8 ms·

I don't see why everything needs to be open source. People who simply don't like Microsoft will not use it just because it's open. Quite the opposite I think -

I don't see why everything needs to be open source. People who simply don't like Microsoft will not use it just because it's open. Quite the opposite I think - they'd probably immediately fork it and provide an alternate download in order to hurt Microsoft. Are foreign governments a big market that Microsoft has lost a lot of customers from? I don't think so. The vast majority of the potential market for Windows is already running Windows, so I don't see what they'd really have to gain. The small but loud minority of open-source zealots won't be happy until every single Microsoft product is open.

mahyarm 12y ago
When your debugging code, being able to see all of the code in the stack trace is valuable alone.
- brudgers 12y ago
  Good debugging tools that filter out the irrelevant are perhaps better. Odds are that any time you break out the debugger the fix is in your code not Windows, Linux, the JVM etc. That's not to say those things don't have bugs, only that they are orders if magnitude more debugged than most code under development.
  - scrollaway 12y ago
    You are so completely wrong. Follow the Wine project for a few weeks/months to get familiar with just how buggy, inconsistent and inconceivably obscure all of Windows' APIs are. If Windows was good and near-bug-free, Wine would have long been completed. Windows is not just its kernel.
    - RubyPinch 12y ago
      well, it is near-bug-free, in that most of the bugs get permanently folded into the api and become features for backwards compatibility
    - brudgers 12y ago
      Wine has to duplicate all of the duct tape and bailing wire Microsoft has used to provide backwards compatibility for their customers' existing applications. Just as Wine is an important kludge serving as a compatibility layer [It's Not an Emulator], all those undocumented API's are the same sort of kludge as compatibility layer. And of course Wine is an outlier. Not only in that it contains its own 20 years of legacy code but in the fact that it is black box reverse engineering. It can't use disassembly to suss out details. Wine's difficulties stem from its requirements as much as anything else. These days VM's are the way to go if the going is intended to get things done. A Windows box in the cloud is pennies per hour.
      - otakucode 12y ago
        So far as I am aware, ALL usable operating systems are burdened with that sort of thing. I'd really like to see someone at least attempt a clean-slate OS. Make it 64-bit only from the start, vector fonts to support HighDPI displays from the beginning, etc. It would likely accumulate such cruft over time, but I would expect there to be substantial advantages to building from scratch something that rolls in all of the research advances and assumes capable modern hardware.
  - lawl 12y ago
    I worked with a closed source stack in the past (java). Even if the bug wasn't in our code, it was really helpful to see what's going on inside, helped us figure out why something didn't work a lot of time. Making false assumptions, passing stuff in a different format than the system expects etc. We all, always worked with a decompiler in eclipse, just because it really did make life so much easier sometimes. And well, of course, sometimes there really was a bug in the stack, and finding a workaround is much easier when you know what's going on.
- jussij 12y ago
  For .Net developers that has been possible for many years now. Here's a link from 2008 that shows how it works: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sburke/archive/2008/01/16/configuring-visual-studio-to-debug-net-framework-source-code.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sburke/archive/2008/01/16/configurin...
- rplnt 12y ago
  Doesn't VS come with like 6GB of symbols? So you get a nice stack trace wherever in Windows libraries you crash.
  - mahyarm 12y ago
    Symbols that just give you function names are very different from function names and the source inside them!
xamolxix 12y ago
> they'd probably immediately fork it and provide an alternate download in order to hurt Microsoft They would fork it, but that is not why.
derefr 12y ago
The first and biggest effect (presuming a GPL-compatible license) is that Wine would suddenly work much better, and so Ubuntu and OSX would likely ship their following versions with "the ability to run Windows software alongside native software with no performance loss" as a feature. OSX N+3 or so might even eliminate Boot Camp, saying that there's no need to install Windows as a whole if all the software "Just Works."
- chinpokomon 12y ago
  Then why would anyone build native applications when Windows apps would be WORA? The only incentive I see for Apple is that they are in many ways a hardware company first. They want to sell hardware and this is one reason they haven't feared bootcanp. Years ago I saw a demo of a Windows subsystem running an ELF Apache server directly on Windows NT. It isn't anything that Microsoft would release though, because once you make it so Windows can run Linux applications, who is going to write Windows apps? It erodes the platform. I see an official WINE for OSX, that has a perfectly working subsystem, introducing the same problems to that ecosystem.
  - redacted 12y ago
    I dunno about Linux, but OS X has resisted cross-platform applications to a ludicrous degree. It's a good thing in my opinion, moving to Windows recently really highlighted the quality (in design and general OS fit) that indie OS X apps achieve.
logn 12y ago
How would that hurt Microsoft? There aren't many people who have bought MS software for years and are now excited to use a fork or their own build. Even assuming that some other mega corp comes along and offers world class support/service and their own fork, it still probably wouldn't hurt MS much. Most small companies would have released their code as GPL (versus MIT as the case here) to limit the risk of a fork fragmenting everything (not being able to merge forks back in or make everything compatible). But in Microsoft's case, because of their size, few companies could hope to make a better version than MS. Further, MS makes money in lots of ways and this isn't a zero-sum game for them. They'll profit immensely from a more open ecosystem. Companies such as IBM, Apple, Google, and Oracle already have proven it's possible to be profitable with open source.
- yellowapple 12y ago
  > Oracle Er, no. The entirety of Oracle's dabbling in "open source" has been by shaking free software products out of the rotting carcass of Sun Microsystems and - in many cases - adding those products to the grave (see also: OpenSolaris, OpenOffice, various others). The exceptions - namely MySQL (which wasn't a Sun product) and Java (which is still doing reasonably well) - are few and far between. Oracle Linux certainly exists, but I'm certainly not about to hold that monstrosity on any sort of pedestal. As for the others, yeah, they're making money on FOSS (and not killing said FOSS in the process), though such free software tends to be integrated in very much proprietary end results (like OS X / iOS and the vast majority of Android distributions).
  - rdtsc 12y ago
    > Oracle Linux certainly exists, It is funny. At some point Redhat said "screw those guys" and started obfuscating its patches to the kernel (Oracle Linux was based on RHEL's code which was open source) to make it harder for Oracle to apply and create the (what was seen as) a competing Enterprise Linux Distro.
  - zanny 12y ago
    MySQL got worked into MariaDB. Don't think many people are recommending you use the Oracle version much anymore. And Oracle Java has also died on every platform that is not Windows. OpenJDK took over the Unix space, and Google has Dalvik and the ART implementing the JRE. Virtualbox still exists. I guess. It has not done anything in about half a decade, though.
jsprogrammer 12y ago
>I don't see why everything needs to be open source. I think this goes back to one of the core tenets of free and/or open source software: the user should be able to know, control, and modify exactly what their machine is doing. If the source is not available you're just running a black box and praying that it will do what the person who gave it to you claims it will do.
- jussij 12y ago
  I suspect for the average Windows user they don't care what their machine is doing. They just want it to work. That black box model has been with Windows from day one and it hasn't stopped Windows owning 90% of the PC market.
  - zanny 12y ago
    Wanting your machine to work is also caring what your machine is doing. I'm sure the IRS is kicking themselves for running XP for over a decade, building up such an extreme dependency on it that they are now paying huge sums of money for Microsoft to continue to support them. The black box is only great so long as it actually works, and when it breaks you are completely screwed. It is in Microsofts business interests to make sure it works, but they also want you paying them money while maintaining control of your computer. But when it does break, your only option is the true owner of your computer, who will milk you for all you are worth, because you are now trapped. You don't know you are in a cage until you want out.
    - jussij 12y ago
      My mum and dad both uses their computers on a daily basis and yes on occasions things don't always work as expected. When that happens they ask me to fix it and if it wasn't me, then yes they would take it to a computer technician. Just like they take their car to the mechanic. Guess what. Not everyone is or wants to be a computer programmer and that group makes up the majority of all Windows users. And why Windows has been so successful is you can get away with knowing very little about computers (like my mum and dad) yet still find Windows easy to use.
yellowapple 12y ago
> People who simply don't like Microsoft will not use it just because it's open. You're forgetting that a lot of people traditionally haven't liked Microsoft because their software wasn't/isn't open. Yeah, Windows would still be a steaming pile of bovine manure regardless of which license it was made available under, but the availability of that source code would make it easy for better, Unix-like operating systems to pick up the necessary pieces to support Windows software, thus continuing to allow Microsoft to profit on their non-operating-system software (Office, SQL Server, Exchange, IIS, Internet Explorer^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HSpartan, etc.) regardless of whether or not Windows itself is widespread in usage.

mahyarm 12y ago

When your debugging code, being able to see all of the code in the stack trace is valuable alone.

brudgers 12y ago
Good debugging tools that filter out the irrelevant are perhaps better. Odds are that any time you break out the debugger the fix is in your code not Windows, Linux, the JVM etc. That's not to say those things don't have bugs, only that they are orders if magnitude more debugged than most code under development.
- scrollaway 12y ago
  You are so completely wrong. Follow the Wine project for a few weeks/months to get familiar with just how buggy, inconsistent and inconceivably obscure all of Windows' APIs are. If Windows was good and near-bug-free, Wine would have long been completed. Windows is not just its kernel.
  - RubyPinch 12y ago
    well, it is near-bug-free, in that most of the bugs get permanently folded into the api and become features for backwards compatibility
  - brudgers 12y ago
    Wine has to duplicate all of the duct tape and bailing wire Microsoft has used to provide backwards compatibility for their customers' existing applications. Just as Wine is an important kludge serving as a compatibility layer [It's Not an Emulator], all those undocumented API's are the same sort of kludge as compatibility layer. And of course Wine is an outlier. Not only in that it contains its own 20 years of legacy code but in the fact that it is black box reverse engineering. It can't use disassembly to suss out details. Wine's difficulties stem from its requirements as much as anything else. These days VM's are the way to go if the going is intended to get things done. A Windows box in the cloud is pennies per hour.
    - otakucode 12y ago
      So far as I am aware, ALL usable operating systems are burdened with that sort of thing. I'd really like to see someone at least attempt a clean-slate OS. Make it 64-bit only from the start, vector fonts to support HighDPI displays from the beginning, etc. It would likely accumulate such cruft over time, but I would expect there to be substantial advantages to building from scratch something that rolls in all of the research advances and assumes capable modern hardware.
- lawl 12y ago
  I worked with a closed source stack in the past (java). Even if the bug wasn't in our code, it was really helpful to see what's going on inside, helped us figure out why something didn't work a lot of time. Making false assumptions, passing stuff in a different format than the system expects etc. We all, always worked with a decompiler in eclipse, just because it really did make life so much easier sometimes. And well, of course, sometimes there really was a bug in the stack, and finding a workaround is much easier when you know what's going on.
jussij 12y ago
For .Net developers that has been possible for many years now. Here's a link from 2008 that shows how it works: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sburke/archive/2008/01/16/configuring-visual-studio-to-debug-net-framework-source-code.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sburke/archive/2008/01/16/configurin...
rplnt 12y ago
Doesn't VS come with like 6GB of symbols? So you get a nice stack trace wherever in Windows libraries you crash.
- mahyarm 12y ago
  Symbols that just give you function names are very different from function names and the source inside them!

xamolxix 12y ago

> they'd probably immediately fork it and provide an alternate download in order to hurt Microsoft They would fork it, but that is not why.

derefr 12y ago

The first and biggest effect (presuming a GPL-compatible license) is that Wine would suddenly work much better, and so Ubuntu and OSX would likely ship their following versions with "the ability to run Windows software alongside native software with no performance loss" as a feature. OSX N+3 or so might even eliminate Boot Camp, saying that there's no need to install Windows as a whole if all the software "Just Works."

chinpokomon 12y ago
Then why would anyone build native applications when Windows apps would be WORA? The only incentive I see for Apple is that they are in many ways a hardware company first. They want to sell hardware and this is one reason they haven't feared bootcanp. Years ago I saw a demo of a Windows subsystem running an ELF Apache server directly on Windows NT. It isn't anything that Microsoft would release though, because once you make it so Windows can run Linux applications, who is going to write Windows apps? It erodes the platform. I see an official WINE for OSX, that has a perfectly working subsystem, introducing the same problems to that ecosystem.
- redacted 12y ago
  I dunno about Linux, but OS X has resisted cross-platform applications to a ludicrous degree. It's a good thing in my opinion, moving to Windows recently really highlighted the quality (in design and general OS fit) that indie OS X apps achieve.

logn 12y ago

How would that hurt Microsoft? There aren't many people who have bought MS software for years and are now excited to use a fork or their own build. Even assuming that some other mega corp comes along and offers world class support/service and their own fork, it still probably wouldn't hurt MS much. Most small companies would have released their code as GPL (versus MIT as the case here) to limit the risk of a fork fragmenting everything (not being able to merge forks back in or make everything compatible). But in Microsoft's case, because of their size, few companies could hope to make a better version than MS. Further, MS makes money in lots of ways and this isn't a zero-sum game for them. They'll profit immensely from a more open ecosystem. Companies such as IBM, Apple, Google, and Oracle already have proven it's possible to be profitable with open source.

yellowapple 12y ago
> Oracle Er, no. The entirety of Oracle's dabbling in "open source" has been by shaking free software products out of the rotting carcass of Sun Microsystems and - in many cases - adding those products to the grave (see also: OpenSolaris, OpenOffice, various others). The exceptions - namely MySQL (which wasn't a Sun product) and Java (which is still doing reasonably well) - are few and far between. Oracle Linux certainly exists, but I'm certainly not about to hold that monstrosity on any sort of pedestal. As for the others, yeah, they're making money on FOSS (and not killing said FOSS in the process), though such free software tends to be integrated in very much proprietary end results (like OS X / iOS and the vast majority of Android distributions).
- rdtsc 12y ago
  > Oracle Linux certainly exists, It is funny. At some point Redhat said "screw those guys" and started obfuscating its patches to the kernel (Oracle Linux was based on RHEL's code which was open source) to make it harder for Oracle to apply and create the (what was seen as) a competing Enterprise Linux Distro.
- zanny 12y ago
  MySQL got worked into MariaDB. Don't think many people are recommending you use the Oracle version much anymore. And Oracle Java has also died on every platform that is not Windows. OpenJDK took over the Unix space, and Google has Dalvik and the ART implementing the JRE. Virtualbox still exists. I guess. It has not done anything in about half a decade, though.

jsprogrammer 12y ago

>I don't see why everything needs to be open source. I think this goes back to one of the core tenets of free and/or open source software: the user should be able to know, control, and modify exactly what their machine is doing. If the source is not available you're just running a black box and praying that it will do what the person who gave it to you claims it will do.

jussij 12y ago
I suspect for the average Windows user they don't care what their machine is doing. They just want it to work. That black box model has been with Windows from day one and it hasn't stopped Windows owning 90% of the PC market.
- zanny 12y ago
  Wanting your machine to work is also caring what your machine is doing. I'm sure the IRS is kicking themselves for running XP for over a decade, building up such an extreme dependency on it that they are now paying huge sums of money for Microsoft to continue to support them. The black box is only great so long as it actually works, and when it breaks you are completely screwed. It is in Microsofts business interests to make sure it works, but they also want you paying them money while maintaining control of your computer. But when it does break, your only option is the true owner of your computer, who will milk you for all you are worth, because you are now trapped. You don't know you are in a cage until you want out.
  - jussij 12y ago
    My mum and dad both uses their computers on a daily basis and yes on occasions things don't always work as expected. When that happens they ask me to fix it and if it wasn't me, then yes they would take it to a computer technician. Just like they take their car to the mechanic. Guess what. Not everyone is or wants to be a computer programmer and that group makes up the majority of all Windows users. And why Windows has been so successful is you can get away with knowing very little about computers (like my mum and dad) yet still find Windows easy to use.

yellowapple 12y ago

> People who simply don't like Microsoft will not use it just because it's open. You're forgetting that a lot of people traditionally haven't liked Microsoft because their software wasn't/isn't open. Yeah, Windows would still be a steaming pile of bovine manure regardless of which license it was made available under, but the availability of that source code would make it easy for better, Unix-like operating systems to pick up the necessary pieces to support Windows software, thus continuing to allow Microsoft to profit on their non-operating-system software (Office, SQL Server, Exchange, IIS, Internet Explorer^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HSpartan, etc.) regardless of whether or not Windows itself is widespread in usage.