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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?
Microsoft's role shouldn't be in improving the OS, it should be in creating the infrastructure necessary to allow the umpteen-zillion Windows developers out there to improve the OS instead.
I don't know how many of you have contributed to an OSS project, but, at least for those projects that are well-established the process can be a lot of work and not a little bit intimidating. Some progress has been made on the tool front to make it easier but it still takes way too much effort to get a patch mainstreamed on the really big projects.
What Microsoft should do is open up their software, and invest their money in more programmers, but not to do coding, to act as support for the rest of us who do the coding.
Make it so that if I find a bug, all I have to do is fix it and submit a patch. That's it. Nothing more. Nothing less.
This is the one opportunity they have that I don't see Linux/*BSD ever possessing. The kind of work necessary to support large projects is the very last thing most of us want to do. Sourceforge is littered with the remains of OSS projects that were fun to code and get working, but that nobody wants to maintain anymore.
They'd still make gobs of money. Ever browse their help wanted section? Sometimes it seems as if half the listings there are for build engineers. Guys whose only job it is to build Windows and all the other projects. Casual/notive users are never going to attempt this on their own (Gentoo/LFS users notwithstanding), and you'd be crazy to accept builds from third-parties given the complexity we're talking about and the potential for malware.
It's the best thing Microsoft could do right now. Which is why they won't do it. It's like what they say about generals always fighting the last war. Gates and Ballmer got where they are by hewing to a specific ideology. They're not changing their minds in this lifetime or the next, even if its clear that that ideology is antiquated and obsolete.
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Why didn't you know?
I believe what he is suggesting is that Microsoft spend a billion bucks and a year to embrace and extend Linux, starting from some existing distribution. Then when they release their flood of changes in a year, under the GPL, no one will be able to catch up because of that billion buck one year lead.
But that one year lag works the other way too. Microsoft would then be a year behind the open source baseline with which they started.
If they kept merging mainline changes into their internal codeset during that year of secret development, it would no longer have a year's worth of changes in it, it would only have enhancements, which would be a lot easier to pick and choose from for the rest of the world to merge back into the mainline.
If Microsoft kept their baseline "pure", they would be behind the world as much as the world would be behind them. If they kept their internal codeset up to date, they would not be a year ahead.
Wham! Paradox City Arizona, baby.
Infuriate left and right
Releasing anything resembling the source code to windows would be laden with problems for Microsoft. Opening their customers to a whole range of security holes created by decades of patch-fixes and arcane support layers for retired API's would possibly leave them with a public relations disaster on their hands, not to mention the financial repercussions.
However, it is interesting to imagine a truly level playing field between Windows & Unix based operating systems, in freedom and price terms. Would end users choose unix based systems over windows based systems given the full freedom of choice and knowledge that applications could run on either? Also the possibilities for code and standards interaction between two entirely open systems and the continued improvement of both in competetive and meaningful ways is something that could potentially be extremely beneficial to the computing ecosystem at large
Business Voyeur
but hey, it'd be nice if Microsoft did it too. I like UNIX ;-)
This isn't a speculative article. It's a quiet attempt by Microsoft to gauge the community's reaction to a possible open source product.
Recently I was paid $10 to take a survey geared towards IT professionals about "current trends within the Software and PC Industry". The questions were clearly written by Microsoft, and one possible plan was obvious:
-Microsoft will compose a list of dozens of software patents allegedly violated by Linux and will offer total indemnification for Red Hat users only. If necessary, it will use its own patent portfolio as leverage.
-Microsoft will strengthen Red Hat's source offerings to emphasize "interoperability", which means that it will be possible to administer a RH install from Windows.
-Microsoft will buy Red Hat for considerably more than it seems to be worth and will immediately cripple it just as it's crippled every other worthy competitor it has bought out.
This is a clever plan to defeat Linux.
(Part of the survey really bugged me because it seemed like a push poll - see here.)
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
What 'open source product' did Apple take in? They were acquired by (or they acquired, depends on how you look at it) NeXT, who had a closed-source operating system. They essentially 'open sourced' big chunks of it, enough to run a 'bare UNIX-like OS' which has been called Darwin. As part of making it a bare UNIX-like OS that would be USABLE they grafted on a FreeBSD derived userland.
In no sense of the word did they 'take an open source product' and kinda create their own fork. Unless you can tell me where to download NeXT's Source Code. I wouldn't mind having NextStep/OpenStep to run on some of the various hardware (PA-RISC, Sparc, Intel, etc.) hardware I have around here. . . It's not freely available by any means except the warez route. Certainly the source code is not available.
If it were GPL, I wouldn't care...as long as it was an official release from the MS corp. A release from a team of their engineers would leave me coldly skeptical. I would be expecting that at some point MS, the corp, would swoop down with a bunch of concealed patents, and start suing everyone they didn't like for patent infringement.
They haven't earned much in the way of trust.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
But, were I Microsoft, I could think of ways to leverage the Linux development progress cheaply and easily, and piss off all the OSS people all at once.
First, MS should buy Transgaming. They own Cedega, which is a closed fork of the Wine tree. No need to support the WINE project with actual patches, since there's no licensing requirements.
Second, knock together, say, a FreeBSD or Linux distribution. X11, standard userland, everything.
Third, use their internal OS programmers to turn Cedega into the greatest thing since sliced bread. A -perfect- implementation of the Win32 API on top of Linux.
Fourth, get all the hardware manufacturers on board for drivers. Institute a driver program. Ta-da, everyone has drivers, but only on platforms MS wants to support. IE, x86. OSS driver development continues, but at a slower pace with fewer people actively testing.
Fifth, make the install as painless as a standard Windows install. No text-mode, no kernel boot stuff, just the splash we all know and love(/hate)
Fifth, sell for the price of a Windows license, or a little less. Allow the base OS to be downloaded freely, ala Darwin, but keep the WINE/Win32 API closed and sealed off.
Since their Win32 API is perfect, Visual Studio should run flawlessly. AND, with the proper window manager on X11 (as they will likely do this), it would be visually indistinguishable from standard Windows. Power-users could install Gnome/KDE/fluxbox/windowmaker/whatever, and the Win32 API would still be perfectly available, exportable over the network as any X11 app, etc.
Leverage the community to build the kernel and userland. Use their own people to maintain just the API - keep the total lock-in.