Slashdot Mirror
What if Microsoft went Open Source?
An anonymous reader writes "This article on newsforge takes a speculative look at what would have to happen if Microsoft decided to jump on the Open Source bandwagon (using Microsoft Project as the source of speculation). Amusing to think about, unlikely to happen."
It's not happening, for obvious reasons. Companies exist to make money!
MS is doing just fine without being OS!
What if America was a real democracy and not run by oligarhic oportunists... ?
...
Unlikely... Impossible
I picture in my mind, many gleeful hackers and an overwhelming wave of new exploits, that might in fact cause more people to switch to Linux, where the support community is much more on top of things, and a reliable infrastructure is in place.
You're right of course that it will never happen, but Open Source Windoze would be useful since it would make it easier to create Windoze emulation environments and would remove any need to purchase Windoze to run Windoze-only apps.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
Then they would increase 100% with cries of how they weren't following the letter of the L/GPL/BSD license/whatever.
On a more serious note, MS could acutally open up, say, the Win XP kernel to the public. The kernel doesn't do the brunt of the OS work; it's kind of the foundation, not the building. That way, MS couldn't be acused of being monopoilistic, but they could be monopolistic in practice.
Also, maybe we could see some Win XP clones? For free? Of course that right there is why MS wouldn't open up a current version of Windows, but they could open up, say, Win 95. Of course, knowing hackers, there probably would be a free version of Windows out in 6 months, and MS would (eventually) be undercut by boxed versions of this "free Windows".
MS couldn't open up Windows. Even if developers couldn't _use_ the code from Windows, they could read it so they could create a free version of Windows in ~3 years. And then they'd undercut MS's price, and eventually MS would go out of business.
Of course this very scenario may happen with WINE + Linux. But, of course, this is going to take time. If MS opened up Windows, they would only speed the process.
And Bill doesn't want that, now does he?
What if the developers of MS project left Microsoft and started their own OpenProject, Inc? One of the things that keeps developers working for the company that makes the software they write is that they just can't take the code, walk out, and start their own company with it. But now it's GPL, so these developers have no reason to stick around if they think they can do better on their own. And now Microsoft is at a huge competitive disadvantage until they can get new developers up to speed.
As far as the idea that Microsoft could change it's business model, if Microsoft wanted to be in the business of a Project ASP, they would be there already. So sure, once they gave away their source of revenue, they'd have to find another, but why would you throw away your dinner then pick through the neighbor's trash to find something to eat?
Fact: Mozilla has lots of bugs
Fact: The staff can't possibley address them all in real time
Fact: They do manage to address a large number of them
Fact: IE has lots of bugs
Fact: THe staff can't possibley address them all in real time
Fact: They usually just ignore bugs until b\they become a CRITICAL vulnerability. And even then it can take months to address.
YOU SUCK BALLS!
In the 70's and 80's we speculated that cars would use a clean energy source by the year 2000. But nobody realized that SUVs would become popular and get even worse gas milage.
The same thing will probably happen with Microsoft. A huge business like that does not change overnight. It is doubtful that we see any changes until it is too late. Proprietary businesses no matter how good will eventually lose out to 3rd parties. There is a window in businesses like IBM and Microsoft. When that time is up, they will get hit hard.
IBM at one time was completely proprietary. Piece by piece 3rd party manufacturers replaced IBM hardware. Eventually IBM clones were around and could compete with IBM directly. Over a span of less than 10 years IBM lost most if it's desktop market share. Now IBM doesn't even bother with consumer hardware. The last couple of things to go were videocards and hard drives. Companies like NVIDIA and ATI were innovators and blew by IBM in the videocard market. Then the IBM hard drives began to get chinsey and they discontinued that as well.
I am speculating that the same thing with Microsoft is going to occur. Right now there are competing office suites, desktop os', web browsers etc. These products will eventually replace the need for Microsoft products one by one as more people use them. In a matter of years more people will be using open/free software and look back to the days of Microsoft and either laugh or feel dread and angst. The days of a software proprietary model are limited and if Microsoft and other companies don't change to accept opensource, then they will ultimately lose their market shares.
Well it would be the end of Microsoft since we'd all have a lawsuit against them. Then we would take the code and put it into Linux and make every Win32 program run at native speeds or faster.
The real cash-cow for Microsoft is Office, and it is certainly inconceivable that Office could go Open Source.
However, there are certain MS products (IIS, even the core OS) which could be at least partially opened up in order to capture some of the coding-for-free Open Source culture. But if you thought that Linus was picky with patch acceptance, imagine what Bill would be like.
However, it won't happen, since:
Please remain calm, there is no reason to pani... wait, where are you all going?
Should MS talk about releasing the kernel, there would be generals and politicians in an uproar, and would be screaming 'No, no! National Security!"
It would take a lot of explaining to convince them that malignant hackers couldn't exploit a new hole and tunnel in to mess up a batallion's paychecks.
C'est pas apres qu'on a fait dans son pantalon qu'il faut serrer les fesses.
Think about it, if the cost of the OS is gone one of the main reasons to swich to linux (not the biggest, but at least one of the more easily noted) is gone. If the source is open, will be no more security by obscurity, a lot of eyes will detect and fix the hundreds of remaining critical bugs in the code, maybe even make Win95 as stable as XP or Linux, or make really safe XP. If Windows now have almost the entire market share on the desktop and not so in the server market, with this not only expand even more their dominance in the desktop, but will have the same dominance in the the server market, and more than this, the market will expand with free/open windows.
What about Microsoft? How it will generate revenues? With services, support, not so free apps (i.e. Office), having their specific distribution, using it as a plataform of selling their own services (passport?).
of course they can't release the whole sourcecode for all of their applications, for the reasons you just mentioned. But even if only if they released the sourcecode to a tiny fraction of their it could benefit them. OpenOffice.org/StarOffice, Mozilla/Netscape, Mac OS X/Darwin are examples where the sourcecode has been released after code from other companies has been removed, and yet it was beneficial for all parties involved. And All of them are also sold with closed source extensions. So your reasoning is only partly valid.
And nobody says that you can't fill the holes in swiss sourcecode.
Fact? sounds more like a baseless claim made from anecdotal evidence. Does the poster really know what usually happens when the the IE team encounters a bug in their code? I highly doubt it. I think its much more likely when the IE team encounters a bug it usually gets fixed and patched without anyone knowing. Not all bugs can lead to vulnerabilities, or for that matter are even noticable to the end user.
What signature defines me as a person?
A sound argument, but I believe that, whether or not Office is OS doesn't matter that much, as the casual end user will simply download it anyways. Granted, downloading it NOW is illegal, but that doesn't stop a lot of people. I suppose that if it WAS legal, more people would, but how many more?
On the other hand, MS could keep a few modules proprietary, and the source wouldn't include the clipart and so on. So an OS version would perhaps have different features, or features which behave slightly differently. I would imagine that this, combined with the lack of documentation and support, wouldn't make the casual user go for the OS version anymore than they currently go for the warezed version. Perhaps less so, due to the missing features
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Fact Netscape 6.0 (mozilla .6) ships 11/2000
Fact by 10/2001 Mozilla 1.0 still hasn't shipped
Fact between 1/1998 and 11/2000 Microsoft ships IE5.0 and IE 5.5.
Fact by 10/2001 IE 6.0 has shipped.
Contrast that with IE where none of these things are possible. Got a bug? Good luck trying to raise and track the issue with Microsoft.
But even if only if they released the sourcecode to a tiny fraction of their it could benefit them.
Sorry, this is not Flamebait: Only broke companies see benefit on releasing the source. The *true* benefit only applies to the open source development community (liked it? use it in your own app), where the final users *may* receive some benefits, depending on the goodwill of open source developers (will they act like 31337 jerks, like the mplayer people?).
Billionare companies like Microsoft don't need "help" in the "jeez, let's save 10 millions on development staff paychecks" sense.
I'll bet that Microsoft has ten times as many developers working on IE as Netscape does. Also, they release for just ONE platform, while mozilla develops for at least 10. Small wonder that they can crank out new releases faster. Besides, MSIE 6 is, for the most part, a version of Spyglass mosaic with many new features bolted on. It still has many old quirks and bugs in its HTML interpreter, and has shitty support for stylesheets, XHTML, et cetera. Netscape/Mozilla is 100% new code.
I'm sure it wouldn't take Mozilla developers so long if they started from an old, working codebase, made it for just one platform, and had thousands of bright and experienced developers working for them like Microsoft does. What's truly amazing is that the quality of MS products is so low, given their incredible resources.
Haha ah haha... Oh, wait ... that wasn't intentionally funny.
Personal preference of coding style does not define good vs. bad code. Quality is defined by consistent attention to detail, where those details are related to correctness, robustness, efficiency, security, etc.
In my years of coding, I've been mistaken in thinking there was ONE TRUE WAY in terms of coding style. I was wrong, and so are you. Style is only perpheral to other *important* qualities in software.
mx
When something is rewritten from scratch, it takes a couple of years to get to where one left off (especially if one is going to write ones own gui toolkit, bug query system and various other apps). In the long run, I think it was worth it, but in the short term, no results are obvious because much of coding is to get to what was already done.
IE was not rebuilt from scratch in this time and thus could continue with incremental improvements of what MS already had.
In the long run I think Mozilla will take over the Web (simply because anyone can customize and improve it) but it was understandably slow at first. Now that the gui toolkit is robust and stable [XUL] and the core systems are working properly, I expect improvments from the mozilla team to be relatively faster.
I miss the Karma Whores.
That is really hard to imagine when you try to remember what happened. Go waaay back to the days of the Altair "computer", where hobbyists and future geeks would order the computer by mail. Go to meetings and swap programs and ideas. Then came Paul Allen and Bill Gates and wrote basic for it. It was a biz project from the beginning, aimed at making money. Now there is nothing wrong with making money, we all making money. But to imagine Microsoft as Open Source is really hard when you see how they complained about people swapping their Basic as they did with all the software for that computer. Now _selling_ software for the Altair seemed like overkill and I guess it was but it seemed that their plan worked quite well but to me it doesn't seem like Microsoft is built around the open source mind set at all(gasp) :)
my sig
You are incorrect.= /library/en-us/dnie60/html/cssenhancements.asp for details.
Version one and two of IE were based on SpyGlass. I'm not sure about 3. I do know that 4 is a completely new codebase compared to 2.
You are correct that it has many old quirks. These are COMPLETELY INTENTIONAL, and the result of a lot of work. You see, vast quantities of HTML on the web were created without any regard for standards, just so that they looked good in whatever browser was available at the time. Even if they were created to a standard, many of the old standards have been deprecated. In any case, IE focused on backwards compatibility, so that real live content worked, as opposed to standards compliance, which very little content adheres to anyway. Seriously.
If you want IE to be more standards compliant, just add the appropriate declaration to the top of your pages, and IE6 will try to adhere to modern standards.
Check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url
Why would you say that? By taking over an existing, working OS, MS could concentrate on DRM, as opposed to putting out fires in their OS code base.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Sure it does - indirectly, by making MacOS X a viable choice for Unix hackers.
MacOS X has become a widely supported (in terms of free and semi-free software - i.e. most of the software I use daily) Unix-variant. I'd say that currently, only the entirely free Unixes and perhaps Solaris are better supported by third parties, and Solaris mostly because its established position.
Even if most people don't use the Darwin source, Apple is presenting a fairly good image to the open source community. Had MacOS X been totally closed, things like fink probably wouldn't have happened.
I probably would not have bought a Mac, or MacOS X if I didn't know that a large part of the source code is available. Why? All closed operating systems I've ever used have had kernel bugs that I could've fixed if I had the source code.
Good rendering engine, terrible User Interface (the worst of all browsers). Tabbed interface, yadda yadda yadda, ONE good idea doesn't saves Mozilla's UI.
Forgot what Microsoft is about? User Interface.
I know this is all subjective, but Microsoft's IE has the least intuitive user interface of all the current browsers. It is simply missing so many important features, of course you won't know they are missing until you try other browsers. IE is far behind, especially in their user interface. Just to name a few things missing: their zoom function is very ineffective. Mozilla zooms all text, Opera zooms everything. IE is quite lacking in keyboard controls. Want to copy/paste with IE? You're pretty much forced to use the mouse to highlight text. Compare that to Mozilla, click once at the beginning or end of text and then use keyboard controls to highlight what you want; or turn on carret browsing and navigate with keyboard; then there's type-ahead find, etc, etc. Tabbed browsing is good, but its definitely not the only thing that makes Mozilla's interface so usable. And I have yet to see an IE frontend that brings it anywhere near the functionality of Mozilla or Opera.
I think Mozilla/Phoenix's UI is highly effective, and its getting better with each release. Opera 7 is the best of the bunch IMHO, especially in regards to user interface. If you're still using IE, you're sadly behind the times.
One of the main goals of the Mozilla project was to establish standards, not necessarilly create a competing browser (after all, its just a reference implementation). People scoff at this, and say "standards don't matter, I'd rather have a browser that just works." Well, guess what? I think the Mozilla project has actually been successful in achieving this goal. I haven't had to use IE for any web page. Web sites seem to be conforming to the standards because the sites I visit render correctly in whatever standards-complaint browser I use (maybe I've just been lucky). When Mozilla 1.0 was released this wasn't exactly the case, but I've seen the progression since then.
Zoot!
Honest question: Can anyone think of a realistic scenario where it makes sense for a market-leader to open-source its product?
I can think of three.
One: A legal force (change in copyright law, antitrust suit, etc) compels them to.
Two: A radical fragmenting hardware shift catches them off guard, and they need to very very quickly cover every new platform.
Three: Their main product matures to the point where further development isn't cost-effective, they stop version incrementing, and "Open Source" to allow for broader support. (The other products would very likely remain closed source.)
Four: Their product ceases to make money, and they discontinue the line but gain goodwill by open-sourcing the last version.