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I suggest open sourcing Windows. Put it on GitHub with a permissive license and accept pull requests. The internet will blow up, you'll instantly win back all o
by Touche 13y ago
I suggest open sourcing Windows. Put it on GitHub with a permissive license and accept pull requests. The internet will blow up, you'll instantly win back all of the developer mindshare that has been lost over the years.
- machbio 13y agoThat would be the most awesome thing that could ever happen, when they can just keep offering the windows 8 for the customers in boxed but allowing developers to contribute to the project.. I cannot think of percentage of people who will be lost customers, it will not matter when everyone in another 10 years will have their own linux systems on cloud..
- abhipatti 13y agoWould it not be a major security problem .. Since so many people use windows and hackers would know loop more easily and attack
- andrewflnr 13y agoTo roughly the same extent as Linux and *BSD, yes.
- mjolk 13y agoLinux and BSD have the security advantage of having their ugliness shown to the world for decades. When you push a change that everyone can see, you don't have the option of hiding your ugliness behind a compiler.
- CmonDev 13y agoIs next decade finally going to be the decade of Linux?
- scholia 13y agoThe next decade will be the decade of Linux, and always will be ;-)
- chmullig 13y agoI think his next move will be to only accept payment in bitcoin.
- samstave 13y agoAnd an API!
- InclinedPlane 13y agoYou obviously have no concept of what the windows source looks like. Putting it on github would be a massive technical challenge alone.
- adamcanady 13y agoCan you explain?
- InclinedPlane 13y agoLet's just say that comparing Windows to the linux kernel would be a mistake. Hosting the windows source would be a challenge for any source control system out there. Git / github is not exactly optimized for projects of that size.
- yuhong 13y agoYea, look up "Source Depot"
- anologwintermut 13y agoNo. Don't. Please
- code_duck 13y agoSure, Windows is more than a kernel. I imagine the NT kernel vs the Linux kernel would be roughly comparable. But to compare 'Linux' the OS to Windows would mean Windows vs. GNU/Linux/X.org/Gnome/KDE... or say, the source for every package in the base Debian distribution.
- InclinedPlane 13y agoExactly. Now imagine that every part of it was just as bloated and convoluted as you'd imagine.
- herokusaki 13y agoIf Microsoft released the source code to Windows 98 OSR2, which is effectively abandonware as far as I understand, it would be great. A lot of multimedia applications and old games would instantly become easier to preserve. Is there still any value for Microsoft in Win9x?
- Touche 13y agoWhy not XP? The have no interest in supporting it. And millions of people still want to use it.
- jhh 13y agoBecause this would allow these millions of people to continue using this fork of XP rather than eventually buying a MS operating system.
- Touche 13y agoBut this is the attitude Microsoft needs to eliminate. The days of making money on operating systems is rapidly fading away. They already gave away Windows 8.1 as a free upgrade, so they're aware of it. An open source XP would get many hackers interested in Windows, something they desperately need.
- mjolk 13y agoCitation needed. They are definitely making money on closed-source operating systems and operating system tools: http://www.microsoft.com/investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Earnings/PressReleaseAndWebcast/FY12/Q2/default.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Earn...
- hifier 13y agoUmm, I don't buy Apple computers for their backlit keyboards...
- tripzilch 13y ago
- Mikeb85 13y agoI for one, would welcome a day where I can put install MS Office and VS on my Linux system without any hacks. I think Microsoft would do very well to go the IBM route, and a FOSS Windows would really shake up the market. Anyhow, the new MS CEO seems like a good guy, hopefully it's the beginning of a less evil, nicer Microsoft.
- anoncow 13y agoThis is an amazing idea. I am sure there is a way to charge for licenses for completely open source software. Will Satya do this? Can he do this?
- marcosdumay 13y agoMicrosoft won't be able to charge much for Windows anymore. They are already squeezing the price, and losing market share at the same time. Maybe open sourcing Windows will keep their other products at the positive for longer.
- cookiecaper 13y agoIt's pretty hard to do it with a conventional OSI certified license. Anyone can rebuild your product and resell it or give it away. Red Hat tried something similar but CentOS still existed. Microsoft could come up with their own license that was "open source" but not "free software" by Stallman's definitions (ignoring here the people who've attempted to make these terms synonymous), which would allow people to change code and distribute freely among license holders, but not allow people to resell or just give out copies of Windows. I'd actually be really excited about this, because I think the FSF is overboard with their demand that everyone essentially make their software unsellable. They could go the Red Hat route, go GPL, accept that they'll no longer get money for software licenses but instead support contracts (they could even try selling these to consumers; Dell would pay MS $50/PC not for a copy of Windows, but for a subscription to Windows Update). This would shift the dynamics of the company a bit, but probably not as much as one may think, since enterprise keeps MS afloat anyway, and it may be a good solution.