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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... ?
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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?
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.
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?
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
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.
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
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.