Campaigns like these shake my confidence in the FSF as a serious organization because it shows how little they understand about large, private software projects

Campaigns like these shake my confidence in the FSF as a serious organization because it shows how little they understand about large, private software projects. Open sourcing large proprietary software products like this involves: - Licensing agreements with potentially thousands of third parties (Adobe, Apple, Xerox, IBM, SCO, Oracle to name a few) - Trade secrets (also thousands, involving third parties) - Distribution restrictions - Export controls Tracking down all involved parties is hard enough. Getting them all to agree is even harder, and more often than not is impossible. I suspect that even if all of the brass at Microsoft were keen on open sourcing Windows 7, it still couldn't be done.