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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.
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.
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.
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