> Fundamentally, what advantage is Windows going to maintain with a closed source kernel? How many customers care that MS isn't using the Linux kernel? Not many

> Fundamentally, what advantage is Windows going to maintain with a closed source kernel? How many customers care that MS isn't using the Linux kernel? Not many. The bean counters are eventually going to start ask questions, like "why are we paying to maintain our own kernel when we could just use Linux?". Backwards compatibility is a big one, and arguably the key principle behind all of Windows' evolution. Yes, WINE, yes, apps all moving to the browser, but there's a long tail of applications that won't work as well under WINE as they do on modern Windows versions.