5 ms·

If that was true, I am pretty sure that the entire windows source would be all over the internet.

by xtanx 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
intern4tional 6y ago
Disclaimer: Am Microsoft. Windows source is open to most people at MS. MS is not joking when it says we practice an "inner source" policy, in that we do not rely on the security of our source code to secure our products.
- SteveNuts 6y ago
  My question then is why is windows not just open source entirely? Be like Red Hat where the OS is open but you pay for support, I don't know why that model wouldn't work for MS.
  - sbarre 6y ago
    Not OP (and not Microsoft), but I would say it's a complicated road to get there. I do believe we will see open source Windows in... the next decade? Anyone want to take a longbet with me? ;-)
    - ampdepolymerase 6y ago
      I am willing to add to the pool, I am also betting core components of Windows will be open sourced soon.
      - stragies 6y ago
        I'm betting more on "replaced". E.g. When they switched to Webkit, they didn't opensource Trident. How many people would notice, if the next version of windows used CUPS running on the WSL2 backend with a nice small GUI in Windows-Land? The very informative comments from @zinekeller and @ChrisSD highlight the problems with opensourcing mixed-vendor heterogeneous code bases. Also open-sourcing code rarely means it becomes "maintenance-free".
        sbarre 6y ago
        I think you're right in that the road to MS open-sourcing Windows will be slowly starting to adopt other existing subsystems (and hopefully giving back) so that they are managing less and less proprietary code over time.
        zinekeller 6y ago
        Psst! They technically released the ECMAScript/JScript (definitely not JavaScript®)* interpreter, Chakra (https://github.com/chakra-core/ChakraCore https://github.com/chakra-core/ChakraCore). * Trademark notice: JavaScript® is a registered trademark of Oracle America Inc.
        saagarjha 6y ago
        WebKit? Edge is using Blink, unless I’m misunderstanding?
        stragies 6y ago
        Blink is the name they gave the fork of the webkit core.
        Wowfunhappy 6y ago
        The fork was years ago at this point. Blink and Webkit certainly share a lot of code, but I think it's inappropriate to completely lump them together.
    - stragies 6y ago
      Component by component, it would look like. And it makes sense to replace components with tried and tested open-source solutions to reduce internal maintenance burden for components with low visibility/profitability. When was the last you heard somebody say: "I bought windows (server) because of the print subsystem"? I could see them adopting CUPS, for example. That way in 10 years they can stop maintaining theirs when current versions EOL. But for "intimate areas" that may take time, or may never happen. Or they move into the hardware. So I remain skeptical wrt a 100% auditable (modern) tech-stack. In the case of the browser-engine I wish though, that they had not picked webkit. What were the reasons against Gecko? Not "embedable" enough?
      - easton 6y ago
        In fact, I think most companies buy Windows Server in spite of the printing subsystem. I still wake up at night mumbling “net stop spooler; net start spooler”
      - jodrellblank 6y ago
        Windows' print subsystem was one of the ways it became so dominant, by having a standard hardware abstraction layer desktop software like word processors and spreadsheets could advertise "compatible with Windows printing" and buyers wouldn't have to shop around for software and printer models which were compatible with each other, and developers wouldn't have to . Jeffrey Snover talked about this as part of his design for PowerShell, to have a standardised management interface that admins could learn for scripting and automation, and third parties could present an interface to for managing their products and services. The print subsystem is one of the backwards compatibility limits on redesigning parts of the classic control panel - I'm fairly sure Raymond Chen has written about it - because so many print drivers depend on the way it works to hack in pages and popup dialogs for specialist configurations for their printers. It also integrates decently with Windows' granular permissions, file and printer sharing on networks, logging, has tons of specialist printers like label printers, receipt printers, etc and is used by a ton of 3rd party management and configuration tools. I would be hugely surprised if it's unsupported in 2031. > "*"I bought windows (server) because of the print subsystem"?" When was the last you heard somebody say: "I would buy Windows server, if it had CUPS printing support in it"?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - stragies 6y ago
    You'd then have forks pretending to be "secure" wrt things like Protected-Video-Output-Path, widevine etc. Sort of like Magisk for Windows. Disney, Netflix and many others don't really like that. And you'd have versions with configurable update servers. And LE probably really enjoys the fact, that they can ask "Hey, next time SubjectX downloads daily defender updates, please add-in the Remote-Adminstration-Toolkit" for any of a billion computers. I'm expecting MS to get a big list soon with maybe several dozen million new "people of interest" that need tracking.
  - ChrisSD 6y ago
    Windows includes code from a lot of different companies and places. Sorting out all the licenses would be a major headache (especially as code is refactored/edited) let alone getting agreements from everyone for a new license.
  - ROARosen 6y ago
    Not taking sides here, but I don't get the comparison. RHEL is based on the oss Linux kernel, whereas microsoft is closed from the bottom up. That being said Microsoft is slowly "getting" open source. We'll see how far their gut will let them take it.
  - ultrasaurus 6y ago
    OSSing a major decades old codebase is a huge undertaking and it's hard to see how it would drive additional Windows or even MSFT revenue at this point. They do share source code if you're big enough that the revenue matters to them: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/
  - zinekeller 6y ago
    One of the most challenging things Microsoft has faced when open-sourcing projects is the auditing stage. Windows is huge. Lots of code in Windows are not written by Microsoft or even by third-parties contracted by Microsoft. Some parts of Win32 code (that is backwards-compatible sensitive) are owned by third parties that are already long gone or absorbed by other third parties. This is the reason Microsoft cannot even release a binary version of Space Cadet Pinball even when they want to because it is now owned by EA (Surprise! Also see https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20181221-00/?p=100535 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20181221-00/?p=10...) and the same reason why they have removed the pre-2007 equation editor on their Office suite (https://support.microsoft.com/office/equation-editor-6eac7d71-3c74-437b-80d3-c7dea24fdf3f https://support.microsoft.com/office/equation-editor-6eac7d7...). At one of its previous audits (for IE 7), they have to check if it was Spyglass code and replace the offending code which allows them to terminate their contract with (at the time) AOL. Windows has many of these components, and they are even attributed when you know where to look. For example, the code for parts of the disk management utility, the spinning-disk defragmenter, and NTFS quota management were based from code provided by VERITAS Systems (which I am not even sure if the company still exists). The MP3 codec is provided by Fraunhofer (which still exists, but I'm sure that they will not agree to open-sourcing that codec). On the other hand, some of them are under permissive licenses or even the same code as other counterparts (while the BSD TCP/IP stack story ranges from code removed by Windows 2000 to simply an apocryphal tale) for example, the code by IJG for JPEG support is used extensively in Windows. The only built-in (L)GPL code used ever was the BRLTTY system (https://mielke.cc/brltty/index.html https://mielke.cc/brltty/index.html) and LibLouis (http://liblouis.org/ http://liblouis.org/), which was used for Braille accessibility (WSL2 used the Linux kernel, but they are arguably a different application with separate instances). Edit: Microsoft's third-party disclosures: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/products/notices/win https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/products/notices/win
    - fartcannon 6y ago
      Strong case against using proprietary software in your code base, isn't it. What a mess.
      - 6y ago
  - dralley 6y ago
    Microsoft does do that already. They do both, so dropping the licensing revenue would strictly be a decrease in revenue. Offering support contracts for open source code is an extremely difficult business model. It happens to be one of the few that actually can work, but the margins are just not great compared to the proprietary software industry. 90% of the kinds of customers who really "should" be paying you simply won't do so if they think they can scrape by without doing so.
rot25 6y ago
It is true for most engineers here. Most of us don't want to go to prison though. Most tech companies are the same way.
- cheeze 6y ago
  Buddy said the same is true at Amazon. There are some locked down repos but a vast majority of everything is open for any engineer to see. Leaks are possible, no doubt. But yeah, prison.
msftfte666 6y ago
it is true
ryanlol 6y ago
It is all over the internet lol. Windows source has always been frequently traded.
tinus_hn 6y ago
Different versions have in fact leaked, most recently of Windows XP/server 2003.
- userbinator 6y ago
  Oddly enough, all the Windows leaks I've heard of are various versions of the NT series --- I don't think I've ever heard of Win9x (and 3.x) leaks. There's some very old DOS leaks too, but the "in between" seems to have somehow been avoided.

If that was true, I am pretty sure that the entire windows source would be all over the internet.

by xtanx 6y ago

If that was true, I am pretty sure that the entire windows source would be all over the internet.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

intern4tional 6y ago

Disclaimer: Am Microsoft. Windows source is open to most people at MS. MS is not joking when it says we practice an "inner source" policy, in that we do not rely on the security of our source code to secure our products.

SteveNuts 6y ago
My question then is why is windows not just open source entirely? Be like Red Hat where the OS is open but you pay for support, I don't know why that model wouldn't work for MS.
- sbarre 6y ago
  Not OP (and not Microsoft), but I would say it's a complicated road to get there. I do believe we will see open source Windows in... the next decade? Anyone want to take a longbet with me? ;-)
  - ampdepolymerase 6y ago
    I am willing to add to the pool, I am also betting core components of Windows will be open sourced soon.
    - stragies 6y ago
      I'm betting more on "replaced". E.g. When they switched to Webkit, they didn't opensource Trident. How many people would notice, if the next version of windows used CUPS running on the WSL2 backend with a nice small GUI in Windows-Land? The very informative comments from @zinekeller and @ChrisSD highlight the problems with opensourcing mixed-vendor heterogeneous code bases. Also open-sourcing code rarely means it becomes "maintenance-free".
      - sbarre 6y ago
        I think you're right in that the road to MS open-sourcing Windows will be slowly starting to adopt other existing subsystems (and hopefully giving back) so that they are managing less and less proprietary code over time.
      - zinekeller 6y ago
        Psst! They technically released the ECMAScript/JScript (definitely not JavaScript®)* interpreter, Chakra (https://github.com/chakra-core/ChakraCore https://github.com/chakra-core/ChakraCore). * Trademark notice: JavaScript® is a registered trademark of Oracle America Inc.
      - saagarjha 6y ago
        WebKit? Edge is using Blink, unless I’m misunderstanding?
        stragies 6y ago
        Blink is the name they gave the fork of the webkit core.
        Wowfunhappy 6y ago
        The fork was years ago at this point. Blink and Webkit certainly share a lot of code, but I think it's inappropriate to completely lump them together.
  - stragies 6y ago
    Component by component, it would look like. And it makes sense to replace components with tried and tested open-source solutions to reduce internal maintenance burden for components with low visibility/profitability. When was the last you heard somebody say: "I bought windows (server) because of the print subsystem"? I could see them adopting CUPS, for example. That way in 10 years they can stop maintaining theirs when current versions EOL. But for "intimate areas" that may take time, or may never happen. Or they move into the hardware. So I remain skeptical wrt a 100% auditable (modern) tech-stack. In the case of the browser-engine I wish though, that they had not picked webkit. What were the reasons against Gecko? Not "embedable" enough?
    - easton 6y ago
      In fact, I think most companies buy Windows Server in spite of the printing subsystem. I still wake up at night mumbling “net stop spooler; net start spooler”
    - jodrellblank 6y ago
      Windows' print subsystem was one of the ways it became so dominant, by having a standard hardware abstraction layer desktop software like word processors and spreadsheets could advertise "compatible with Windows printing" and buyers wouldn't have to shop around for software and printer models which were compatible with each other, and developers wouldn't have to . Jeffrey Snover talked about this as part of his design for PowerShell, to have a standardised management interface that admins could learn for scripting and automation, and third parties could present an interface to for managing their products and services. The print subsystem is one of the backwards compatibility limits on redesigning parts of the classic control panel - I'm fairly sure Raymond Chen has written about it - because so many print drivers depend on the way it works to hack in pages and popup dialogs for specialist configurations for their printers. It also integrates decently with Windows' granular permissions, file and printer sharing on networks, logging, has tons of specialist printers like label printers, receipt printers, etc and is used by a ton of 3rd party management and configuration tools. I would be hugely surprised if it's unsupported in 2031. > "*"I bought windows (server) because of the print subsystem"?" When was the last you heard somebody say: "I would buy Windows server, if it had CUPS printing support in it"?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- stragies 6y ago
  You'd then have forks pretending to be "secure" wrt things like Protected-Video-Output-Path, widevine etc. Sort of like Magisk for Windows. Disney, Netflix and many others don't really like that. And you'd have versions with configurable update servers. And LE probably really enjoys the fact, that they can ask "Hey, next time SubjectX downloads daily defender updates, please add-in the Remote-Adminstration-Toolkit" for any of a billion computers. I'm expecting MS to get a big list soon with maybe several dozen million new "people of interest" that need tracking.
- ChrisSD 6y ago
  Windows includes code from a lot of different companies and places. Sorting out all the licenses would be a major headache (especially as code is refactored/edited) let alone getting agreements from everyone for a new license.
- ROARosen 6y ago
  Not taking sides here, but I don't get the comparison. RHEL is based on the oss Linux kernel, whereas microsoft is closed from the bottom up. That being said Microsoft is slowly "getting" open source. We'll see how far their gut will let them take it.
- ultrasaurus 6y ago
  OSSing a major decades old codebase is a huge undertaking and it's hard to see how it would drive additional Windows or even MSFT revenue at this point. They do share source code if you're big enough that the revenue matters to them: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/
- zinekeller 6y ago
  One of the most challenging things Microsoft has faced when open-sourcing projects is the auditing stage. Windows is huge. Lots of code in Windows are not written by Microsoft or even by third-parties contracted by Microsoft. Some parts of Win32 code (that is backwards-compatible sensitive) are owned by third parties that are already long gone or absorbed by other third parties. This is the reason Microsoft cannot even release a binary version of Space Cadet Pinball even when they want to because it is now owned by EA (Surprise! Also see https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20181221-00/?p=100535 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20181221-00/?p=10...) and the same reason why they have removed the pre-2007 equation editor on their Office suite (https://support.microsoft.com/office/equation-editor-6eac7d71-3c74-437b-80d3-c7dea24fdf3f https://support.microsoft.com/office/equation-editor-6eac7d7...). At one of its previous audits (for IE 7), they have to check if it was Spyglass code and replace the offending code which allows them to terminate their contract with (at the time) AOL. Windows has many of these components, and they are even attributed when you know where to look. For example, the code for parts of the disk management utility, the spinning-disk defragmenter, and NTFS quota management were based from code provided by VERITAS Systems (which I am not even sure if the company still exists). The MP3 codec is provided by Fraunhofer (which still exists, but I'm sure that they will not agree to open-sourcing that codec). On the other hand, some of them are under permissive licenses or even the same code as other counterparts (while the BSD TCP/IP stack story ranges from code removed by Windows 2000 to simply an apocryphal tale) for example, the code by IJG for JPEG support is used extensively in Windows. The only built-in (L)GPL code used ever was the BRLTTY system (https://mielke.cc/brltty/index.html https://mielke.cc/brltty/index.html) and LibLouis (http://liblouis.org/ http://liblouis.org/), which was used for Braille accessibility (WSL2 used the Linux kernel, but they are arguably a different application with separate instances). Edit: Microsoft's third-party disclosures: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/products/notices/win https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/products/notices/win
  - fartcannon 6y ago
    Strong case against using proprietary software in your code base, isn't it. What a mess.
    - 6y ago
- dralley 6y ago
  Microsoft does do that already. They do both, so dropping the licensing revenue would strictly be a decrease in revenue. Offering support contracts for open source code is an extremely difficult business model. It happens to be one of the few that actually can work, but the margins are just not great compared to the proprietary software industry. 90% of the kinds of customers who really "should" be paying you simply won't do so if they think they can scrape by without doing so.

rot25 6y ago

It is true for most engineers here. Most of us don't want to go to prison though. Most tech companies are the same way.

cheeze 6y ago
Buddy said the same is true at Amazon. There are some locked down repos but a vast majority of everything is open for any engineer to see. Leaks are possible, no doubt. But yeah, prison.

msftfte666 6y ago

it is true

ryanlol 6y ago

It is all over the internet lol. Windows source has always been frequently traded.

tinus_hn 6y ago

Different versions have in fact leaked, most recently of Windows XP/server 2003.

userbinator 6y ago
Oddly enough, all the Windows leaks I've heard of are various versions of the NT series --- I don't think I've ever heard of Win9x (and 3.x) leaks. There's some very old DOS leaks too, but the "in between" seems to have somehow been avoided.