4 ms·

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 w

by 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
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by 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]