12 ms·

At this rate, are we going to see Windows open-sourced? MS is on a roll. My bias since 1996 is being eroded with each OSS release they have, and multi-platform

At this rate, are we going to see Windows open-sourced? MS is on a roll. My bias since 1996 is being eroded with each OSS release they have, and multi-platform targeted support. I started using VSCode regularly as my main Rust IDE, and I feel dirty for liking it. It's seemless across macOS and Linux.

dogma1138 10y ago
I don't see MSFT benefiting from open sourcing windows, so likely never.
- bluejekyll 10y ago
  Yeah. I meant that as a little tounge in cheek, I'm pretty sure they never will either.
- dman 10y ago
  I see them benefiting immensely. A big problem that Microsoft has is that once you start going down rabbit holes on Windows the number of people out there who have a clue is vanishingly small. So for systems programming on Windows there is very little coverage online. Opening Windows up will broaden the number of people who understand the platform on a deep level.
  - throwawayish 10y ago
    Earlier in my life I did a lot of Windows system-level programming, including some minor driver development, and now I'm practically exclusively on the #nix bunch, sometimes doing similar stuff. I can't say that there is a disparity. If anything, the parts that are documented are usually better documented in the Windows world, and there are very good books about most components. (To be fair I never read a book on anything unix apart from Lion's). There is a large amount of stuff online for either, but I often have the feeling that correct examples are less frequently found for, esp., Linux.
    - simias 10y ago
      I've never done kernel work on Windows but on Linux at least you can dig into the source code to figure out how stuff works when the documentation is lacking. I suppose that's what the parent was talking about.
      - yoz-y 10y ago
        Not giving the source code forces you to write a better documentation though. In an ideal world, both would be available but personally I prefer a good documentation rather than source code diving.
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    Windows System Internals are probably the best documented in the world, MSDN alone is a treasure trove of information and there are countless books on the matter. And unlike some other platforms what is written tends to match reality, and stay relevant for a long time (for better or for worse).
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  Sun is a beautiful case study in what happens when you're a little too aggressive about the "openness" mantra. They bet the farm on SPARC and lost. If they had kept pieces of Solaris closer to chest, who knows what would've happened, but they would've at least had one more potentially-viable commercial offering. I assume that Microsoft is not going to be naive enough to do the same. IMO Microsoft's interest in openness revolves around remaining a viable option in the cloud era. They need to protect their investment in the .NET ecosystem and MS-centric development workflow, which means making it easy for people to run .NET programs on *nix-based VPSes and containers.
  - coredog64 10y ago
    AIUI, Sun bet on being able to sell stuff (not just SPARC) to FinTech firms. They borrowed money at the height of the bubble, and when the bubble burst, their customer base cut back on hardware purchases. Because they couldn't service that expensive debt, they had to find a buyer.
- ed_blackburn 10y ago
  Perhaps some elements. The kernel? The more platforms the better?
jpfed 10y ago
I am under the impression that MS has a lot of different parts, and that these parts have different cultures and goals. MS Research and their developer division seem really open-source-friendly, but that may or may not say anything about their OS team.
- Someone1234 10y ago
  Their OS team just put a Ubuntu-Linux subsystem into Windows via direct kernel calls. I'd be careful assuming anything about them.
  - ygra 10y ago
    They were also very careful not to touch anything GPL-licensed. The Linux syscalls were all implemented from scratch. So it's effectively a proprietary reimplementation of parts of the Linux kernel. I'm not sure how much that says about open-source plans of Windows itself.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - eganist 10y ago
      That sounds more like an edict from MS Legal more than anything related to the culture of the core OS team.
    - nxc18 10y ago
      That says more about the fact that that implementation pattern is a core part of the NT OS, and the underlying design of the two kernels is so different that just throwing Linux code in the mix would not make sense (in the way that hearing purple doesn't make sense). WSL is a elimination of the Linux user mode programming environment. The fact that that requires implementing Linux kernel functionality is simply an artifact of the lack of a more modular design (or really any up front design) in Linux.
      - 10y ago
WayneBro 10y ago
Not yet. Their next strategy is to try and use ARM (again) to shove UWP down your throat. I love Windows but I seriously will not touch UWP until they loosen up the sandbox restrictions so that I can do regular IPC with a win32 desktop app. You can't even send an HTTP request to a little node.js Web server running on your desktop right now. Fuck that. I'm not buying into it.
- Kipters 10y ago
  Care to elaborate on the HTTP part? You just need the "Internet (client)" capability in your manifest, it's even enabled by default when you create a new project Moreover, win32 desktop apps can use the AppService mechanism exposed by UWP apps (but cannot host an AppService themselves, just connect to UWP-hosted AppServices)
  - WayneBro 10y ago
    Give it a try. You can't send requests to `localhost` or `127.0.0.1` at all. AppService is largely useless for IPC between UWP and Win32 since the UWP app can't initiate a request to the Win32 app. Another thing you can't do, which is really annoying: UWP won't let your code start an external process and use standard i/o pipes to communicate with it. The only possibility is to use files for IPC and you'd have to have your Win32 app listen for changes in the file or directory, then open it up and read the data. However UWP can't listen for changes in those same files, so it's a real PITA. All of the options are listed here - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12341707/communication-between-windows-store-app-and-native-desktop-application http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12341707/communication-be... You can also use a loopback exemption, but it requires installing a fake root certificate (no thanks!) - http://docs.telerik.com/fiddler/Configure-Fiddler/Tasks/ConfigureFiddlerForWin8 http://docs.telerik.com/fiddler/Configure-Fiddler/Tasks/Conf... or http://loopback.codeplex.com/ http://loopback.codeplex.com/
    - Someone1234 10y ago
      > However UWP can't listen for changes in those same files, so it's a real PITA. It can via the ContentChanged event see this example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/39737147/how-can-i-watch-for-file-changes-in-a-uwp-project http://stackoverflow.com/questions/39737147/how-can-i-watch-... > Give it a try. You can't send requests to `localhost` or `127.0.0.1` at all. Luckily getting the local IP address is easy enough from UWP: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/33770429/how-do-i-find-the-local-ip-address-on-a-win-10-uwp-project http://stackoverflow.com/questions/33770429/how-do-i-find-th... That will work since it is treated like all other network traffic. localhost and 127.0.0.1 are considered privildged routes since you can bypass the firewall and exploit local processes to escalate.
olyjohn 10y ago
It's not like they're doing it out of the goodness of their heart. They don't have a choice, they were becoming irrelevant, and now they're playing catch up to try to bring back all the devs to their platform.
- bluejekyll 10y ago
  Agreed, but is it a bad thing for the OSS community? They're generally using unristricted licenses, MIT and Apache2, so this is legit OSS. While I still haven't bought an MS product since 1996, I don't think I have a problem with using their OSS. I see it as supporting companies when they do the right thing. Honestly Apple's tightening up of the control on their platform in recent years, like requiring LLVM bitcode with apps on some of their devices which only works if it's Apple LLVM generated bitcode, has me swinging the opposite direction from them. It would go a long way for my perseption of Apple if they either drop the LLVM bitcode requirement, or at least standardize on a non-proprietary version.
- manigandham 10y ago
  MS was definitely not becoming irrelevant. The vast majority of enterprise software is written in .NET and the MS stack runs millions of businesses. They are evolving the framework to be faster and cross-platform based on external pressures but in the last few years they have managed to overtake several of the other language/framework options to again be one of the top choices for new projects. They aren't catching up, they're leading the way.
  - akiselev 10y ago
    > The vast majority of enterprise software is written in .NET and the MS stack runs millions of businesses. What data are you basing this statement on? I'm genuinely curious because the vast majority of indicators I've seen clearly show that Java is by far the #1 enterprise language. Greenfield projects are probably far more likely to choose .Net but for now, there is a hell of a lot more important legacy Java code that will never be practical to port. I believe that C#/F# are the future of managed enterprise languages (Roslyn, CoreCLR/FX, and quite soon RyuJIT are far superior to Java equivalents, imo) but I highly doubt their adoption is anywhere near Java.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
runjake 10y ago
I think that MSFT would open source the Windows OS today, if they were able, but they have some issues to deal with: * Intellectual Property. * The concern about opening a can of security vulnerabailities and the associated negative press, is probably on their minds. Still, I wish they would open source the components they can, if only as a gesture.
- beagle3 10y ago
  I have no idea why you would think that, when they refuse to document what gets communicated back to Microsoft, make it impossible to turn off telemetry for home users, and even refuse to let you postpone reboots after updates. It is wishful thinking to believe that "they want to be more open, but just can't". They are open sourcing only where they are weak, and that's just not true of the OS (or Office or SQL Server, for that matter).
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
PaulHoule 10y ago
It has nothing to do with Linux vs. Windows. It does have something to do with SQL Server vs the world -- and that is life as usual at Microsoft. Microsoft had a big leadership role in XML standardization at the W3C but has had little to do with RDF. (ex. Oracle contains a forward-chaining triple store optimized for geospatial work, SQL Server does not.) The Microsoft SQL server team would naturally oppose any effort to make a competing database. They've tried to deep six the JET engine that powers Microsoft Access because (i) people want access, and (ii) Microsoft SQL server Express/Compact/whatever is not an effective replacement. Thus, there is not a lot of room under Microsoft's umbrella for a competitive project, but "yet another open source graph database" is not seen as a threat.
- jessedhillon 10y ago
  Is this based on experience or reporting from within Microsoft, or is this kremlinology?
- hackuser 10y ago
  > Microsoft SQL server Express/Compact/whatever is not an effective replacement. Why not?
thewhitetulip 10y ago
VSCode is amazing, not just the product, but the team is one of the best I've encountered, they are friendly and helpful
userbinator 10y ago
Windows open-sourced? Maybe an older version (you can already get the kernel source for XP/2K3 under a restrictive license, but nonetheless you don't have to be an MS employee for it) but I don't see MS open-sourcing anything newer for the forseeable future --- otherwise I bet someone will just make a fork with all the telemetry and other invasive features removed, which certainly doesn't help MS.
digitalzombie 10y ago
> At this rate, are we going to see Windows open-sourced? Doubt it. In my personal opinion, they're just playing catch up and trying to grab a piece of the pie in the Server space that opensource have been gobbling up. Linux got web server, cloud, scientific computing, big data (hadoop, spark, etc..), etc... I believe they're releasing these open source so they can get people on their Azure cloud and get people into their microsoft ecosystem instead. They're emulating what makes Linux so popular, a good ecosystem and also opensource software. I do not think they will give up Window for free or even opensource at all. They was willing to lose the internet for desktop. Their mentality was everything goes through the desktop. Google and the internet proved them wrong and made app OS agnostic via webapp. They neglected search engine for desktop and Google ate it up. That's how crazy it is. There's also a theory of how they dominated Gaming via DirectX so they can keep their OS popular. I doubt they would give up DirectX and gaming lead via opensource. I think it's a good strategy but I personally love open source ecosystem much more than Microsoft and have trust issues with them in the past. They're just playing catch up just like Bing vs Google, IE vs Mozilla, etc.. There's still money to be made even though there are clear leader in each space Microsoft neglected.
- dingo_bat 10y ago
  > I do not think they will give up Window for free Win 10 was free.
  - dagw 10y ago
    Win 10 was free. It was a time limited free upgrade for people who already had a valid windows license. I don't think it it was free.
    - 3825 10y ago
      I had the same misunderstanding as well. However, I think they ought keep Windows 10 Insider program available to everyone free of cost and without having to pay for a license. I feel like this will fall on deaf ears though. Microsoft watchers say Windows already treats stable as a testbed for the enterprise users who withhold updates for n days. So, a new update shows up without much testing, breaks a bunch of stuff on consumer hardware, Microsoft finds out thanks to logs or twitter chatter and fixes it, and everyone including enterprise hardware take the updates. I think eventually Windows being source available is possible but I doubt it will be free in a meaningful way.

dogma1138 10y ago

I don't see MSFT benefiting from open sourcing windows, so likely never.

bluejekyll 10y ago
Yeah. I meant that as a little tounge in cheek, I'm pretty sure they never will either.
dman 10y ago
I see them benefiting immensely. A big problem that Microsoft has is that once you start going down rabbit holes on Windows the number of people out there who have a clue is vanishingly small. So for systems programming on Windows there is very little coverage online. Opening Windows up will broaden the number of people who understand the platform on a deep level.
- throwawayish 10y ago
  Earlier in my life I did a lot of Windows system-level programming, including some minor driver development, and now I'm practically exclusively on the #nix bunch, sometimes doing similar stuff. I can't say that there is a disparity. If anything, the parts that are documented are usually better documented in the Windows world, and there are very good books about most components. (To be fair I never read a book on anything unix apart from Lion's). There is a large amount of stuff online for either, but I often have the feeling that correct examples are less frequently found for, esp., Linux.
  - simias 10y ago
    I've never done kernel work on Windows but on Linux at least you can dig into the source code to figure out how stuff works when the documentation is lacking. I suppose that's what the parent was talking about.
    - yoz-y 10y ago
      Not giving the source code forces you to write a better documentation though. In an ideal world, both would be available but personally I prefer a good documentation rather than source code diving.
- dogma1138 10y ago
  Windows System Internals are probably the best documented in the world, MSDN alone is a treasure trove of information and there are countless books on the matter. And unlike some other platforms what is written tends to match reality, and stay relevant for a long time (for better or for worse).
cookiecaper 10y ago
Sun is a beautiful case study in what happens when you're a little too aggressive about the "openness" mantra. They bet the farm on SPARC and lost. If they had kept pieces of Solaris closer to chest, who knows what would've happened, but they would've at least had one more potentially-viable commercial offering. I assume that Microsoft is not going to be naive enough to do the same. IMO Microsoft's interest in openness revolves around remaining a viable option in the cloud era. They need to protect their investment in the .NET ecosystem and MS-centric development workflow, which means making it easy for people to run .NET programs on *nix-based VPSes and containers.
- coredog64 10y ago
  AIUI, Sun bet on being able to sell stuff (not just SPARC) to FinTech firms. They borrowed money at the height of the bubble, and when the bubble burst, their customer base cut back on hardware purchases. Because they couldn't service that expensive debt, they had to find a buyer.
ed_blackburn 10y ago
Perhaps some elements. The kernel? The more platforms the better?

jpfed 10y ago

I am under the impression that MS has a lot of different parts, and that these parts have different cultures and goals. MS Research and their developer division seem really open-source-friendly, but that may or may not say anything about their OS team.

Someone1234 10y ago
Their OS team just put a Ubuntu-Linux subsystem into Windows via direct kernel calls. I'd be careful assuming anything about them.
- ygra 10y ago
  They were also very careful not to touch anything GPL-licensed. The Linux syscalls were all implemented from scratch. So it's effectively a proprietary reimplementation of parts of the Linux kernel. I'm not sure how much that says about open-source plans of Windows itself.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - eganist 10y ago
    That sounds more like an edict from MS Legal more than anything related to the culture of the core OS team.
  - nxc18 10y ago
    That says more about the fact that that implementation pattern is a core part of the NT OS, and the underlying design of the two kernels is so different that just throwing Linux code in the mix would not make sense (in the way that hearing purple doesn't make sense). WSL is a elimination of the Linux user mode programming environment. The fact that that requires implementing Linux kernel functionality is simply an artifact of the lack of a more modular design (or really any up front design) in Linux.
    - 10y ago

WayneBro 10y ago

Not yet. Their next strategy is to try and use ARM (again) to shove UWP down your throat. I love Windows but I seriously will not touch UWP until they loosen up the sandbox restrictions so that I can do regular IPC with a win32 desktop app. You can't even send an HTTP request to a little node.js Web server running on your desktop right now. Fuck that. I'm not buying into it.

Kipters 10y ago
Care to elaborate on the HTTP part? You just need the "Internet (client)" capability in your manifest, it's even enabled by default when you create a new project Moreover, win32 desktop apps can use the AppService mechanism exposed by UWP apps (but cannot host an AppService themselves, just connect to UWP-hosted AppServices)
- WayneBro 10y ago
  Give it a try. You can't send requests to `localhost` or `127.0.0.1` at all. AppService is largely useless for IPC between UWP and Win32 since the UWP app can't initiate a request to the Win32 app. Another thing you can't do, which is really annoying: UWP won't let your code start an external process and use standard i/o pipes to communicate with it. The only possibility is to use files for IPC and you'd have to have your Win32 app listen for changes in the file or directory, then open it up and read the data. However UWP can't listen for changes in those same files, so it's a real PITA. All of the options are listed here - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12341707/communication-between-windows-store-app-and-native-desktop-application http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12341707/communication-be... You can also use a loopback exemption, but it requires installing a fake root certificate (no thanks!) - http://docs.telerik.com/fiddler/Configure-Fiddler/Tasks/ConfigureFiddlerForWin8 http://docs.telerik.com/fiddler/Configure-Fiddler/Tasks/Conf... or http://loopback.codeplex.com/ http://loopback.codeplex.com/
  - Someone1234 10y ago
    > However UWP can't listen for changes in those same files, so it's a real PITA. It can via the ContentChanged event see this example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/39737147/how-can-i-watch-for-file-changes-in-a-uwp-project http://stackoverflow.com/questions/39737147/how-can-i-watch-... > Give it a try. You can't send requests to `localhost` or `127.0.0.1` at all. Luckily getting the local IP address is easy enough from UWP: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/33770429/how-do-i-find-the-local-ip-address-on-a-win-10-uwp-project http://stackoverflow.com/questions/33770429/how-do-i-find-th... That will work since it is treated like all other network traffic. localhost and 127.0.0.1 are considered privildged routes since you can bypass the firewall and exploit local processes to escalate.

olyjohn 10y ago

It's not like they're doing it out of the goodness of their heart. They don't have a choice, they were becoming irrelevant, and now they're playing catch up to try to bring back all the devs to their platform.

bluejekyll 10y ago
Agreed, but is it a bad thing for the OSS community? They're generally using unristricted licenses, MIT and Apache2, so this is legit OSS. While I still haven't bought an MS product since 1996, I don't think I have a problem with using their OSS. I see it as supporting companies when they do the right thing. Honestly Apple's tightening up of the control on their platform in recent years, like requiring LLVM bitcode with apps on some of their devices which only works if it's Apple LLVM generated bitcode, has me swinging the opposite direction from them. It would go a long way for my perseption of Apple if they either drop the LLVM bitcode requirement, or at least standardize on a non-proprietary version.
manigandham 10y ago
MS was definitely not becoming irrelevant. The vast majority of enterprise software is written in .NET and the MS stack runs millions of businesses. They are evolving the framework to be faster and cross-platform based on external pressures but in the last few years they have managed to overtake several of the other language/framework options to again be one of the top choices for new projects. They aren't catching up, they're leading the way.
- akiselev 10y ago
  > The vast majority of enterprise software is written in .NET and the MS stack runs millions of businesses. What data are you basing this statement on? I'm genuinely curious because the vast majority of indicators I've seen clearly show that Java is by far the #1 enterprise language. Greenfield projects are probably far more likely to choose .Net but for now, there is a hell of a lot more important legacy Java code that will never be practical to port. I believe that C#/F# are the future of managed enterprise languages (Roslyn, CoreCLR/FX, and quite soon RyuJIT are far superior to Java equivalents, imo) but I highly doubt their adoption is anywhere near Java.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

runjake 10y ago

I think that MSFT would open source the Windows OS today, if they were able, but they have some issues to deal with: * Intellectual Property. * The concern about opening a can of security vulnerabailities and the associated negative press, is probably on their minds. Still, I wish they would open source the components they can, if only as a gesture.

beagle3 10y ago
I have no idea why you would think that, when they refuse to document what gets communicated back to Microsoft, make it impossible to turn off telemetry for home users, and even refuse to let you postpone reboots after updates. It is wishful thinking to believe that "they want to be more open, but just can't". They are open sourcing only where they are weak, and that's just not true of the OS (or Office or SQL Server, for that matter).

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

PaulHoule 10y ago

It has nothing to do with Linux vs. Windows. It does have something to do with SQL Server vs the world -- and that is life as usual at Microsoft. Microsoft had a big leadership role in XML standardization at the W3C but has had little to do with RDF. (ex. Oracle contains a forward-chaining triple store optimized for geospatial work, SQL Server does not.) The Microsoft SQL server team would naturally oppose any effort to make a competing database. They've tried to deep six the JET engine that powers Microsoft Access because (i) people want access, and (ii) Microsoft SQL server Express/Compact/whatever is not an effective replacement. Thus, there is not a lot of room under Microsoft's umbrella for a competitive project, but "yet another open source graph database" is not seen as a threat.

jessedhillon 10y ago
Is this based on experience or reporting from within Microsoft, or is this kremlinology?
hackuser 10y ago
> Microsoft SQL server Express/Compact/whatever is not an effective replacement. Why not?

thewhitetulip 10y ago

VSCode is amazing, not just the product, but the team is one of the best I've encountered, they are friendly and helpful

userbinator 10y ago

Windows open-sourced? Maybe an older version (you can already get the kernel source for XP/2K3 under a restrictive license, but nonetheless you don't have to be an MS employee for it) but I don't see MS open-sourcing anything newer for the forseeable future --- otherwise I bet someone will just make a fork with all the telemetry and other invasive features removed, which certainly doesn't help MS.

digitalzombie 10y ago

> At this rate, are we going to see Windows open-sourced? Doubt it. In my personal opinion, they're just playing catch up and trying to grab a piece of the pie in the Server space that opensource have been gobbling up. Linux got web server, cloud, scientific computing, big data (hadoop, spark, etc..), etc... I believe they're releasing these open source so they can get people on their Azure cloud and get people into their microsoft ecosystem instead. They're emulating what makes Linux so popular, a good ecosystem and also opensource software. I do not think they will give up Window for free or even opensource at all. They was willing to lose the internet for desktop. Their mentality was everything goes through the desktop. Google and the internet proved them wrong and made app OS agnostic via webapp. They neglected search engine for desktop and Google ate it up. That's how crazy it is. There's also a theory of how they dominated Gaming via DirectX so they can keep their OS popular. I doubt they would give up DirectX and gaming lead via opensource. I think it's a good strategy but I personally love open source ecosystem much more than Microsoft and have trust issues with them in the past. They're just playing catch up just like Bing vs Google, IE vs Mozilla, etc.. There's still money to be made even though there are clear leader in each space Microsoft neglected.

dingo_bat 10y ago
> I do not think they will give up Window for free Win 10 was free.
- dagw 10y ago
  Win 10 was free. It was a time limited free upgrade for people who already had a valid windows license. I don't think it it was free.
  - 3825 10y ago
    I had the same misunderstanding as well. However, I think they ought keep Windows 10 Insider program available to everyone free of cost and without having to pay for a license. I feel like this will fall on deaf ears though. Microsoft watchers say Windows already treats stable as a testbed for the enterprise users who withhold updates for n days. So, a new update shows up without much testing, breaks a bunch of stuff on consumer hardware, Microsoft finds out thanks to logs or twitter chatter and fixes it, and everyone including enterprise hardware take the updates. I think eventually Windows being source available is possible but I doubt it will be free in a meaningful way.