3 ms·
It’s actually possible to get the source code to Microsoft. Seriously. You just have to be big enough and have a good enough reason. https://www.microsoft.com/
by colejohnson66 6y ago
It’s actually possible to get the source code to Microsoft. Seriously. You just have to be big enough and have a good enough reason.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/
- fsflover 6y agoThe source code is not the point. The point is the freedoms of FOSS.
- colejohnson66 6y agoMicrosoft can’t open source windows. Not that they don’t want to; they can’t. There’s too much of other companies proprietary stuff in it. Microsoft didn’t write all of Windows; they’ve licensed some stuff from other companies, and they almost certainly don’t have a right to release the source code for it all. Basically, Windows wasn’t written to be open source, so the effort involved to do so is insurmountable.
- jka 6y agoWould the atomic structure of the universe begin to unbind if someone at Microsoft started tagging and removing proprietary elements of the codebase and gained approval to push the remainder of it to GitHub? (my point is that "can't", "too much", and "insurmountable" are rarely words that make sense in the realm of software, especially given sufficient time -- and any missing interfaces can be removed and re-implemented; in fact it's likely that existing open source alternatives already exist for most of them)
- badsectoracula 6y agoThen it isn't open source. Nor any useful to me or most people, really.