Microsoft Trying To Look Open Source With CE

MajorBlunder writes "There is an article at ZDnet about Microsoft opening up the source code for Windows CE. I really don't care to guess what demons of Redmond are thinking, but this certainly puts some power behind the whole Open Source concept. " Looking deeper into the story, it appears that MS is more concerned with appearances (that is, looking like it's embracing Open Source, at least at some level) rather than actions. I'm guessing only "selected" developers get the source -- at which point, so what?

Comments

Re:Already

[mosch]

Actually it is a valid link. It's just supposed to be www.linuxce.org.

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I *like* the editorializing

[diaphanous]

Human beings, (and any similarly designed AI programs and humans) including Cmdr Taco, Hemos, and whoever the hell jimjag is, have opinions. What is much worse than the *editors* editorializing, is when media outlets assume a veneer of objectivity while concurrently promoting an agenda or not questioning the agenda or the people they agree with or who pay their salaries. Slashdot has been pro-free-software before "open source" was a buzzword exploited by Sun/Apple/(MS?). I know this and I know they are owned by VA.

I am a reasonably intelligent human being (or AI or alien...) and I don't have to agree with what the editors of slashdot think. (except when Rob comes to me in my dreams and orders me to buy a VA Linux box). If I think that they are misreporting something, intentionally or subconciously, or just have their basic data wrong, I can check the facts myself, and make up my own mind and try to convince other people of my view. Moreover I hope that other people would take a rationally skeptical view when I open my mouth (or logic gates or jlkjds'ds oriface)

I've been reading slashdot for more than 2 years in part because it is visibly run by human beings (or AIs (who need to get a date with a pretty little ispell program) or aliens). Sometimes they f*ck up. But I can deal with that, I'm a human being too (or ... )

Performance VS. Establishment

[Accipiter]

Microsoft may give away the software to developers in the embedded-device market -- an effort to blunt Linux inroads.

In a lot of cases, it's not about who's open-source and who isn't. People are using Linux in embedded systems (as well as other places) because it does a better job than it's counterparts. So what if it's free, and open source. Which is better at doing the job, doing it right, and doing it quickly?

THAT'S the one the developers are going to pick.

-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

Re:*cough*

[Zoltar]

Amen to that my brother. In my quest to learn GTK programming I have spent some time hacking through some of the apps that ship with gnome and I have to say that they SHOULD LEARN TO PUT SOME FUCKING COMMENTS in their code.

Writing good code is more than coming up with clever little hacks or the tightest algorithm. Writing clean, well commented code with descriptive variables goes a long way in my book. Some code I looked at was just fucking awfull..no comments at all and variable names with no meaning at all. Yeah it's a pain in the ass to write comments, but it's more of a pain in the ass to slog through uncommented spaghetti code.

So don't get all high and mighty until your house is in order.

But for what reason?

[a.out]

I know for a fact, from talking to a Microsoft employee that there *are* people at Microsoft who are pro open-source. Remember when ESR gave a talk at Microsoft a while back in the summer?

Well it seems as though they might be taking some of the good points of his talk (like they would do with ALL of the people that they bring in: and they have a very *large* impressive list of speakers) and applying it possibly to CE.. Why you may ask?? here is my theory:

CE is loosing badly in the PCD market. Palm has taken out the whip and is giving them a good beating. CE is a very modular Operating System that you *can* hack on to some extent. For example let's say that you don't like the graphics subsystem (as in the case of some OEMs) you can rip it out program you own and plug it back in using the hooks that exist in the other modules. Of course the next logical step here is to open some of the source up.

But then again it might not be a PR thing. CE 3.0 is just around the corner. (could this be ths oss release??) With CE 3.0 they are promising some sort of Real Time capablility which would be geared towards the embeded environment. Now wouldn't it make a bit more sence to have an open environment for this kind of thing?

Getting back to MS and open source. Most MS employees took ESR's talk very well but there were two points that some could not get over
1) Security in an open environment is harder: (we all know the downfalls of security though obscurity: sooner or later someone figures it out)
2) Smart people don't work for free making free projects: (actually I heard that someone put up their hand and said "hey: I will never work for free" In which I reply with two things, first think speech not beer, second one if my boxes has been up for 108 days cause it was programmed by someone stupid :)

Danger - this code could damage your health

[chazR]

Can't you see what this is? A cynical attempt to kill a large proportion of the open source community. How many of us are literally going to die laughing when we see the quality of this code?

Re:Danger - this code could damage your health

[jallen02]

Uhm Having actually seen WindowsCE code I can say its *HAS* to be a much cleaner API than the One used in Win98 and Win2K.

Okay its not THE greatest but I did not die laughing or anything. Take this with a grain of salt since I have no qualifications really to say if WindowsCE code is higher quality than Linux code or vice versa however there did not seem to be all that much kludge and stupid stuff going on. The API is a bit cleaner than the regular windows API. :-o

I had to do a small thing for CE once and I found the source on our MSDN disks :-).

"Companion to NT Embedded"

[theonetruekeebler]

The article had MS PR flaks describing CE in a number of unflattering ways--including as a "companion to NT Embedded." I guess I should count myself fortunate that I've never even heard of this critter. Personally, I can't imagine NT having the uptime, stability, or simplicity to operate as an embedded system.

In the meantime, can anybody here think of anything in CE's source that might be worth reading? MSFT's not exactly giving away the whole store here.

You know what I really want them to open source? Word for DOS 5.0. There never was a nicer word processor.

--

Believe it or not, CE is a hell of an OS.

[be-fan]

Actually, CE is a pretty damn good OS in its own right. It is influenced by NT, offers DirectX support in some versions, is fairly light, fairly memory conserving, fast, and fairly stable. Might suck as a palmtop OS (too big) but would be pretty nifty as a general purpose desktop OS. If the Sound/Input/Graphics/Music parts of the Win32 API were taken out of CE, and ones based on DirectX with some extra libraries over them to implement some easier to code functionality, it might make a fairly good general purpose OS. The reason is that
A) It already runs on x86. The only thing that would be needed would be to tweek it for the architecture.
B) It already runs on a lot of RISC procs. Should be fairly easy to port it to some more. The code base is probably protable because it runs on x86, MIPS, and SH3.
C) Most hardware already has DirectX drivers. Small tweeks and a recompile might be necessary, but could be doable.
D) DirectX on this system rocks. It is pretty deeply embedded. Imagine, your normal desktop being drawn through DirectDraw, ultra low latency sound through DirectSound, and low overhead input from DirectInput. Okay, enough about DirectX, I think you get the point.
E) At an 8 meg memory footprint (maybe 16 meg if you put all the other stuff I mentioned) it would whoop Linux/X, Windows, and most of the other GUI OSs out there. (Even BeOS needs 32meg to feel like BeOS)
F) Back to DirectX, the driver model is greatly simplified, giving a smaller chance of stuff breaking.
You do realize that MS is standing there with an OS that with a few months of careful coding, could easily become a very kick-ass Windows 2001.

Re:Believe it or not, CE is a hell of an OS.

[IntlHarvester]

One of the original ideas behind CE was to use it as a 'network computer' OS, and also as a settop box system (XBox? WebTV?). The big problem with it is that it's never really gotten used for these things, and instead has been misapplied as a handlheld OS.

The biggest problem with CE is that the rest of Microsoft isn't really behind it. New applications and services get rolled out for NT/98, and CE kinda gets left out in the cold. They haven't even provided CE a reasonable facimilie of Office, for example. Also, Windows 98 has been such a gold mine as a legacy system, they're in no hurry to replace it.

The bottom line is that whatever technical merits CE has are obscured by MS political considerations. Too bad, as the consumer world would probably be better served by CE than the mess that is Win98.
--

Why it won't help. Why it will.

[dsplat]

Here's a point-by-point dissection:

Microsoft Corp. is contemplating giving Windows CE to some developers for free.

The keyword is "some". And by developers, they mean the developers they recognize as developers. That is, friends. There is nothing wrong about doing it. Nor is there anything new about it.

Microsoft's revenue comes, instead, on development tools and maintenance contracts, sources said.

The open source OSs, Linux, *BSD, and Hurd, come with all of the development tools bundled. You can get them from the same sources that you got the OS and all of the applications from. If you have the program, you can get the source and the tools to compile it. Every user is a potential developer, or more to the point, every potential developer can become an actual developer for the cost of downloading and installing the tools.

For now, developers say, Microsoft isn't contemplating going so far as to turn Windows CE into an open-source project, which would allow developers to make changes to the source code and share their work with Microsoft and others in the development community.

So they are not creating any potential developers.

Why now? Microsoft is considering the move to stave off competitive embedded Linux products.

The bottom line is that Linux is more portable. For embedded systems, having a portable OS means that your code can outlive the hardware it originally ran on. Oh wait, that is true of any kind of code. It also means that your choice of hardware is not limited by the OS as much. I'd say that constitutes substantial pressure.

Now, why could this help them anyway? Is there anyone inside Microsoft or out who believes that the open source community is Microsoft's friend? Okay, there are many people in open source who also use Microsoft products and are happy with them. But alienating the open source community is not exactly something Microsoft loses sleep over. This gesture doesn't mean much, but the people it is meant to impress are people who have heard the words "Linux" and "Open Source" only in connection with business news about the Redhat and VA Linux IPOs. They haven't read The Cathedral and the Bazaar and they don't know what makes open source work.

Doubt it...

[Ledge Kindred]

This looks a lot like Ballmer's constant officially-denied claims that MS may consider open-sourcing Windows itself. Key words that give away that this just sounds like publicity: "Microsoft Corp. is contemplating giving Windows CE to some developers for free". In fact, it doesn't even really look like they're going to make it "open source" in the sense that Sun thinks of as "open source" meaning "Yeah, you can look at the source code, but if you do anything to it, you can't distribute the changes to anyone but us." It looks more like "you can look at the code, but don't even think about changing anything."

I think the article should have said something like: "Microsoft is contemplating the possibility of thinking about maybe considering letting some specific developers in certain situations look at parts of the WindowsCE source code."

-=-=-=-=-

Re:/. = Equal Time

[Money__]

micros~1 spends millions each quarter slamming their message in my face about how wonderful their pithy little products are. I see /. as equal time.

Our humble little /. is only a tiny little blip compared to the mountian of marketing garbage that micros~1 spews out every day. I, for one, welcome the editorializing about micros~1 in order to have a balanced opinion of the facts.

Where can I turn to find real-world, hands-on evaluations of micros~1 products? MS? ummmm no. They're so in love with their stock options you hear actual ms "product managers" using phrases like 'this __DOS2.1-DOS3.0-Win1.0-Win3.0-MsBOB-WinCE___ is an exciting new paradigm shift'.

The best anology I can think of is watching your network evening news (liberal) and tuning into Rush (conservative). Neither may be perfect, but by sampling content from both sources, I get to decide what's signal and what's noise.

The problem is that you're so conditioned to reading the "ZDnet ms press release" on a daily basis that this is the first time you're hearing "The emperor has no clothes".
_________________________

sick of editorializing

[medicthree]

I'm a little sick of the editorializing thats going on on the level of the actual story presentations here at /. I understand that the whole point of the site is to let any and all opinions be heard--that's fine, as long as the opinions are coming from the posts themselves. I see little to no value of there being opinions in the stories themselves--let the readers read the stories and make up their own minds. If a particular reader--or even the vast majority of readers--believes that MS (wow--can you believe it, I'm not writing it as "M$"--that must be a /. first!) is evil, that's great.. let him/her have her opinion heard in the replies. But don't bias the reporting of the stories.

Also, I think a little less bias in the selection of the stories themselves could be useful. Who on earth made the decision that the release of FreeBSD 4.0 wasn't even worthy of a mention as a "quickie," yet the book review on assosciate programs was worthy of a whole article? God forbid a VA Linux subsidiary would have any mention of a non-Linux based OS in a somewhat positive light! Okay, openness lovers, why not open up your story selection process a little bit?

Let's think realistically here...

[Raunchola]

Yes, Microsoft opening up their source code to CE doesn't exactly match what Linux zealots consider "true" open source. Quite frankly, do you even expect that they would open up the source code to any of their programs and say, "Here, take it and redistribute our programs for free?"

Microsoft is in this for the money. If they're going to open up the source to their flagship programs, then it'd be stupid not to expect that there will be heavy licensing and the such attached with it. Do you think Microsoft could afford to let their programs go open source...at least as defined by the Linux crowd?

Microsoft has stockholders to keep happy, and they sure as hell aren't going to keep them happy by losing money by open sourcing their flagship programs.

...expecting this post to be moderated down as "Unpopular Opinion," or something related...sense the cynicism?

Re:Let's think realistically here...

[Jason Earl]

You are certainly correct in assuming that Microsoft will act in Microsoft's best interests, but in this case I think that you are seriously mistaken in what their best interests might be.

The fact of the matter is that Windows CE is going no where in a hurry. The Palm OS is creaming it for handhelds, and if it loses any more of the embedded market then it will be the first program in history to actually have negative marketshare. The only people interested in Windows CE are the people that Microsoft is paying to use it.

Needless to say, there isn't much of business model in paying your customers to use your product.

That's the whole point of this article. Microsoft can afford to give away the source code to Windows CE. Heck, they can even license it in such a way that it is basically free to use. What they can't afford is to be a non-entity in what is poised to be the next big thing. Hand-held and embedded devices are poised to become a market that is an order of magnitude bigger than the PC market. Microsoft has to have an OS that contends in this space even if they have to pay people to use it. After all, in the long run they can always recoup their money by selling development tools, or by charging small licensing fees. Licensing fees of less than a dollar a processor could be worth billions if Windows CE ran on every single one of your kitchen appliances, your car, your pager, your cellphone, your toilet, and your pet AIBO.

Microsoft is finally coming to the realization that being the king of the desktop does not mean squat when it comes to PDAs and embedded OSes. They are faced with actual competition in this arena, and they are being handed their head. What's worse is they have very little leverage in this industry. No one cares if Office 2000 runs on their cell phone, and there are plenty of embedded OSes that are either free or ridiculously inexpensive (Linux being one that comes to mind). So Microsoft has to do something, and lowering the price and offering some access to the source code is a fairly obvious move. Their only real alternative is to give up this particular market as a lost cause.

What you can bet that Microsoft won't do is release Windows CE under a license that would allow someone to fork the code base. I completely agree with you there. They are certainly not going to use a license like the GPL or BSDL. They probably won't even use a license as free as the Netscape Public License, but they will instead probably opt for something like Sun's Community Source License (or worse).

*cough*

[Anonymous Coward]

The Open Source pot should NOT be calling the Microsoft kettle black... take a look at some of the code from Open Source projects some time. It's some of the worst, inconsistently indented, uncommented, algorithmically brain-damaged on earth.

Um, FreeBSD 4.0 had its very own article.

[barzok]

Not a quickie, a whole article. Right here: BSD: FreeBSD 4.0 Released

FreBSD 4.0

[Rupert]

Who on earth made the decision that the release of FreeBSD 4.0 wasn't even worthy of a mention as a "quickie," yet the book review on assosciate programs was worthy of a whole article?

Did you miss this article?

Maybe we should be nice

[Mr Krinkle]

Granted it isn't as much of a step as they could take. But it is still a step in the right direction. Of course I don't care if it was open source I would never look at the billions of lines of code for windows 2000:) Unless I was really into optimizing it for a game I was programming, but I don't program games so I will continue using my friendly UNIX servers. I would like to see them starting to open up more source so that maybe we could yank out parts of applications we dont need so that we could get them back to working on our old boxes. If this is a first step great and let us hope that. However, the bashes that are going to come will probably tell much more true of MS than hoping they will see this is good and become more and more open source in the future.

No Source, not for everyone

[Chris_Pugrud]

Read the article. MS is focussing on giving away WinCE for free. They may give away the source, but that's doubtful. If they do give away the source, it will probably go out to a limited group.

Why bother? There is too much publicity about companies that chose Linux because it was "Free". not "Open Source". MS Sees opportunity, they can capitolize on "Free" cause they hardly make any money on licensing. So this definately won't grow to the regular Wins because they make most of their money on those from licensing.

We need to get more companies to emphasize "Open Source" when they discuss their choice of Linux for embedded systems.

chris

yes, WinCE is difficult to compile

[cpeterso]

I briefly worked at a company that writes WinCE compilers and build tools for Microsoft. Microsoft outsources these projects to other companies. Compiling a WinCE kernel requires many batch files and a custom IDE called Microsoft Windows CE Platform Builder to edit the (ugly) config files. The Platform Builder IDE is based on the source code for Microsoft Visual Studio 5.0 (yes it's old code). This Microsoft C++ code was literally the worst code I have ever seen/debugged! I'm not exaggerating. I'm talking about C++ classes with 50+ public methods and 20+ public data members! Microsoft has no concept of modularity or data encapsulation.

Already

[SheldonYoung]

You have been able to get the source for CE for a long time. An "evaulation" version of the Windows CE source comes with our MSDN disks. Of course, you still have to license it if you want to do anything with it, but the souce *IS* already available and has been for at least a year.

If you really want a true open source OS for your Windows CE machine, take a look at <a href="http://www.linuce.org">LinuxCE</a>. A port of BSD is also up and running on the same devices.