If Microsoft Went Open Source

From an Anonymous Reader: "The BBC's Bill Thompson has written a speculative article about the possibility of Microsoft attempting to secure their place in the future of operating systems by creating an open operating system. From the article: 'They allocate a billion dollars worth of programmers to shine and polish [The new OS] for a year, improving its compatibility with Windows Server technologies, donating parts of the Windows and Office code bases under the GPL and turning it into the world's best operating system.' Could this ever happen?

Comments

Putting developpers first

[fanha]

In the spirit of putting developpers first, Microsoft should make Visual Studio an open source project first. Then we can all benefit from it's awesome new list of additions:

- 100% increase in startup times
- 250% increase in IntelliSense lag
- Newly added: Features that bring up a "TODO" box or crash the program when used in random contexts
- The CD would include binaries instead of actual executables, and you would benefit from the productive experience of building it yourself
- MSDN Library would be replaced with five pages: Home, Download, Contributing, Links, and Help; the latter would lead to a set of poorly formatted discussion forums rather than the obviously overinflated and uselessly wordy MSDN help files
- The compiler would be raved about for conforming to standards but still break quite often in addition to using the most horrendously unuseful RTTI in the world

I eagerly await MS's move to OSS since it would be so great for developpers!