I remember reading something like this somewhere. It goes along the following lines: The only good thing about MS Win. are the ubiquitous driver support and se

I remember reading something like this somewhere. It goes along the following lines: The only good thing about MS Win. are the ubiquitous driver support and secondly their programming API (since 90% of the desktop code + office + ... etc... depend on those APIs). However the rest (ie. the kernel, the gui, especially the kernel) suck. Therefore, the right thing to do is to trash the kernel and just use something else. It would be pretty easy for MS to write a compatibility layer for their drivers to say... the linux kernel (if we don't care about drivers, I would actually use FreeBSD as it is more stable and secure). Since, their compatibility layer does not include any major portion of the kernel and can be considered a separate module under the GPL (Nvidia and ATI do something like this already so it works), they can lock up the source to their pleasure and charge $150/license from us (and like $3/license from Dell et al.) and still make their nice cushy profits. Think ndiswrapper on steroids. You plug in the compat layer, point it to the Win32 drivers and magic: devices work. This works for MS. As shown, they still geto to make their cushy profits and get their lock in monopoly. If they do the same to their APIs on the app side, they can control the office market as well. It works for all those servers and stuff because they get to use the FreeBSD kernel with all the stability and server goodness that comes with it and it works for me because i take the compat layer, stick FreeBSD on top of it and happily go on bash-ing away this time with full driver support. Furthermore, the compat layer and API layers are relatively thin with (hopefully) none of the really complex stuff like VM management, file systems, and CPU schedulers so it should be much much easier for MS to push out good code (they could even cut down their development budget and make even more money). Happy faces all around.