It is not just technical, it is political. It is the future of the world.
“In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.” — George Orwell
I had enough of M$
No it would not affect Linux because you have to be able to develop the open source project, you need the rights to continue the project, not just the fact that the platform is open. That’s only half of what is needed.
I think this article is rather niave and lives in a world of ideals more pure than most of the OS zealots.
M$ can’t open the source code to NT, firstly it would be corporate suicide, all there massive security holes would be out in the open for all those existing NT box users (of which there are many). Second, WINE et al would become perfect allowing easier migration to Linux. Third no OS or MS developer would really care to maintain it. Fourth you would probably only get a minute amount of code because most of it is licensed or patented by other companies. Lastly after all their ‘Open source is cancer’ they would lose so much face and their faithful followers who really believed that statement would feel betrayed and confused and lied to.
Open Source works because it establishes itself as a community maintained ‘product’ at a relatavely early part of its life or has a massive current user base that has a real interest in continuing the development of the source code and also has commercial intersest in doing so (Mozilla, OSX, Real etc). NT fits none of the criteria to survive as an OS product, it would just mark the end of MS, especially on the stock market.
I agree with your “take” on this news, MS offering NT4 source code is a cheap and unimpressive move to align themselves on the current open-source movement. Aside from a hobbyist’s point of view, for those geeks who want (and can) waste/spend (depends on your point of view) hours re-building and extending something that old, it just cannot even begin to rival linux distros in the free-OS department. Incidently, Apple made it’s OSX core public a while back (Darwin), I have no idea if many have bothered using it or developping on it..Anyone?
<“if Linux really starts to squeeze Microsoft very seriously on all markets — Microsoft would make Longhorn free for download as an ISO image, instead of selling it.”>
Blasphemy! We’re talking about Micro$oft here!
Seriously, the idea would be viable, but I definitely can’t see MS going that way in the near future,
‘”In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.” — George Orwell ”
So politics is a genetic disease? What chromosone does it affect?