9 ms·

Microsoft urged: Open-source Windows 7 to 'undo past wrongs'

136 points by gitgud 7y ago

cosmiccatnap 7y ago
They won't do this because then you would see how much of this codebase is just the same as it ever was with a new GUI. Reminds me of that board meeting at the beginning of Tron legacy. This is accountability and forced innovation, two things Microsoft avoids at all costs.
grenoire 7y ago
The article has a sentence on the matter, but just to expand a bit more: Windows 7 is not a new piece of self-standing software. It includes past Windows releases, and future Windows releases include it. It doesn't make sense for Microsoft to do this. Besides, I don't see any person/people being able to understand such a complex feat of engineering (and legacy) sufficiently to maintain it for years to come.
- gmueckl 7y ago
  Well, there's Wine and ReactOS as two major efforts to reimplement Win32 user space and the operating system as a whole. These are big team efforts, certainly, but they manifest a very detailed understanding of Windows, mostly obtained through reverse engineering. I would assume that there is enough interest in maintaining Windows - especially commercial interest - that finding and funding a sufficiently large and knowledgeable team is actually not unrealistic. It's just unrealistic to assume that the source code will ever be published willingly by Microsoft as long as any part of it is a direct ancestor to a product they still sell.
  - grenoire 7y ago
    Good point about Wine and ReactOS; I would still think that there must be so much hidden away and swept under the million rugs. As for the commercial interest part, just thinking about how video games' source codes are so rarely published saddens me a great deal. Even after the commercial interest is lost and the IP is no longer in use, companies don't really think much about preserving the source code.
  - krilly 7y ago
    You make a good point, although I think it's pretty clear that ReactOS cheated. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/03/reactos_windows_research_kernel_claim/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/03/reactos_windows_res... What about open sourcing, say, windows 95? That seems more achievable, and probably more helpful.
    - gmueckl 7y ago
      Windows 95 is a kludge by today's standards and it's been the little brother of the more complete Win32 implementation in the NT line. As a result, it is missing a ton of things that are essential parts of modern Windows. I don't see any value in that.
      - ChrisSD 7y ago
        Arguably, the kludge is supporting Win32 on an NT kernel. The win32 layer on top of NT is a mess of backwards compatibility hacks with more modern NT and NTFS features hammered in. The native NT layer is much better but officially it's unstable. Compared to that, Windows 9x was less kludge and more a straightforward implementation of Win32, though of course lacking modern features.
    - wongarsu 7y ago
      > What about open sourcing, say, windows 95? That seems more achievable, and probably more helpful. The Windows NT4 source code leaked a while ago and can be found all over the internet. Of course that doesn't really help ReactOS because they officially can't use it, but that's probably the closest we will get to MS open sourcing Windows.
    - mehrdadn 7y ago
      I'm not sure it's "pretty clear"? See the entire thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20343007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20343007
ChrisSD 7y ago
> But Microsoft is unlikely to cave into the Windows 7 demands that FSF outlined in a petition launched last week There should be an award for understatement of the month. This petition[0] is more about making a point than any realistic expectation of open sourcing Windows 7. [0]: https://www.fsf.org/windows/upcycle-windows-7 https://www.fsf.org/windows/upcycle-windows-7
- HoustonRefugee 7y ago
  I am pretty sure the C-level at Microsoft is having quite the laugh at this petition.
  - dis-sys 7y ago
    Laughing at the petition? That is already way better than calling it a cancer.
  - mattl 7y ago
    I doubt they even know it exists
Santosh83 7y ago
Even if they wanted to, I doubt they could do so given all the third-party software they must have incorporated inside Windows. Perhaps it is possible to strip those out but still am sure MS doesn't want the entire world looking at their code, given that parts of the kernel of Windows 7 are probably functionally the same under Windows 10, so you'll essentially enable everyone to try and find bugs in the system without having to reverse engineer.
mirthandmadness 7y ago
An open-source version of the last good Windows, I'd like that.
- acdha 7y ago
  “Last good Windows” – just like XP, 2000, 98, and NT? Nothing makes people forget about all of the problems like not wanting to learn something new.
  - flir 7y ago
    2000 was pretty good. NT with a nicer interface. I was on that far longer than is reasonable.
luma 7y ago
Win7 won't be open sourced for the same reason that makes nearly any large closed-source software project nearly impossible to re-license: it's packed full of licensed code and libraries that don't belong to MS.
- bilekas 7y ago
  This this this this. As nice as the idea is, it just wont happen.
- bangboombang 7y ago
  Exactly that. Bundled 3rd party software would probably be the easiest part to remove, but there is tons of supporting code, libraries and whatnot intermixed with core components that even if they wanted to, it would cost them a lot of resources to strip it clean of that stuff. But just imagining that happening... Would be super crazy.
- neurobashing 7y ago
  I wish I could find the source, but I once read that people at Apple considered opening up Classic, but there was so much 3rd party code a releasable blob would take a ton of engineering hours to scrub it all, and couldn't justify the cost.
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  And I've little doubt that the FSF knows this. The demand smells of performance art to me.
  - TrickyRick 7y ago
    Of course it's a PR trick, anyone with even the slightest experience in software development can figure out that it's a lot of work to open-source a larger project. Also considering what's mentioned in the article, plenty of this code is probably still in use in later Windows versions which are still sold.
    - hobs 7y ago
bilekas 7y ago
I won't echo the statements from others about the headache in licencing it would be for Microsoft but I would like to point out : In the petition: > We want more proof that you really respect users and user freedom, and aren't just using those concepts as marketing when convenient. How do you even define that ? It really seems like this was just setup to inflame people about Microsoft again. Yeah windows 7 is end of life.. ~10 years.. I would consider that pretty reasonable. Demanding for the source in a petition ? That's quite unreasonable.
- gmueckl 7y ago
  This is a publicity stunt. Nobody in their right mind would expect that this would get any official reaction from MS, even if it's just a plain "no". I just don't get what the FSF has to gain from that. It rather makes them look petty in my eyes.
  - PretzelFisch 7y ago
    They get a sound bite, with the hope of reminding anyone thinking of buying windows 10 that it is closed source and maybe should think about the ramifications.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- acdha 7y ago
  We’re spending time talking about them, and they spent how much on that free PR? This is a great media hack since it costs almost nothing to request and while they know that it would be prohibitively expensive (and almost nobody would use it) they also know most people reading it won’t think about that so it’ll be easy to get some angry “greedy Microsoft won’t even open something they don’t need anymore” circulation.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
exabrial 7y ago
If if weren't for Excel, would there be any reason for businesses to stay on Windows? That seems to be the "killer app" for finance.
- thrower123 7y ago
  Decades of legacy LOB apps that only work on Windows. Also, ye gods, the number of intranet "web apps" that still require IE 8 and ActiveX controls.
- scarface74 7y ago
  The better question, is there any reason for them to leave Windows?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  Active Directory, SMB, Outlook (and the other non-Excel parts of office), the ludicrous number of tiny proprietary applications that keep the world running, custom business applications with 3 decades of continuous development on them, etc. It is somewhat amazing to me how ignorant some people in this industry can be of why Windows is still used.
  - exabrial 7y ago
    I'm one of them. I'm guessing it's just the era in which your business was setup. Maybe a modern day equiv: Right now there's no exit option for AWS unless you just happen to build an insulating layer with kubernetes and many other layers of indirection.
- gamblor956 7y ago
  Word is the killer app for most white collar businesses. Publisher is the killer app for many non-profits and community organizations. Many companies run on Access. Windows supports more hardware than either of its competitors, from the very cheap commodity crap to the crushingly expensive and proprietary. Hardware usually just works with Windows, and even if it doesn't, it's an automatic driver download away to get it working. It's also easier to use than Linux and it's cheaper to use and easier to administer than MacOS.
lousken 7y ago
Licencing issues aside, I don't think MS would do it just because they want to see old windows versions dead. They don't even care about W8.1 (e.g. lack of dx12) even though it's still supported.
zerr 7y ago
FoxPro as well :)
- HoustonRefugee 7y ago
  I think it would be more productive to do that and release the source for other out of date platforms like GW-BASIC and MS COBOL.
m-p-3 7y ago
The more realistic option is a production-ready ReactOS release before Microsoft open-sources their past OSes.
mehrdadn 7y ago
I like what the FSF sometimes does, but this is going to stick out in my mind like sore thumb as an example of how they make it hard to keep doing that... Edit: fixed typo
- acidictadpole 7y ago
  What does the EFF have to do with this? Are they related to the FSF somehow?
mangecoeur 7y ago
> "nothing to lose by liberating a version of their operating system" Ummm... except for all of the proprietary and valuable IP that is anyway shared by subsequent versions of Windows? It's not like they scrapped every bit of code when they started working on Win8, Win10 etc. Some bits of the control panel are pretty much unchanged since Windows NT!
sfgweilr4f 7y ago
To state the obvious: Windows 7 is the predecessor of Windows 10. So open-sourcing Windows 7 is effectively open-sourcing Windows 10. I'd be very surprised if Windows 10 had no code from Windows 7. I'd also be surprised if Microsoft actually owns all the code/assets in Windows. Licensing is a thing. Open-sourcing Windows 10 as a "current" product is requesting the source to everything Windows. That is a big ask. It would have to fit into a core strategic change for Microsoft. Microsoft has likely got plans of its own to embrace and absorb Linux. Why should I as a Big Corporate with full licenses be forced to maintain separate Linux machines? Why can't Enterprise natively run Linux binaries? WSL is part of the answer to those questions but I'm fairly sure Microsoft has bigger plans. Who says they won't simply pivot and make Windows run on their own flavor of Linux or a defined distribution? Sounds crazy but... stranger things have happened and licensing is a real money maker. The ability to lock people to Windows is still very lucrative however. For the foreseeable future they are much more likely to run Linux on Windows and keep their existing control. I seriously doubt Windows 7 will be open-sourced while Windows 10 remains closed-source.
- sixothree 7y ago
  Microsoft has made a point to re-develop closed-source projects in an open manner. The entire dotnet framework, multiple languages, WSL, even the terminal. I think a more appropriate ask would be to "please re-develop X technology in an open manner".
- chooseaname 7y ago
  > Who says they won't simply pivot and make Windows run on their own flavor of Linux or a defined distribution? Sounds crazy but... I don't think it sounds crazy at all. I've had the same feeling since WSL was released. And that feeling has gotten stronger since they showed of the Duo.
  - ChrisSD 7y ago
    They could, but why? Microsoft already has a kernel. It works for them. If they did pivot to Linux, they'd still need to support NT for a long time to come. They'd also need to write a win32 layer for Linux (WINE, as it is, wouldn't be enough) as well as compatibility shims for Windows drivers, etc. And after they'd done all this work, while still supporting the NT kernel, what have they gained? Little that can't be done already. More likely is that they continue to port .NET and/or UWP so applications built with those technologies will be cross platform. This may eventually mean they no longer need Windows but could maintain a Microsoft branded Linux distro. But that wouldn't be "Windows" by any sensible definition of the term.
ComodoHacker 7y ago
Licensing and economic aspects aside, I think it would do more harm than good from security perspective. Malicious actors will start finding and exploiting 0-days at much faster pace than benevolent actors can (a) find them, (b) patch and (c) get patches applied to the userbase.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
> We want more proof that you really respect users and user freedom, and aren't just using those concepts as marketing when convenient. Considering the state of telemetry and adware in Windows 10, not to mention the history of forcing updates and the recent burying of the ability to setup a non-live account, I'd have to say that only a fool would believe they respect users and user freedom.
richard_todd 7y ago
What they could more easily do, and what seems to fit with their strategy lately, is open source further portions of Windows 10. (MIT rather than GPL though, obviously) They are already way down the path (winUI, NET5, PowerShell, terminal, etc). I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see more of the bundled apps like Paint and Notepad show up on GitHub one day, for example. If they could get explorer.exe over to the open-source side, that would be huge. And I don’t think MS has anything to lose by doing that. It seems they’d mainly want to would protect the stuff that powers/differentiates Azure.
shmerl 7y ago
They can't open source all the backdoors and DRM in there.
trollied 7y ago
Licensing issues aside, it'd be very dangerous from a security perspective. 0-days would come thick & fast.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  And not just to Windows 7. Enough of Windows 10 runs the same code that it would be more vulnerable. That said, there's no reason to think state actors don't already have the Windows 10 source.
TeaDude 7y ago
I would have settled for XP. I love that clunky old thing but Win7 is the cooler faster son that was "just right" with the most new features (That you actually want) before a lot of the legacy stuff rotted off in windows 8. (Still technically there but showers you with errors if you attempt to use) Obviously this will never ever happen for corporate, licencing and government reasons but a man can dream...
dehrmann 7y ago
> The petition was aiming to gather at least 7,777 supporters and today has exceeded that by 1,000. Maybe those 8,000+ supporters should go contribute to ReactOS.
dehrmann 7y ago
> We urge you to respect the freedom and privacy of your users – not simply strong-arm them into the newest Windows version. The software is 10 years old, MS bends over backwards to maintain backwards compatibility, and they gave Windows 10 upgrades to Windows 7 users.
- zamalek 7y ago
  > they gave Windows 10 upgrades to Windows 7 users. And they still do, even though the upgrade period has official lapsed. I strongly doubt Microsoft will buckle to the type of these arguments being made by FSF. The list of demands read like they were written by a neurotic significant other. That being said... I really do hope Microsoft open sources Windows some day, but the problem is that the users that will enjoy the most freedom on day 1 would be black hats. Windows consists of MLOC that has never been publicly audited and it takes far longer to identify and install patches than it does to exploit a vulnerability. If a logical argument that addresses the risks, as well the benefits that Microsoft would see, I am sure that Microsoft would at least enter into dialog about this. Even though RMS (and by association FSF) are fundamentally correct, I have yet to see coherent and reasonable communication originating from them in the Microsoft and FOSS discussion.
mixmastamyk 7y ago
I'm not sure what good Win7 would be, now that it is EOL. But, I'd like to see them take the relevant parts to bolster ReactOS.
- Koshkin 7y ago
  > relevant Problem is, opensourcing Windows 7 under a permissive license might make ReactOS itself irrelevant.
  - mixmastamyk 7y ago
    Won’t happen as dozens of folks have already explained.
martin1975 7y ago
Personally, I would like to see MS do the inverse of what they did with Linux - move to Linux as their primary kernel and embed the NT kernel with hooks into Linux, either via hypervisor or directly if hypervisor doesn't give it the performance it needs for us to depart from NT kernel permanently. Not saying NT is bad... just that Linux has so much more momentum on the server, is well liked, popular and 'free'. Make NT an afterthought in Linux... not the other way around.
djsumdog 7y ago
This seems so useless. Why not petition instead for Microsoft to work on open sourcing the Titan HTML rendering engine? Microsoft spent years removing a lot of the NSCA Moasic stuff, and there is a good chance they own all of the Titan/Edge code. With their browser switching to Blink/Chromium, surely they could put in a few months of effort to try and make it publishable / open source. Opening sourcing their entire operating system is never going to happen and the petition is a useless publicity stunt to remind people that MS doesn't really care about open source. I wish the FSF had asked for something more useful/realistic instead.
mastrsushi 7y ago
The Free Software Community can't even maintain its own consumer operating system. How the hell could they actively maintain a behemoth like Windows 7?

136 points by gitgud 7y ago

They won't do this because then you would see how much of this codebase is just the same as it ever was with a new GUI. Reminds me of that board meeting at the beginning of Tron legacy. This is accountability and forced innovation, two things Microsoft avoids at all costs.

grenoire 7y ago

The article has a sentence on the matter, but just to expand a bit more: Windows 7 is not a new piece of self-standing software. It includes past Windows releases, and future Windows releases include it. It doesn't make sense for Microsoft to do this. Besides, I don't see any person/people being able to understand such a complex feat of engineering (and legacy) sufficiently to maintain it for years to come.

gmueckl 7y ago
Well, there's Wine and ReactOS as two major efforts to reimplement Win32 user space and the operating system as a whole. These are big team efforts, certainly, but they manifest a very detailed understanding of Windows, mostly obtained through reverse engineering. I would assume that there is enough interest in maintaining Windows - especially commercial interest - that finding and funding a sufficiently large and knowledgeable team is actually not unrealistic. It's just unrealistic to assume that the source code will ever be published willingly by Microsoft as long as any part of it is a direct ancestor to a product they still sell.
- grenoire 7y ago
  Good point about Wine and ReactOS; I would still think that there must be so much hidden away and swept under the million rugs. As for the commercial interest part, just thinking about how video games' source codes are so rarely published saddens me a great deal. Even after the commercial interest is lost and the IP is no longer in use, companies don't really think much about preserving the source code.
- krilly 7y ago
  You make a good point, although I think it's pretty clear that ReactOS cheated. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/03/reactos_windows_research_kernel_claim/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/03/reactos_windows_res... What about open sourcing, say, windows 95? That seems more achievable, and probably more helpful.
  - gmueckl 7y ago
    Windows 95 is a kludge by today's standards and it's been the little brother of the more complete Win32 implementation in the NT line. As a result, it is missing a ton of things that are essential parts of modern Windows. I don't see any value in that.
    - ChrisSD 7y ago
      Arguably, the kludge is supporting Win32 on an NT kernel. The win32 layer on top of NT is a mess of backwards compatibility hacks with more modern NT and NTFS features hammered in. The native NT layer is much better but officially it's unstable. Compared to that, Windows 9x was less kludge and more a straightforward implementation of Win32, though of course lacking modern features.
  - wongarsu 7y ago
    > What about open sourcing, say, windows 95? That seems more achievable, and probably more helpful. The Windows NT4 source code leaked a while ago and can be found all over the internet. Of course that doesn't really help ReactOS because they officially can't use it, but that's probably the closest we will get to MS open sourcing Windows.
  - mehrdadn 7y ago
    I'm not sure it's "pretty clear"? See the entire thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20343007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20343007

ChrisSD 7y ago

> But Microsoft is unlikely to cave into the Windows 7 demands that FSF outlined in a petition launched last week There should be an award for understatement of the month. This petition[0] is more about making a point than any realistic expectation of open sourcing Windows 7. [0]: https://www.fsf.org/windows/upcycle-windows-7 https://www.fsf.org/windows/upcycle-windows-7

HoustonRefugee 7y ago
I am pretty sure the C-level at Microsoft is having quite the laugh at this petition.
- dis-sys 7y ago
  Laughing at the petition? That is already way better than calling it a cancer.
- mattl 7y ago
  I doubt they even know it exists

Santosh83 7y ago

Even if they wanted to, I doubt they could do so given all the third-party software they must have incorporated inside Windows. Perhaps it is possible to strip those out but still am sure MS doesn't want the entire world looking at their code, given that parts of the kernel of Windows 7 are probably functionally the same under Windows 10, so you'll essentially enable everyone to try and find bugs in the system without having to reverse engineer.

mirthandmadness 7y ago

An open-source version of the last good Windows, I'd like that.

acdha 7y ago
“Last good Windows” – just like XP, 2000, 98, and NT? Nothing makes people forget about all of the problems like not wanting to learn something new.
- flir 7y ago
  2000 was pretty good. NT with a nicer interface. I was on that far longer than is reasonable.

luma 7y ago

Win7 won't be open sourced for the same reason that makes nearly any large closed-source software project nearly impossible to re-license: it's packed full of licensed code and libraries that don't belong to MS.

bilekas 7y ago
This this this this. As nice as the idea is, it just wont happen.
bangboombang 7y ago
Exactly that. Bundled 3rd party software would probably be the easiest part to remove, but there is tons of supporting code, libraries and whatnot intermixed with core components that even if they wanted to, it would cost them a lot of resources to strip it clean of that stuff. But just imagining that happening... Would be super crazy.
neurobashing 7y ago
I wish I could find the source, but I once read that people at Apple considered opening up Classic, but there was so much 3rd party code a releasable blob would take a ton of engineering hours to scrub it all, and couldn't justify the cost.
mumblemumble 7y ago
And I've little doubt that the FSF knows this. The demand smells of performance art to me.
- TrickyRick 7y ago
  Of course it's a PR trick, anyone with even the slightest experience in software development can figure out that it's a lot of work to open-source a larger project. Also considering what's mentioned in the article, plenty of this code is probably still in use in later Windows versions which are still sold.
  - hobs 7y ago

bilekas 7y ago

I won't echo the statements from others about the headache in licencing it would be for Microsoft but I would like to point out : In the petition: > We want more proof that you really respect users and user freedom, and aren't just using those concepts as marketing when convenient. How do you even define that ? It really seems like this was just setup to inflame people about Microsoft again. Yeah windows 7 is end of life.. ~10 years.. I would consider that pretty reasonable. Demanding for the source in a petition ? That's quite unreasonable.

gmueckl 7y ago
This is a publicity stunt. Nobody in their right mind would expect that this would get any official reaction from MS, even if it's just a plain "no". I just don't get what the FSF has to gain from that. It rather makes them look petty in my eyes.
- PretzelFisch 7y ago
  They get a sound bite, with the hope of reminding anyone thinking of buying windows 10 that it is closed source and maybe should think about the ramifications.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
acdha 7y ago
We’re spending time talking about them, and they spent how much on that free PR? This is a great media hack since it costs almost nothing to request and while they know that it would be prohibitively expensive (and almost nobody would use it) they also know most people reading it won’t think about that so it’ll be easy to get some angry “greedy Microsoft won’t even open something they don’t need anymore” circulation.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

exabrial 7y ago

If if weren't for Excel, would there be any reason for businesses to stay on Windows? That seems to be the "killer app" for finance.

thrower123 7y ago
Decades of legacy LOB apps that only work on Windows. Also, ye gods, the number of intranet "web apps" that still require IE 8 and ActiveX controls.
scarface74 7y ago
The better question, is there any reason for them to leave Windows?
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
Active Directory, SMB, Outlook (and the other non-Excel parts of office), the ludicrous number of tiny proprietary applications that keep the world running, custom business applications with 3 decades of continuous development on them, etc. It is somewhat amazing to me how ignorant some people in this industry can be of why Windows is still used.
- exabrial 7y ago
  I'm one of them. I'm guessing it's just the era in which your business was setup. Maybe a modern day equiv: Right now there's no exit option for AWS unless you just happen to build an insulating layer with kubernetes and many other layers of indirection.
gamblor956 7y ago
Word is the killer app for most white collar businesses. Publisher is the killer app for many non-profits and community organizations. Many companies run on Access. Windows supports more hardware than either of its competitors, from the very cheap commodity crap to the crushingly expensive and proprietary. Hardware usually just works with Windows, and even if it doesn't, it's an automatic driver download away to get it working. It's also easier to use than Linux and it's cheaper to use and easier to administer than MacOS.

lousken 7y ago

Licencing issues aside, I don't think MS would do it just because they want to see old windows versions dead. They don't even care about W8.1 (e.g. lack of dx12) even though it's still supported.

zerr 7y ago

FoxPro as well :)

HoustonRefugee 7y ago
I think it would be more productive to do that and release the source for other out of date platforms like GW-BASIC and MS COBOL.

m-p-3 7y ago

The more realistic option is a production-ready ReactOS release before Microsoft open-sources their past OSes.

mehrdadn 7y ago

I like what the FSF sometimes does, but this is going to stick out in my mind like sore thumb as an example of how they make it hard to keep doing that... Edit: fixed typo

acidictadpole 7y ago
What does the EFF have to do with this? Are they related to the FSF somehow?

mangecoeur 7y ago

> "nothing to lose by liberating a version of their operating system" Ummm... except for all of the proprietary and valuable IP that is anyway shared by subsequent versions of Windows? It's not like they scrapped every bit of code when they started working on Win8, Win10 etc. Some bits of the control panel are pretty much unchanged since Windows NT!

sfgweilr4f 7y ago

To state the obvious: Windows 7 is the predecessor of Windows 10. So open-sourcing Windows 7 is effectively open-sourcing Windows 10. I'd be very surprised if Windows 10 had no code from Windows 7. I'd also be surprised if Microsoft actually owns all the code/assets in Windows. Licensing is a thing. Open-sourcing Windows 10 as a "current" product is requesting the source to everything Windows. That is a big ask. It would have to fit into a core strategic change for Microsoft. Microsoft has likely got plans of its own to embrace and absorb Linux. Why should I as a Big Corporate with full licenses be forced to maintain separate Linux machines? Why can't Enterprise natively run Linux binaries? WSL is part of the answer to those questions but I'm fairly sure Microsoft has bigger plans. Who says they won't simply pivot and make Windows run on their own flavor of Linux or a defined distribution? Sounds crazy but... stranger things have happened and licensing is a real money maker. The ability to lock people to Windows is still very lucrative however. For the foreseeable future they are much more likely to run Linux on Windows and keep their existing control. I seriously doubt Windows 7 will be open-sourced while Windows 10 remains closed-source.

sixothree 7y ago
Microsoft has made a point to re-develop closed-source projects in an open manner. The entire dotnet framework, multiple languages, WSL, even the terminal. I think a more appropriate ask would be to "please re-develop X technology in an open manner".
chooseaname 7y ago
> Who says they won't simply pivot and make Windows run on their own flavor of Linux or a defined distribution? Sounds crazy but... I don't think it sounds crazy at all. I've had the same feeling since WSL was released. And that feeling has gotten stronger since they showed of the Duo.
- ChrisSD 7y ago
  They could, but why? Microsoft already has a kernel. It works for them. If they did pivot to Linux, they'd still need to support NT for a long time to come. They'd also need to write a win32 layer for Linux (WINE, as it is, wouldn't be enough) as well as compatibility shims for Windows drivers, etc. And after they'd done all this work, while still supporting the NT kernel, what have they gained? Little that can't be done already. More likely is that they continue to port .NET and/or UWP so applications built with those technologies will be cross platform. This may eventually mean they no longer need Windows but could maintain a Microsoft branded Linux distro. But that wouldn't be "Windows" by any sensible definition of the term.

ComodoHacker 7y ago

Licensing and economic aspects aside, I think it would do more harm than good from security perspective. Malicious actors will start finding and exploiting 0-days at much faster pace than benevolent actors can (a) find them, (b) patch and (c) get patches applied to the userbase.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago

> We want more proof that you really respect users and user freedom, and aren't just using those concepts as marketing when convenient. Considering the state of telemetry and adware in Windows 10, not to mention the history of forcing updates and the recent burying of the ability to setup a non-live account, I'd have to say that only a fool would believe they respect users and user freedom.

richard_todd 7y ago

What they could more easily do, and what seems to fit with their strategy lately, is open source further portions of Windows 10. (MIT rather than GPL though, obviously) They are already way down the path (winUI, NET5, PowerShell, terminal, etc). I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see more of the bundled apps like Paint and Notepad show up on GitHub one day, for example. If they could get explorer.exe over to the open-source side, that would be huge. And I don’t think MS has anything to lose by doing that. It seems they’d mainly want to would protect the stuff that powers/differentiates Azure.

shmerl 7y ago

They can't open source all the backdoors and DRM in there.

trollied 7y ago

Licensing issues aside, it'd be very dangerous from a security perspective. 0-days would come thick & fast.

dehrmann 7y ago
And not just to Windows 7. Enough of Windows 10 runs the same code that it would be more vulnerable. That said, there's no reason to think state actors don't already have the Windows 10 source.

TeaDude 7y ago

I would have settled for XP. I love that clunky old thing but Win7 is the cooler faster son that was "just right" with the most new features (That you actually want) before a lot of the legacy stuff rotted off in windows 8. (Still technically there but showers you with errors if you attempt to use) Obviously this will never ever happen for corporate, licencing and government reasons but a man can dream...

dehrmann 7y ago

> The petition was aiming to gather at least 7,777 supporters and today has exceeded that by 1,000. Maybe those 8,000+ supporters should go contribute to ReactOS.

dehrmann 7y ago

> We urge you to respect the freedom and privacy of your users – not simply strong-arm them into the newest Windows version. The software is 10 years old, MS bends over backwards to maintain backwards compatibility, and they gave Windows 10 upgrades to Windows 7 users.

zamalek 7y ago
> they gave Windows 10 upgrades to Windows 7 users. And they still do, even though the upgrade period has official lapsed. I strongly doubt Microsoft will buckle to the type of these arguments being made by FSF. The list of demands read like they were written by a neurotic significant other. That being said... I really do hope Microsoft open sources Windows some day, but the problem is that the users that will enjoy the most freedom on day 1 would be black hats. Windows consists of MLOC that has never been publicly audited and it takes far longer to identify and install patches than it does to exploit a vulnerability. If a logical argument that addresses the risks, as well the benefits that Microsoft would see, I am sure that Microsoft would at least enter into dialog about this. Even though RMS (and by association FSF) are fundamentally correct, I have yet to see coherent and reasonable communication originating from them in the Microsoft and FOSS discussion.

mixmastamyk 7y ago

I'm not sure what good Win7 would be, now that it is EOL. But, I'd like to see them take the relevant parts to bolster ReactOS.

Koshkin 7y ago
> relevant Problem is, opensourcing Windows 7 under a permissive license might make ReactOS itself irrelevant.
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  Won’t happen as dozens of folks have already explained.

martin1975 7y ago

Personally, I would like to see MS do the inverse of what they did with Linux - move to Linux as their primary kernel and embed the NT kernel with hooks into Linux, either via hypervisor or directly if hypervisor doesn't give it the performance it needs for us to depart from NT kernel permanently. Not saying NT is bad... just that Linux has so much more momentum on the server, is well liked, popular and 'free'. Make NT an afterthought in Linux... not the other way around.

djsumdog 7y ago

This seems so useless. Why not petition instead for Microsoft to work on open sourcing the Titan HTML rendering engine? Microsoft spent years removing a lot of the NSCA Moasic stuff, and there is a good chance they own all of the Titan/Edge code. With their browser switching to Blink/Chromium, surely they could put in a few months of effort to try and make it publishable / open source. Opening sourcing their entire operating system is never going to happen and the petition is a useless publicity stunt to remind people that MS doesn't really care about open source. I wish the FSF had asked for something more useful/realistic instead.

mastrsushi 7y ago

The Free Software Community can't even maintain its own consumer operating system. How the hell could they actively maintain a behemoth like Windows 7?