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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?
Free Software (and Open Source I guess) is about cooperation and working together.
Proprietary software is about not cooperating, and many big businesses seem to be about destroying anything which gets in the way of their profit or control.
Microsoft can't "go open source" until it collectively believes that cooperation is a good idea and stops trying to destroy or control everything. And I'm guessing that won't happen any time soon.
Just think about the type of things that Microsoft do (competitive practice that edge on illegality) and the sort of things that are said repeatly about Open Source movement by this company, from employees in the trenches all the way to officers of highest level. My own conclusion is that a snowball has better chance in hell than Microsoft ever switching over to Open Source model.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
This will never happen because there is huge quantities of patented code in Windows which belongs to third parties. Microsoft would have to buy in dozens if not hundreds of companies to do this. I can't see that happening.
Otoh. It would be interesting to know exactly what Daniel Robbins, and similar collegues, are doing. My own guess is that he's probably creating a superior and enhanced version of his Portage build system for Vista. And otherwise probably very little, apart from being kept safely out of circulation so that the Free World cannot make use of his talents.
Inkscape is another project that deserves some recognition. These are OSS projects where a small group of competent developers have identified a niche and delivered. I hope it inspires others.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
If you've ever read his personal website it talks about how long he's been working with technology, how he's influenced the course of I.T. (has he crap!) and how he has this amazing ability to understand new technologies faster than most 'normal' people. And yet a few weeks ago he wrote the most ill-informed, ignorant piece I've ever read from a 'commentator' about how he couldn't port his email from Windows to Mac OS X (and of course he blamed Microsoft for his own lack of ability). Not surprisingly in the BBC feedback section, dozens of people suggested solutions which he could easily have identified from 5 minutes research on Google. Even less surprisingly, the feedback section was remove shortly afterwards.
I've barely if ever agreed with anything he's ever written. I think the fact that he has to have his face and name plastered all over his column, when every other respected BBC journalist lets their writing do the talking, says it all.
Yes they did. Back when they were called NeXT, they took 4.2BSD and Mach 2.0 (later Mach 2.5), forked it and put a proprietary UI on top of it.
When they became Apple, they replaced a lot of the 4.2BSD stuff with FreeBSD code (and some from NetBSD back in the Rhapsody era).
Of course, this process happened back in 1988, so it's only news by Slashdot's standards, but it did happen.
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