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One of the reasons why OS/2 wasn't open-sourced is that it contained several 3rd party libraries whose license wouldn't permit IBM to release their source, and
by chiph 12y ago
One of the reasons why OS/2 wasn't open-sourced is that it contained several 3rd party libraries whose license wouldn't permit IBM to release their source, and IBM didn't want to go to the trouble of getting releases from them.
I wonder if there's an issue like this that would preclude Microsoft from releasing the source for Windows.
- cesarb 12y agoThey could always do a "partial open source", where DLLs with license problems are kept closed-source. There's precedent for that; I recall a successful open sourcing of an old game engine where the third-party audio library it used couldn't be released. In fact, I could argue they are already slowly going a "partial open source" route, with their gradual open sourcing of parts of the dotnet runtime.
- jebblue 12y agoExactly, pieces that would be too difficult for them to Open Source I think communities would gather to build those out to form a complete Open Source Windows.