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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?
Control of suppliers, control of customers, control of employees, control of what competitors are left.
To go OSS would be a complete 180 in personality, and that is just not going to happen.
No. Less return to the stockholders (not that they get many dividends anyway....)
This could not happen. From everything I've read, Bill Gates doesn't work this way and isn't concerned about that kind of immortality.
There is nothing in the history of him or his company to suggest that this is possible.
And, frankly, it's not necessary.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
No. Next question.
Stupid like a fox!
Honestly, I'm wondering why this is on Slashdot. I come here to read news, not some editorial guesses at what might be news in the future. "News for Nerd. Stuff that matters." ===> and this article doesn't matter...
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
MS has 90%+ of the market. Why should they try to do anyting other than what they're doing, which is obviously working? They seem pretty content!
A blog like any other.
If you'd asked if Microsoft would release their application and development suite as binaries for Linux, for a price, I'd say "Sure! As soon as they realize that the OS is now a commodity they cannot count on for their profit margins any more."
However, Microsoft will not release Windows as Open Source. They cannot, because there is too much stolen code in it. **cough**BSD**cough**
IF Microsoft had released Office for every OS out there, rather than trying to own the entire PC from device drivers to applications to keyboards and mice, they would indeed own the office, likely for the rest of time. But they didn't. They got greedy, they wanted it all, and focused so much effort and time trying to LOCK IN users and LOCK OUT any alternatives that they lost sight of the one thing that they used to do well: Write applications.
They tried. 64-bit Win95 for the Alpha did indeed get sold, but then they abandoned it. This left customers hanging and looking for an alternative, and they were pissed enough at MS to not go back. This is not smart, and it demonstrates the lack of forethought that has created the environment for disaster that Windows Vista forshadows.
Who will upgrade their hardware to relative supercomputers just to pay for an upgrade to software they already have and that already works? The vision of those hardy souls who have never upgraded from Win98 because, face it, Win98 and Office97 are still perfectly good for 99.99% of what everyone does.
So when Office97 documents start failing because Microsoft changed their formats again, don't expect companies to spend $2000/seat to just do what they could do yesterday. OpenOffice is already here.
And when IE7 won't install on anything older than WinXP, don't expect that same $2000/seat upgrade to be spent to, again, just do today what worked fine yesterday. Firefox, Opera, Mozilla &etc are already here.
The F/OSS community already has a head start in making functional apps to do what needs doing regardless of OS, on existing hardware, using commodity protocols. Microsoft can never catch up trying to do that, because they have never been successful at doing that. They CHOSE not to be compatible, not to be frugal, not to play nice with others.
Microsoft as a company believes this is some kind of "race" that they have to "win", but while Microsoft spends bails of money "mobilizing their sales and marketing departments", F/OSS developers will continue to write good code.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
I think there's a flaw to your logic: Forks.
Forked projects occasionally, though not always, end up viable alternatives.
Look at X.org, look at the three different BSDs (De Raadt's recoding of things for security) and so forth.
If Microsoft took the traditional route of forking a fairly recent version of the stable codebase, they'd have a decent chance of being able to actually sell something.
Allocating a billion dollars to the project wouldn't do it. As it is now, more people are involved in getting a version of Windows to launch-state then it took to put a man on the moon. Simply managing the logisitics of something of that scale is boggling enough... and that's before you even look at the quality of the operating system itself. I am curioous, though, how much money it took Apple, all tolled, to get OS X from dream to reality. Anyone want to venture a guess that the total was well north of a billion dollars?
Because exactly as you've pointed out -- it's not the small maintenance and enhancement programming that makes a project good. It's the higher-level decisions by the project managers that can determine whether code changes will be successful.
What you've said about the administration problems for large projects is true, but I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing that there are lots of unfinished projects lying around places like Sourceforge.
A few months ago, I was looking for a library that would do something, but it just didn't exist. What I did find, though, was someone's Sourceforge effort from five years ago. It wasn't packaged very well, and it only covered about 70% of what I'd ideally want. I was able to contact the original author, and while he's still interested in it, he really doesn't have the time (or to some extent the expertise) to finish it.
Since then, I've decided to try to pick up where the previous developer left off. I've re-packaged the code, and now I'm thinking about extending it to cover what I wanted to do previously. I don't know how successful I'll be in finishing it off, and to be honest I think it's unlikely. But the fact that someone else made their own effort available, and occupying sourceforge, made it much easier for me to get my own effort underway.
So, Microsoft buys out Red Hat for a huge amount of money....
... but Microsoft cannot do anything to the people who WANT to work on Linux.
Why would the people who worked at Red Hat still work there after Microsoft buys them?
Why wouldn't that take their huge checks and start a new company, with all the GPL'd code and industry love they've earned and call it something like "Red Cap" and pick up right were they left off.
Except they're all much richer than before.
Microsoft can hire individuals away from Linux-based companies
And I wouldn't trust Microsoft's lawyers not to have all kinds of provisions in a developer's contract with Microsoft.
I'm sure Bill would happily pay Linus a million or two if he could legally prevent Linus from writing any more code.