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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
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.