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While unlikely, I hope one day that the entire Windows operating system will be made open source — I'm not sure how Microsoft would make the revenue work out, b
by epoch_100 8y ago
While unlikely, I hope one day that the entire Windows operating system will be made open source — I'm not sure how Microsoft would make the revenue work out, but I bet it could be done. And the world would be better for it.
- kevinSuttle 8y agoCan you imagine how much work and exploit patching could have been avoided in the last 30 years?
- ethbro 8y agoCan you imagine how much effort and legacy code retention has gone into Microsoft maintaining backwards compatibility in their OSes?
- kevinSuttle 8y agoExactly my point. If it were open source, that work would have been fractioned.
- ethbro 8y agoI think OpenSSL is indicative of the enthusiasm most unpaid contributors have for working with legacy code.
- kypro 8y agoSurely there is some incentive to do this for home licences? Then they could charge for a subscription to the "pro" features and take a cut from apps on the Windows store.
- bunderbunder 8y agoI could imagine some sort of scheme where home versions are free to download, but the right to redistribute is not included in that license. So OEMs still have to pay for an OEM version, and the server version still costs money. But that would only work if it's legally possible to open source even that much of it in the first place, which may not be the case.
- derefr 8y agoSo the OEMs would Instead install a Linux bootstrap system that gets online and then downloads+installs Windows on behalf of the user. Linux distros already do exactly that for other “open source but non-redistributable” things Microsoft offers, like the MS Core Fonts. The distros’ packages for the fonts don’t contain the fonts, but rather a wizard that goes and gets them from Microsoft’s servers on behalf of the user, and then installs them. This seems legitimate enough, as an approach; nobody’s ever been sued for this. So I’m not sure there would be much difference in the legality of it if it were the whole OS.
- bunderbunder 8y ago> So the OEMs would Instead install a Linux bootstrap system that gets online and then downloads+installs Windows on behalf of the user. I doubt it. That kind of first-time user experience would probably do more $ worth of damage to the company's reputation and sales than what OEM licensing costs. Linux vendors may be able to do it just fine, but Linux PC vendors cater to a very different target market from Windows PC vendors.
- djsumdog 8y agoI still hope enough people hack on ReactOS that one day it will catch up and can run most Win10 drivers, basic apps and eventually games.
- lostgame 8y agoIsn’t that also dependent on WINE development?
- Rychard 8y agoSort of. ReactOS does use large portions of code from Wine, but the ReactOS team upstreams changes to the Wine project whenever possible, so it's a two-way street. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Wine_cooperation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Wine_cooperation https://www.reactos.org/wiki/WINE https://www.reactos.org/wiki/WINE
- hiccuphippo 8y agoI think that would depend on if Microsoft decides to keep working on Win10 instead of coming up with a new version.
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoBecause of legacy code issues, you're likely to just see the new parts of Windows get open sourced. When things get rewritten or ported or what-have-you (such as reimplementing these frameworks for .NET Core), it'll likely be open source. See how nothing from IE has been open sourced, but several components of Edge have been. It's likely most of the nuts and bolts of Windows can be open sourced without threatening their business model, as competing OSes are pretty architecturally incompatible, and there will always be some closed source parts of Windows. Bear in mind, Microsoft is working heavily on shifting their revenue to being services-based as well.
- arethuza 8y agoIE might have lingering traces of Mosaic in it - MS licensed Mosaic from Spyglass as the basis for the original IE although more recent versions have dropped any explicit mention of that licensing deal.
- gsnedders 8y agoAnd while they've dropped any explicit mention of it, it would be much easier to find any surviving evidence of it being a derivative with the code available.
- craftyguy 8y agoI would rather see microsoft contribute to existing projects rather than throw code over the wall.
- ggregoire 8y ago> I'm not sure how Microsoft would make the revenue work out Isn’t Windows 10 already more or less free? You can download it on their site, install it, skip the activation and that’s it. There is a message “Activate Windows” at the bottom right of the screen but it doesn’t matter for most people I guess.
- whichfawkes 8y agoFree is not open source.
- 0xffff2 8y agoOkay, but how are they different in terms of revenue?
- okl 8y agoFree as in beer does not equal open source.
- happycube 8y agoIMO it's more or less Shareware at this point.
- chrisseaton 8y agoI think it's probably unlikely not because of any opinions of Microsoft, but because Windows is vast and contains large volumes of code they've licensed to use in closed source code, but not bought the ability to re-licence as open source.
- amatwl 8y agoThis is true. A quick example would ZIP Folders in Windows - it uses third-party code Microsoft licensed (who knows if the company is still around today since it dates back to the early 2000s). source: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180515-00/?p=98755 https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180515-00/?p=...
- chrisseaton 8y agoYes - and if Microsoft announces they're open sourcing, or that information leaks, the owners of the IP will be able to name their price. Each will be trying to hold out to be that last essential component to get the highest price for the new rights.
- gsnedders 8y agoThere is, of course, always the Java approach: open source everything you can, on the assumption that that is 99% of what's needed, and allow others to fill in the gaps.
- jedieaston 8y agoI don't know that Windows would run without the licensed code, or at least Explorer. If they didn't bother to write their own ZIP library (or use an open-source one) then they probably licensed a lot of other stuff that one would expect a first-class desktop is to have, making it unusable without a bunch of developers fixing it (when their company would probably buy them a license anyway). If it was released without the third-party code, then it'd be a research project, which'd be pretty neat but not something most probably expect from "Windows is open source".
- woodrowbarlow 8y agoprediction: _if_ this happens, it will happen in such a way that you cannot meaningfully run a modified version of the Windows codebase as your OS. (i.e., they'll make it so all software must be installed through the app store and only on signed builds of the OS.)
- oblio 8y agoWhy would they? Any kind of paying customer would want the "official" distro, anyway. And it's not like Microsoft is Red Hat vs Oracle, they can bury anyone making a "hostile" distro.
- JustSomeNobody 8y agoI'd rather them just push for a Linux based "Windows".
- bitwize 8y agoWhy would they trade the much more sophisticated NT kernel for something as primitive as Linux?
- angelsl 8y agoSimplicity is nice sometimes.
- bitwize 8y agoNot when you want to do async I/O and must instead burn CPU cycles and battery life spinning in a select loop.
- floatboth 8y agoWhat? select(), which originally appeared way back in the day in 4.2BSD, is a way to not spin — it only returns when a descriptor is ready.
- loeg 8y agoNT's IO model gives you asynchronous wait on arbitrary event sources, including file IO — not just the network stack. It's actually quite nice if you get over the hideous type names and verbose CamelCase symbols. In contrast, select(), from 4.2BSD through the current day, cannot be used for async IO on regular files. It simply returns immediately. If used naively this could result in a busy loop, I guess, although getting stuck in a blocking disk operation seems more likely to me.
- trasz 8y agoOne of the reasons all the BSDs have kqueue(2).
- tozeur 8y agoEven if Windows is open sourced (which would be pretty cool just to peak in there), there’s no way on Earth you’d be able to compile it. I heard a full build takes over 18 hours on insane hardware, talkin 64+ cores.
- mikestew 8y agoIt's going on fifteen years since I had anything to do with the Windows build, but that sounds...excessive. You could certainly take the afternoon off, though.
- TylerE 8y agoDoesn't sound excessive to me. Sounds about like the days it took to boostrap up Gentoo+X+KDE+etc back in the day.
- dagw 8y agoI heard a full build takes over 18 hours on insane hardware, talkin 64+ cores. A machine like that can be had for only 2-4$ hour on your favorite cloud computing platform. And hopefully the code is sanely enough structured that you don't have to do a complete rebuild too often.
- jononor 8y agoHow long do you think it takes to compile a full Linux desktop distribution like Debian or Arch Linux? Small communities manage to do this regularly. Maybe not so nice on an individual laptop, but there are ways.
- maxxxxx 8y agoI don't see that as a problem. A lot of people and orgs can afford that.
- monocasa 8y agoSo what, like $5 on AWS?
- GordonS 8y ago
- krylon 8y agoI vaguely remember Mark Russinovich giving a talk or something a couple of years ago (when they open sourced .Net Core, I think, but don't quote me), and somebody asked when they would open source Windows, and his reply roughly that they had no specific plans, but that it was "definitely possible": https://venturebeat.com/2015/04/03/microsofts-mark-russinovich-an-open-source-windows-is-definitely-possible/ https://venturebeat.com/2015/04/03/microsofts-mark-russinovi... I agree it is unlikely, or at least would require a huge amount of work. Then again, Sun did it with Solaris, so who knows what the future holds? If somebody had told me ten years ago that Microsoft would open source their .Net runtime, port SQL Server to Linux, replace their proprietary browser engine with Chromium, I would have asked that person to give me some of whatever they were smoking. ;-)
- beefhash 8y ago> I agree it is unlikely, or at least would require a huge amount of work. Then again, Sun did it with Solaris, so who knows what the future holds? Shoutouts to Oracle re-closing Solaris. That was an incredibly pointless move.
- pitaj 8y agoIllumos is where it's at now.
- krylon 8y agoThere's that. But IllumOS is still around and has various derivatives that are under active development. Last time I heard anything about Oracle Solaris, they fired more than a thousands developers at once, and some people commented that Solaris development at Oracle was more or less dead. (I have no clue if that is true, however.)
- jplayer01 8y ago> But IllumOS is still around and has various derivatives that are under active development. It's still an unfortunate blow. A lot of open-source projects are only as popular and widespread because of companies that effectively champion them in a way that convinces other people or companies to jump on the bandwagon. IllumOS, by way of being the pet project of some fairly unknown software company, is hiding in obscurity at this point when it could have been a serious contender as Solaris.
- netcan 8y agoI think chasing down all the rights holders would be harder than the revenue stuff. Ultimately, they'll still be able to sell windows like redhat, and it's the stuff that runs on Windows which is more important anyway.
- anticensor 8y agoYou can drop all non-Microsoft parts and it will still be an usable OS.
- zdragnar 8y agoGross, no thank you. The trialware / bloatware that has come standard on windows from manufacturers was bad enough. Can you imagine how bad Lenovo Windows or Dell Windows would be? The Android landscape is bad enough. At first, I was thinking that it would only be bad for the non-technical folk (i.e. other 99%) who wouldn't know how to re-install a better windows. But then, I remembered that even MS is having a hell of a time rolling out updates without breaking machines. All the different branded flavors of windows would just make getting windows updates that much harder or terrifying, I think.
- curt15 8y ago>Can you imagine how bad Lenovo Windows or Dell Windows would be? Why not just reserve the trademark Windows to Microsoft? If other OEMs want to muck up their own builds they would have to brand it their own and risk their own reputation.
- da_chicken 8y agoThat's exactly what would happen. That's why we don't see hijacking forms of Firefox.
- zdragnar 8y agoThe name Windows is irrelevant for a good chunk of the population. I remember helping some first year college students in the early 2000's (apparently Dell had a batch of faulty hard drives in their new computers). When they came to me for help, I asked if they had mac or windows computers, and the answer was "Um... Dell?". It's the same with Android. A very small percentage of people buy phones with pure Android OS on them. The rest of the non-Apple crowd buy whatever looks good at the store and calls it Android. I would absolutely love to be proven wrong on all of this. I rarely use Windows (mostly for gaming) and otherwise a linux is my daily driver, so either way I'm not likely to be impacted much. Perhaps I'm just too cynical after all of the utter nonsense Lenovo and gang have pulled with windows in the past as it is.
- GordonS 8y agoI might have known someone would try to spin an OSS Windows in a negative way :/ If it was open source, it wouldn't be long before there were hundreds of forks that removed the telemetry, advertising etc. That's by far a net win.
- parvenu74 8y agoHow MSFT would make revenue from an open source operating system: the same as Cononical and Red Hat do from an open source operating system.
- fesoliveira 8y agoI don't think open sourcing the entire OS is possible due to reasons raised by other posts, but maybe they could open source the kernel. This is the central part of Windows and what is actually important. Maybe they could even open source DirectX or some other proprietary library that became a standard over the years, like WPF, who knows.
- justwalt 8y agoHow likely would open sourcing DirectX be? My understanding is that DirectX is a big reason that game developers prefer not to support other platforms. Wouldn’t that let competing platforms have a better chance? That would be a change I’d love to see. But I think a better change would be for newer games not using DirectX and choosing Vulkan instead.
- floatboth 8y agoDropping DirectX and allowing Vulkan on the XBox would be the great move. Would that ever happen? Well, if they can drop EdgeHTML..
- mariusmg 8y ago> Dropping DirectX and allowing Vulkan on the XBox would be the great move. The sad thing is Vulkan and DX12 are not gaining traction even on PC. Very few games support these low level apis , so adding support for Vulkan on Xbox seems pointless first and foremost.
- Const-me 8y agoEven if they want to, I think it’s technically very hard to accomplish. See this pic: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/display/windows-vista-and-later-display-driver-model-architecture https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/di... Many critical components are deep inside Windows kernel, in dxgkrnl.sys, they are very hard to unbundle from the rest of the kernel. Other critical components are in vendor-implemented drivers, both user mode (this part compiles shaders and implements many per-game compatibility hacks) and kernel mode (this one talks to actual hardware). Fortunately, there’re already third-party implementations of D3D on top of something else. Gallium 9, the main downside is no Intel GPU support. DXVK currently only supports D3D 10-11 and WPF is based on 9, but apparently some people are working on D3D9 support. There’s also VK9.
- mr_toad 8y ago> I'm not sure how Microsoft would make the revenue work out They could give away desktop licenses, even in the enterprise, and still rake in the cash from Active Directory and Exchange server licensing. They probably make more from CALS than Windows desktop now.
- ksec 8y agoQuite possible, once Microsoft has ported all the important bits to ARM64. There will be the second coming of Windows Smartphones.