3 ms·

I 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 somebo

by krylon 8y ago

I 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 ago
  Illumos is where it's at now.
- krylon 8y ago
  There'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.
    - krylon 8y ago
      It is sad, yes, considering what OpenSolaris could have become. But at least Oracle was not able to completely destroy the community that had grown around it. This probably sounds silly, but I find it sad, personally, because Solaris is probably the second coolest name ever given to an operating system, after Siemens' BS2000.
    - floatboth 8y ago
      > pet project of some fairly unknown software company IIRC, illumos is a loose community full of former Solaris devs, there's no one company behind the illumos kernel. Joyent, the company behind the SmartOS distribution, I'd say is far from "unknown" — they started that whole node.js thing after all!
derefr 8y ago
If they had first told you that in the amazing future of 2018, quality Operating Systems were a commodity that you can’t even give away, and Microsoft was now making all its money by being a B2B hosted-infrastructure (“cloud”) provider, would the other assertions become easier to swallow?
- krylon 8y ago
  Good question. I have been using GNU/Linux and BSD on my personal machines since 2000, so the first part would not have blown my mind that much. For my needs (and Google's), quality operating systems were a commodity back then. The second part, I don't know. Microsoft has been trying to move to a subscription-based model for a long time. Google Docs, GMail, Google Calendar were around back then, smart phones were becoming a thing. Microsoft moving away from traditional desktop and on-premises server software to a cloud-based model that would allow them collect "rent" instead of one-time license payments, that would not have sounded crazy. (Who knows - if they had tried to create a competing offer to Google's services that you did not have to pay for in sensitive data, they could have hit the Jackpot big time...) Under those conditions, it makes much less sense for Microsoft to hold on to their code as they have done traditionally. But going from the company whose CEO publicly called FLOSS a "cancer" to a company that actively embraces it, that is a pretty huge change. When Nadella became CEO, I joked to a coworker that Microsoft was as good as dead, trying to go "cloud". I was obviously wrong on that one, and now I think if Ballmer had stayed as CEO, Microsoft would probably be much worse off.
  - efreak 8y ago
    Gmail, Docs, and Calendar weren't around in 2000. The first release of Gmail wasn't until invite-only beta in 2004[0] (invites were required until 2006/7); Google bought Upstartle (Writely -> Docs) and released Docs and Calendar in 2006[1][2]. [0]: http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2004/04/google-gets-message-launches-gmail.html http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2004/04/google-gets-message-... [1]: http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2006/10/google-announces-google-docs_11.html http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2006/10/google-announces-goo... [2]: http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2006/04/google-calendar_13.htm http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2006/04/google-calendar_13.h...

by krylon 8y ago

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 ago
Illumos is where it's at now.
krylon 8y ago
There'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.
  - krylon 8y ago
    It is sad, yes, considering what OpenSolaris could have become. But at least Oracle was not able to completely destroy the community that had grown around it. This probably sounds silly, but I find it sad, personally, because Solaris is probably the second coolest name ever given to an operating system, after Siemens' BS2000.
  - floatboth 8y ago
    > pet project of some fairly unknown software company IIRC, illumos is a loose community full of former Solaris devs, there's no one company behind the illumos kernel. Joyent, the company behind the SmartOS distribution, I'd say is far from "unknown" — they started that whole node.js thing after all!

derefr 8y ago

If they had first told you that in the amazing future of 2018, quality Operating Systems were a commodity that you can’t even give away, and Microsoft was now making all its money by being a B2B hosted-infrastructure (“cloud”) provider, would the other assertions become easier to swallow?

krylon 8y ago
Good question. I have been using GNU/Linux and BSD on my personal machines since 2000, so the first part would not have blown my mind that much. For my needs (and Google's), quality operating systems were a commodity back then. The second part, I don't know. Microsoft has been trying to move to a subscription-based model for a long time. Google Docs, GMail, Google Calendar were around back then, smart phones were becoming a thing. Microsoft moving away from traditional desktop and on-premises server software to a cloud-based model that would allow them collect "rent" instead of one-time license payments, that would not have sounded crazy. (Who knows - if they had tried to create a competing offer to Google's services that you did not have to pay for in sensitive data, they could have hit the Jackpot big time...) Under those conditions, it makes much less sense for Microsoft to hold on to their code as they have done traditionally. But going from the company whose CEO publicly called FLOSS a "cancer" to a company that actively embraces it, that is a pretty huge change. When Nadella became CEO, I joked to a coworker that Microsoft was as good as dead, trying to go "cloud". I was obviously wrong on that one, and now I think if Ballmer had stayed as CEO, Microsoft would probably be much worse off.
- efreak 8y ago
  Gmail, Docs, and Calendar weren't around in 2000. The first release of Gmail wasn't until invite-only beta in 2004[0] (invites were required until 2006/7); Google bought Upstartle (Writely -> Docs) and released Docs and Calendar in 2006[1][2]. [0]: http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2004/04/google-gets-message-launches-gmail.html http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2004/04/google-gets-message-... [1]: http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2006/10/google-announces-google-docs_11.html http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2006/10/google-announces-goo... [2]: http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2006/04/google-calendar_13.htm http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2006/04/google-calendar_13.h...