9 ms·

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

• 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
      If its a PR trick, its one that makes the FSF look stupid to anyone in the know, and a zealot to the rest of humanity. It's not a good call.
      • mumblemumble 7y ago
        I don't know about stupid, but perhaps woefully out of touch. In 2020, they're still trying to fight fights from the 1990s, using tactics that haven't really worked since the 1990s.
        • squarefoot 7y ago
          Well, in 2020 people are more sensitive to privacy issues, malware and spyware are still much easier to hide in closed source software, and bugs are much easier to correct if one has the sources at hand, therefore I'd say the request would be even more legit today compared to the 90s. I however agree that's is not going to happen both because of the nightmare of relicensing 3rd party code, and because an OSS Win7 release with community updates and security patches (no telemetry) would probably displace a good number of Windows 10 installs in short time.
          • mumblemumble 7y ago
            Absolutely. But, even if you frame it that way, asking Microsoft to open source Windows 7 feels like trying to take a 2020 concern and approach it as if we were still back in 1999. If closed source software that talks to the Internet is an inherent privacy risk, let's maybe start by focusing on Google Chrome and Android, which have access to much bigger pots of honey than Windows itself does these days.
            • zozbot234 7y ago
              Both Google Chrome and Android have open source releases.
  • timdiggerm 7y ago
    That would be very-FSF of them.
  • benologist 7y ago
    How much software (and other IP) must we lose forever before open sourcing is seen as a reasonable demand?
    • sascha_sl 7y ago
      A demand is unreasonable if it is practically unfulfillable, ask for some libraries to improve wine/reactos, say it should've been really free software and move on. This just looks silly.
  • sascha_sl 7y ago
    should've just asked to open source a few core libraries for wine/reactos, but of course the FSF and famously RMS don't care about practical progress, only about being able to somehow (however inaccessible) use free software only and talk about how unethical everyone else is
• saiya-jin 7y ago
  Even if this hurdle would be somehow magically removed (which is unrealistic), M$ would never do that. Its still a perfectly fine OS, I would claim most Windows users don't need more, ever. Why would anybody go for Win 10? I can imagine patching would be picked up by new companies offering 'enterprise' services on top of it. Heck, if DX 12 with RTX would be implemented for it, I would never ever switched to Win 10. It is a more modern OS, but still feels unfinished, some basic settings navigation feels schizophrenic and just badly designed. It thinks it knows better than me what I want. It is overall a step back. Plus effin' ads & tracking. Any good karma M$ accrued while to paint themselves as 'we're better now' company was burned with Win 10. Same shitty greedy company.
  • jareds 7y ago
    Assuming there was an open source version of Windows 7 Microsoft would have to make Windows 10 much worse before I'd consider switching to it. WSL has bought me a lot of good will toward Microsoft. It probably helps that I'm blind so can't see any adds or crap ware installed on the start menu.
• zerr 7y ago
  Yes, that's the common excuse/reason. But, why MS can't negotiate the move with those 3rd parties? That would be a good PR for them as well.
  • acidictadpole 7y ago
    Because it turns from "Microsoft has nothing to lose by doing this" to "Microsoft is going to lose a bunch of money spending time negotiating with and paying third parties to be allowed to release their libraries with windows' source code". People's time isn't free.
    • luma 7y ago
      And that's presuming that the entities that held the original license still exist today. It's a morass that can be nearly impossible to dig your way out of after 10+ years.
      • Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0 7y ago
        It’s actually 35+ years, Windows 1.0 was released in 1985, and I don’t doubt that some (much) older DOS code still exists in one form or the other in their repo. The other problem is open sourcing the Windows code would be also involve open sourcing its crazy huge build system and tooling — it’s not a simple makefile — which is probably another level of impractical.
        • Someone1234 7y ago
          Likely true. They were able to get rid of a lot of Windows 1.0/Dos back-compat junk with the release of x64 (due to loss of native 16 bit support). I'm sure there's still some though.
          • tjalfi 7y ago
            Windows 10 32bit is still around and supports 16bit applications. My employer uses 32bit VDIs to run a few legacy applications.
• chooseaname 7y ago
  Not only that, but their current product (Windows 10) probably uses 80% of the same code. You can't get a manager to sign off on releasing current code as open source.
• tomphoolery 7y ago
  Also, probably a ton of unpatched vulnerabilities that nobody knows about, and still affect windows machines to this day.
  • tclancy 7y ago
    I think that's the idea.
• robbyt 7y ago
  This is the same reason why it took Sun years to open source Solaris. There was still major parts of the OS they didn't release source for, because it had licensed code. The Open Solaris initiative was rewriting these parts to make the OS completely open.
• zozbot234 7y ago
  Mozilla did it back in the day with their Netscape browser (now SeaMonkey). Sure, so much third-party code had to be stripped out that the code didn't even build to begin with, but those parts got rewritten and the problem was fixed. Blender also used to be a wholly closed-source product; it was opened up after the source code was "liberated" via a Kickstarter-like crowdfunding initiative - and it's now a successful FLOSS project. It can happen.
  • summerlight 7y ago
    The problem is its scale. Windows likely has ~100M lines of implementation, which needs to be fully audited in a legal way before open-sourcing. Maybe open-sourcing NT kernel is a more realistic and useful goal.
    • cycloptic 7y ago
      If there are any software companies on this planet that can afford to keep tabs on the legality of its own source code, I hope that Microsoft with their trillion-dollar market cap (and already very complex licensing situation) is one of them. It would be very sad for everyone in this whole industry if they weren't. It's honestly getting very tired to hear excuses about these F100 companies not being able to afford to do something. That isn't why they refuse to do it, and you know this.
      • acdha 7y ago
        Remember: it’s not whether their code is legal to use but to redistribute in a new way. If they have a contract their existing usage is covered without needing to go through line by line checking who wrote the portions which are still in use. One you add redistribution they have to go through and assess what needs to be renegotiated to add those terms. Given the age of the codebase I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s not even clear who owns the rights given how many small companies sold code libraries back in the 80s and 90s before disappearing or being multiply acquired. That’s a non-trivial amount of new work which only has to be done to release the code.
• cr0sh 7y ago
  That's pretty much also why they'll never open source VB6, despite a very large number of developers wanting it. Instead, Microsoft has been virtually forced to continue to include the VB runtime DLL in every version of Windows since, because there are so many businesses out there that rely on software developed in VB6 that can't (easily or cheaply) switch to something else. Windows 10, from what I understand, almost became the first version to ship without it, but Microsoft relented under the pressure (maybe I'm misinformed here, though). VB.NET is sufficiently different enough that conversion either isn't possible, or due to the source code not being available (or the 3rd-party company that wrote it not existing any longer as an entity - or the source code assets not available or whatnot due to dissolution) - conversion becomes nearly impossible, short of a very expensive reverse-engineering effort by another 3rd party.
• TimTheTinker 7y ago
  They could omit those parts. Sure, it wouldn’t even build, but this wouldn’t be a “product” anyway.
  • HeckFeck 7y ago
    Hypothetically, if this happened, I wonder how much the source of ReactOS could help fill in the blanks. Or at least give the new developers somewhere to start.
• CobrastanJorji 7y ago
  Also, from a legal liability standpoint, it's a near guarantee that SOME trivial quantity of open source code snuck in at some point in the last few decades. No matter how great your intentions are, somebody will have done it wrong, and the legal openings from "you used our copyrighted stuff to make Windows now pay us" is probably substantial.
• magnat 7y ago
  They did release Windows 2003 SP1 kernel source (named as "Windows Research Kernel") long time ago, along with re-licensing it for research use only. Not the whole OS and still not an open source, though.
• eikenberry 7y ago
  Having never worked on a large closed-source software project could you elaborate any on what libraries are used? What sort of functionality are they implementing with them? I've been in software development for 20+ years and I'm not sure if I could come up with one company that licenses out software libraries (adobe maybe?).
• unapologetic 7y ago
  This is true, but they could start open sourcing components. It's a hard problem but one MS has dealt with before.
• tenebrisalietum 7y ago
  Microsoft can open-source the parts that do belong to it and let the community replace the licensed code and libraries. If it's really in the business of selling cloudspace and not operating systems anymore, Microsoft shouldn't care.
  • aidenn0 7y ago
    How many 100s of thousands of dollars to go through and determine which code is licensed and which isn't?
    • tenebrisalietum 7y ago
      Zero. Microsoft should know this already.