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Why Windows Must (and Will) Go Open Source
Attila Dimedici writes "Charles Babcock of Information Week published an interesting article suggesting that Microsoft will have to at least to some degree take Windows open source if they want to stay in business. He suggests that the money to be made from the things MS builds on top of Windows (Office, Server, SQL Server, Exchange, Sharepoint, etc.) is so much greater than what can be made from Windows itself that MS will have to give up the revenue stream from Windows in order to maintain these other, more valuable, revenue streams."
Having to give the OS away for free in order to sell the apps only makes sense if you don't already have a stranglehold on the OS market. Sure, MS has gotten some bad press lately but they still enjoy the overwhelming share of the OS market, and that isn't likely to change anytime soon.
The fact that they are not making a lot of money selling Vista does not mean people are moving away from MS in droves...they're just sticking to an older MS product for now. MS is still entrenched as simply the way people expect computers to work, and it's going to take a much longer series of much larger screwups from Microsoft to change that.
Just look at Gates' earlier comments about how open source ruins development models.
Something tells me that ship might sink rather than adapt (assuming the opinion piece on the direction of the market is correct in the first place).
- Toast
Maybe this guy has different stats, but last I heard, Microsoft made something like 1/3 of their revenue from Windows and 1/3 from Office. It's not like they don't make any money from Windows.
Gosh, I laughed so hard at that.
Oh goodness, that is so funny. Microsoft going open source with Windows.
Snort
Man, it hurts to laugh now.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
and first step towards FOSS crowd, almost finished after 10 years in MS research labs, is FUCKING GRUB SUPPORT.
839*929
Are we witnessing new John Dvorak being born?
End anonymous moderation and posting on
The world is moving away from x86 arch
Like Apple did?
Honestly, can't the summary tell us at least "Why Windows Must (and Will) Go Open Source?" The summary doesn't explain why, it simply counters one reason why not.
What planet are you from? PPC is dead. Sparc is dieing. Embedded is owned by ARM almost as completely as x86 rules the desktop. Intel attempted to kill x86 with IA-64, only to see it fail miserably to AMDs x86-64. Hell, x86 is even making inroads in embedded systems. A few very high end specialty devices like game consoles are doing other architectures, but that's about it. If anything the x86 stranglehold is stronger than ever.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
What if Microsoft offered their OS at a much cheaper price and modeled their revenue after, say, console makers? While the consoles are still expensive, the corporations sell them at a loss and instead plan on gaining a profit from selling video games.
In Microsoft's case, they would sell their software products like units at a profit, and they could concentrate on producing new types of software in house (like Apple does). Plus, if they went this route, they wouldn't necessarily have to pursue something stupid like new their software subscription services strategy.
actually, not too far off... http://reactos.org/
It will be a sad day when MS release the source code for Windows 8.5 ;-)
Think of the *x hackers that will die of laughter after reading the code!!!
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
The problem with Windows is its backup software is Veritas. Its disk defragmenter is ... I forget who, I think it may be Disk Keeper. Most of the internal tools are licensed from companies that Microsoft doesn't own; you can buy a much better Veritas backup system or a full Disk Keeper license and get network control and everything. They can't open source this, and they can't give it away for free because they have to pay it back somehow; free Windows would be "Windows LE" or "Limited Edition" ... limited in ability to do anything but run programs you'll have to buy.
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I was going to point out that Steve Ballmer has to die eventually, but then I realized that he'll still be sweating when he's in Hell...
Desire is not an occupation.
I believe the author means 'free', not open source. There are lots of reasons why MS wouldn't do either, but even if you buy the argument, all MS would need to do would be drop the price to $0. That doesn't mean GPL'ing the code! Gosh!
While I really don't see MS taking Windows open source anytime soon (read: hell freezes over), I have sometimes thought what would happen if they did.
Linux would probably be sunk for one, as hobbyists and big business alike dig in to Windows source code. Apple would be annihilated too- theres no way they could compete with free, not if they had a 90% market share to beat. Thoughts of MS ever losing their monopoly would be right out.
The world would be stuck with Microsoft domination forever. Not a happy thought.
Good job Ballmer's on our side.
The game consoles are all doing PPC in some form. The xbox360 ps3 and wii.
Then there is all the network gear that uses arm and ppc
ppc is far from dead.
FTFA:
To neutralize the advantages of Linux and other open source competitors, Microsoft will have to make Windows more like them. If it doesn't, it risks losing the 6-million-plus developer base that's made the Windows platform great.
Uhmm... why would the developer base run away? I don't get it. Because everyone else has? Then what starts them?
Also, why would Microsoft open-sourcing things be good for Microsoft? Either people shift to Linux because they drink the RMS kool aid (that'd include me), or because it's the better product for them (I then found out this also included me).
If they shift because they drink the RMS kool aid, then we can assume that they prefer a completely free OS (including application stack), which MS won't give out (according to the article, at least).
If they shift because Linux is the better product (technically, that is), Windows being open source(d) won't change the fact that Linux is the better product.
In other words, Windows may be what established Microsoft, but Windows can't sustain the company.
Why not? Where are the figures to back this up? I think you'd need to make an assumption about the relative number of OEM XP licenses vs. OEM Office licenses sold with new computers to just get something linking the claim back to the article.
The proprietary file formats that have protected Microsoft apps have been offset by Office Open XML
Here's the spec: if the document says jump, you jump as high as this other unspecified program. I have heard (but beware of echo chamber effects) that it's nigh impossible to write two implementations of the OOXML spec that renders identical outputs. So if people are going to look at $COMPETITOR Office and say "but my documents look all wrong, let me go back to Microsoft", how was the consumer really not locked in?
Blargh. I'm just going to judge this book by its first page. You can find some statistics in the article if you need them, but they seem loosely connected, and the article fails to specify why its predictions are likely to come true.
Article: -1, Overrated.
title of article: Why Windows Must Go Open Source
Fourth sentence of article: "[...]Windows will never become an open source project in the same vein as Linux[...]"
Sixth sentence of article: "[...]I'll concede that some Windows source code probably will never see the light of day."
I think what he really wants to say is that the cost of Windows has to approach zero. That's completely different from being open source. It's the classic "free as in speech" (or as in freedom) versus "free as in beer."
I think it should be fairly obvious that MS can't open-source the whole OS. For one thing, I doubt that they own the copyright of every single line of code in Windows, and they've surely had to license a gazillion patents, make deals involving trade secrets, etc. Look at the situation with Linux and GPL 2 versus GPL 3 -- even if Linus changed his mind and wanted to make it GPL 3, it can't happen, because you won't get thousands of programmers to agree. With Windows it's bound to be even more complex.
Okay, so let's imagine that the price of Windows becomes zero dollars. So what? Then the US would be like China, just another country where everybody runs Windows and nobody pays for it. You'd still have banks telling you their web interface only works with IE. You'd still have people with hard disks full of documents that are in proprietary formats, preventing them from switching to Linux. Things like video encoders and color management would still be patent encumbered. The main effect would probably be to boost MS's market share, and that would probably allow them not just to sell more copies of Office, etc., but to abuse their monopoly more effectively for competitive advantage. That's essentially what the author of the article is talking about by the time he gets to pages 2 and 3.
And is anyone under the illusion that every version of Windows would cost zero dollars? No way. They'd very carefully set up a tiered system of price-differentiated versions of Windows in order to maximize their profits. Then it's like drug dealing: the first hit is free. This is what they're already doing in the third world, turning a blind eye to pirated versions of Windows because it helps to make those countries dependent on MS. The article says preinstalled Win XP is about $34 worth of the price of a new computer, and $34 is close enough to zero that I'd say that we're essentially already in that regime.
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Windows NT 4.0 ran on x86, Alpha, MIPS and PowerPC. Nowadays, there are only (really) x86, x86_64, and IA-64 versions now (I say really because there is a PPC version of sorts -- the 360's OS, which is forked from that of the original Xbox (x86) which itself was forked from Windows 2000).
Windows has in the past not been bound to x86 for desktop use, it just never really caught on.
It would make more sense if they released their own version of Linux. They could EASILY sell support, books and rake in money for it. and if they sold their apps for Linux, again, they would have a huge market as their product would run on Macs as well with little re-engineering.
The damage they would do to the other Linux resellers would be enormous (in the short term) and if they could do a good enough job, they could become a huge longterm player and maybe even kill off the other players.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Sparc is dieing.
Hmmm, I thought they made chips on wafers, not dies.
Of course, it doesn't matter since Sparc is dying.
Advice: on VPS providers
I honestly believe that a lot of you haven't used Windows recently. I have XP running on 50 computers with 20 of those being laptop scattered all over the US. I can't remember the last time I had to fix a problem that directly involved Windows XP. 99.9% of my issues are due to drivers and third-party software that we use.
Its real easy, you make one install, tweaked and setup how the company needs it. You test it and then use that to build all the rest of the machines. If you encounter a problem on one it is very easy to fix on the rest.
Sure, I love Linux. I have three servers in my basement with over 600 hours of HD tv stored on them plus all my DVD, CD's and old VHS tapes. I have MythTV machines that are tweaked to where you'd have to be an inch away to hear any sound coming from them hooked up to all my TV's. Its great, took four fucking years to get right but it works now and I'm happy.
I don't have time to do that at work. I'm one person supporting 50 people. I don't have time to retrain them on Open Source software and we sure as hell aren't going to pay someone to do it. We hired a kid fresh out of college two years ago. It was our first hire in five years and the youngest hire we've ever had. It took her 1/10th of the time to get up to speed on our software (not Windows, the programs we use) than anyone else.
You know why? The interfaces were familiar and she knew where to look for things because that's what she had been using her whole computer life.
Its not as simple as Year of the Linux Desktop. So many of you have no idea how the business world works.
Obviously new OSes springing forth from Linux will remain open source. (At least, one can hope.)
Barring the entirety of copyright law being thrown out the window (or an SCO-like hijacking), OSs based on Linux must be open source. It is BSD kernels that risk being taken and closed-sourced
Microsoft, in the middle of one of the worst depressions since The Great (Old) One, is still reporting a profit. Not a loss, not even a small loss. It wasn't even a significantly lower profit than the ones they usually post. When companies like Intel were posting that their profit margins had slumped 90%, Microsoft's losses went from 4.5 billion to 4.1 billion.
Yes, Microsoft's bosses own a lot of Microsoft's shares, but the share prices will return to what they were and they get to buy back more now at discount rates. So they not only were richer than God to start off with, they'll be richer than most of the major pantheons combined once the market picks up.
So what possible incentive does Microsoft have to go Open Source? They have almost total control over 95-98% of the world's desktops. They have almost total control over virtually every OEM and every hardware manufacturer. People could boycott their entire product range for a decade and Microsoft would still be wealthier than every other OS vendor combined.
But people CAN'T boycott Microsoft. Virtually all manufacturers add in the cost of Windows into their systems. Even bare-bones systems likely carry some of that cost. I don't know how much Microsoft charges for permitting something to be classed as "certified", but no commercial company is going to permit the use of trademarks or promotional labels for free, which means all components will carry a Windows overhead as well.
So if you add up all these overheads that Microsoft gets for Windows, regardless of whether or not you actually buy the damn OS, my suspicion would be that you've paid the development costs long before you've paid the sticker price for the software. In which case, buying the OS is sheer profit for them. They can get along just fine if nobody actually buys a separate boxed copy ever again.
Sure, you can say that that means they have no motive to not switch to Open Source, but given their distaste for the methodology, I'd argue that it gives them even less motive to do so.
If the world's biggest software company can afford to underwrite fines larger than the GDP of some small countries, to the point where they're willing to keep infringing in total defiance of any rulings against them, and can swan through a severe global depression with a workforce cutback less than a third of either IBM or Panasonic (who have alternative revenue streams and no outstanding multi-billion-dollar fines), it's clear they are feeling next to no pressure to change their methods.
In fact, before this recession is over, it would not surprise me if Microsoft kills off the antivirus vendors (through questionable tactics, already well underway) and has made a bid for the software arm of IBM or Sun. They probably have more in loose change in the break rooms than Sun has in the bank, right about now. They might easily buy up Novell as well, crippling any competition SuSE might offer in the aftermath.
If they take out any two of those three, who precisely is going to form the competition?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
They'll do it by redefining open source. After all, they can wrap a proprietary file format up in XML so that instead of being a bunch of undocumented blobs in a binary stew they're a bunch of undocumented blobs in an XML stew, and manage to convince people to say things like this...
The proprietary file formats that have protected Microsoft apps have been offset by Office Open XML, the default format for Office 2007 and now an international standard.
I have a theory that most closed source remains closed source simply because the authors would die of embarrassment if anybody else saw what a steaming pile of crap they had written. Microsoft's "ship it when it is 'good enough' and let the customer complete the beta testing" philosophy probably doesn't allow for cleaning up old code bases to make them presentable.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It's stunning that the MSIE share of the browser market fell by only 5.8 percent in 2008. This speaks to the power of the default browser setting, and the inertia in the user community. FireFox, Safari and Chrome together only managed to chip away 5.8%? If Microsoft put forth a less than entirely crappy effort, MSIE would probably stop losing ground at all.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
MS still have their hands around the market's throat, but they can't seem to get a good grip.
The "operating system" substrate has grown slippery. Virtual machines, API emulation layers, web, multi-platform development frameworks ... Applications find it increasingly easy to run in numerous places.
The "communications system" substrate has grown slippery, too. Web standards and office document standards are at a practically workable level. Boom, like that, IE has slipped from de facto standard to mere competitor.
You don't need MS anymore. The stranglehold falters.
The OS and protocol lock-ins have been unhealthy for us all, needlessly fragmenting the space in which apps can run. I'll be glad to see it go. I give it 8 years before it's effectively neutralized. Then companies will compete more with the merit of their works than with their influence.
Come on, Steve's not a bad guy.
He's just kind of crazy.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
perhaps you should say "Windows NT 4.0 booted on Alpha, Mips, and PowerPC", as that is true. Running functionally on them is another matter entirely.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
Office is available on OS X....http://www.microsoft.com/mac/ all the appz work the same as their pc counterparts though entourage = outlook, I have no idea why they call it something different.
Ave Molech Setting
Economies of scale and the familiarity of the evil we know will always triumph over superior technology. Intel and AMD are probably spending $1 billion a year improving x86. Even if somebody designs a better CPU, if they can't afford to throw the R&D dollars at it that Intel and AMD are spending, then it will fall behind in a few years. Hence MIPS, Sparc, and PA-RISC, all of which initially showed some promise, have gone by the wayside.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I hope Open Source and Linux, and Sun and Apple can bring ms to its crouching duck-walk position as much as many others would like to see. But, MANY open source developers are simply going to have to come up with more polished user interfaces. App installation is STILL going to have to:
-- become as simple as click on the .tar, no yum /apt-get/ whatever
-- be as smart as installing with a click (after permissions have been determined valid and authorized)
-- and the installer will ALSO have to be smart enough to know how to just search for the Internet-available-but-signed-trusted choices of file are
I have on occasion probably used yum and apt-get and to a greater extent rpm and tar files. It SHOULD be easier. I am sure it IS easy. But, for me, it does not always work. If I have a need to get Rhyme working, and not all the deps are there, it's a show-stopper to face "repository not found", "dependencies (collide/incompatible...)"
But, that's just me and i have to sort these things out so i have less to complain about. BUT...
Joe Brockmeier has, :
http://ostatic.com/blog/open-source-windows-dont-count-on-it
"Open sourcing Windows wouldn't be a simple thing -- it took Sun years to comb through Solaris to start open sourcing it. If I recall correctly, Sun announced the initiative about a year before any code was released as open, and then other bits have been coming in dribs and drabs since. Windows would probably take even longer -- so, going from closed to open would take a couple of years and cost the company momentum even if they chose to do it.
There's also the legal bits. It would probably take Microsoft a very long time to review the code and ensure that it can be open sourced. I also suspect the company would be hesitant to show its code to the world in its present state -- no doubt, it'd take a while to go through the code just to scrub the comments. There's also the matter of third-party code that would need to be rewritten or relicensed to open source it. It's much easier to start a project using an open source license than it is to go from proprietary to open source."
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
You do realize that is basically a business model doomed to failure, right? They need the revenue from upgrades to recoup the princely sum wasted on Vista. If people don't upgrade, there's no more revenue until after - they hope - the next version release. Sure, there is still a trickle of new sales, but it's the revenue from repeat business - the upgrades - that really keeps everything afloat.
This is precisely why software publishers are aggressively pushing "Web apps" and even universal thin clients again: it would guarantee no flakes who only pay once and then take the ball and go home. In a subscription model, people either pay them money every month/year, or they don't get to use the software, PERIOD. There's less accountability for bad design in that model.
Given the current software business model, it's VERY bad for business when customers hold developers accountable for mediocre upgrades and simply choose not to buy them. Amazingly, apparently a lot of people do in fact refuse, and hang onto their bucks until an upgrade is offered that provides features they actually want enough to pay for them. Don't believe me? Try asking Philippe Kahn about how it hurt his wallet when people ignored Borland's manic upgrades.
Sorry folks, Linus essentially conceded this just yesterday. There will never be a 'year of the Linux desktop' because there will never be a single Linux desktop. Nobody seems to want it - or even to want to try to get as close as possible. Not the various distros, not Linus, not a hell of a lot of Linux fans.
Of course ISV's still want it. Businesses with a need for low-cost IT want it. I want it. So do [some of] you.
But Linus has a point. Yes folks, it is true that diversity is one of our strengths. It has been responsible for Linux becoming as good as it is as quickly as it has (and that's pretty damn good, and pretty damn quick). But let's face up to the downside of that strangth. Incompatible distros and a chaotic development cycle are non-starters as far as mainstream desktops are concerned. ISV's won't target you - ISV's can't target you. But most desktop users still want at least some 3rd party software that's not available from their distro's repositories.
I want it, and so, probably do you. Well, actually I don't want it so bad. I don't run TurboTax or Quicken (though my partner does run them via dual-boot on my machine). I don't run Photoshop or 3D games. But if Flash weren't there, I'd bail. Well, maybe not. Still, you get my point. My desktop essentially is an internet appliance. And (don't shoot me) I was given an iPod for my birthday a few years ago, and I actually like it - and dual-boot to Windows to maintain it. Even used it as an excuse to upgrade to an XP-based box so I could maintain it (linux worked fine on my old 1998-vintage PC before that).
For now, we in appliance land are lucky that there are enough non-desktop'y devices that can use linux that hardware gets at least grudging support from manufacturers. Better where the device applications are more obvious.
I'll end with what should be an obvious point. Why do you think Vista has failed so spectacularly? Because XP is still completely useable 8 years into its life cycle. Of course, if it weren't, then Windows may well have failed too. Backward compatibility is Windows' biggest strength - perhaps its only strength compared to the competition. And Linux will never have it, because it's creators don't want it, or don't understand why it's important, or just don't care. They're having a grand old time rewriting KDE and GNOME from the ground up every 2 years.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
As another poster already pointed out, this isnt really true. Windows NT booted on other architectures, but never really provided working systems on them for most purposes. This was a consequence of the unfree characteristics of the Windows ecosystem - the vast majority of the assortment of third party tools that need to be added to Windows to actually do most things never ported over to NT on other archs. The companies that made them had no motivation to allocate resources to port them, because the markets were not large enough, and the markets never grew because the apps werent ported. If you were lucky enough to have an Alpha machine at the time, for instance, you could boot NT on it and run a mean game of solitaire, but precious little more. MS tried to solve this with an emulator, but this worsened the problem - now you could boot NT and run an app, but once you started the app the emulated performance was comparable to an x86 machine you could have gotten at a fraction of the price, while the app makers were even less motivated to make a proper port because they could just tell you to use the emulator.
THIS is one huge advantage a Free OS with Free ecosystem has - the manufacturer doesnt have to allocate resources to port to new and promising architectures. Enthusiasts who use the apps can pitch in unbidden and do it themselves. This allows a promising new arch a chance to grow to critical mass without getting caught in an unsolvable chicken and egg problem.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
âoePeople of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantageâ - John Kenneth Galbraith
It wouldn't make any sense for Microsoft to go open source at this time. Firstly, the only people who should care about open source should be developers. You hear a lot of people whining in linux about how everything should be open, but barely any supporters (companies and individuals alike) look at the code. And if people aren't going to modify or analyse the code, what's the point? Secondly, developers can already do everything they need to in windows without seeing the source code. What do you guys honestly think developers can add, that they can't now? Windows is quite extendible...
I think most people misunderstand the difference between freeware, and open source. Microsoft may possibly make windows much cheaper one day to eliminate the competition (Mark Shuttleworth himself said, its difficult to compete when windows is free). However, Microsoft has enough developers, they certainly don't need community help. I don't mean to call the author of this article an idiot per say, but he clearly doesn't understand the benefits/cons between open source and freeware. Windows is already extendible enough these days to not require it being open sourced.
Furthermore, OSX Darwin is open, and nobody cares! The only reason Apple cares about open source is because they essentially take a lot of code from the community, but give very little back.
Microsoft isn't going bankrupt anytime soon so its not as though you will be making a risk by purchasing windows, and be unable to maintain it in the future!
Theres very little reason people would need to look at the source code.. Must go Open Source?? HAHAHA. NO! There is little point, both for Microsoft and users. Maybe it will go freeware though...
Kind of like those annual antivirus program licences that many people who thought about it for half a second stopped paying for, and installed a freeware program instead.
Maybe it would work for Windows, if they found the right price point for a licence fee, but it might also backfire and encourage people to look at Mac or Linux options.
Open source, when used to mean GPL style OSS, means that it will be free, like it or not. You are perfectly welcome to charge for it, however the first person who buys it can redistribute it freely. Thus you can't make money selling software.
An observant person will note that RedHat doesn't make money selling software, they sell support. Likewise other companies in the Linux market make it not on software, but in other ways. When Linksys used Linux on their routers, the money was made on the hardware, not on the software.
So OSS forces the software to be free. You have to find a different model for making money.
all the appz work the same as their pc counterparts
Not quite. For example, the most recent release has no VBA support.
Well, he doesn't suggest MSFT should or will open-source Windows "at this time." He suggests they will have to at some future point, and he makes some excellent points in TFA. I think he may well be right, and I used to work at Microsoft, so I know full well how hard it would be to turn that particular oil tanker.
Why open source and not freeware? Making it freeware would remove just as much revenue from the stream as open-sourcing it would, but it would leave both the entire support burden and the entire development burden on Microsoft. Compare that to the Linux model, where support and development (especially support) are very strongly community-oriented. Sure, there are companies paying kernel developers and some other developers, but there are plenty of developers in that ecosystem who contribute much or all of their time for free. Most of them, in fact. Nearly all Linux-support is community-based.
I'm not suggesting that open-sourcing Windows would alter the Windows ecosystem to the point where it would be just like the Linux ecosystem, but it would move somewhat in that direction. Look at all the buzz that OpenSolaris has generated for Sun. I would not be surprised to see Microsoft pursue a substantially identical strategy in the future. OpenWindows, anyone?
Developers already do everything they need to in Windows without seeing the source code? Yeah, riiiiiiiiiiight. They do everything they're *allowed* to do, not everything they need or want.
Speaking of developers, the people who you say are the only ones who should care about open source (I disagree, there are very strong reasons why everyone should care, but those aren't necessarily relevant here, so I'll leave that), one of the main points TFA makes is that it will be necessary to open-source Windows in some form to retain developer mindshare among the over 6 million independent developers who develop for the Windows platform. Open source software is already making inroads there, and will continue to do so. If Microsoft were to open-source not only Windows but much or all of its development environment, that could go a long way to holding those developers to the Windows platform. Why do this? To keep Windows a viable platform for the Microsoft products that (it hopes) will continue to make a lot of money.
Of course, one of those may find its revenue-producing ability reduced to the point where they might as well open-source it or make it freeware: MS Office. If they don't, they'll have to cut the price to a small fraction of what they currently get. Google Docs on one side and OpenOffice.org on the other will prove themselves good enough for most people. At least good enough that paying hundreds of dollars for MS Office will not make sense.
What will they make money on, then? Exchange, Sharepoint, SQL Server, etc. Enterprise products that enterprises will pay for. However, that requires a strong OS ecosystem, something open-sourcing Windows would encourage. Or they can give up on the Windows franchise and sell versions of those products to run on Unix, Linux, and a Windows server product and basically exit the desktop OS business. That would make a lot of sense, but having worked there, I believe they're rather do anything - even open-source Windows - than do that.
I recycle old computers for various social organizations that dont have any money and money IS important to them, just like it is for the people who come to the food bank where I work on weekends.
Money is not important to you but in many countries it is. Heck, in your own country it is.
Just this winter, I had a single mother of two whose kids go at my son's school ask me about the costs of software since she heard I knew computers. She told me she could afford a second hand computer but that the prices of Windows, Office and Norton more than she can budget for. I let her use my backup laptop for a week to see how she liked OO instead of Office on her laptop and she was amazed that for $120 I was able to find her an Intel 2.66Ghz desktop that would run Gnu-Linux nicely.
She's not poor by any stretch but she still has to count her money carefully and a few hundred bucks is a big deal.
Try to think of people who arent in your financial situation when you say no one looks at price or cost.
We do pretty well but I hate spending money when I dont have to.
It is very interesting how this article compares with http://www.cyberconf.org/~cynbe/rants/lastdino.htmThe Last Dinosaur and the Tarpits of Doom, which is just this month a decade old.
If you just look on the surface, the Tarpit predictions were clearly wrong. 2010 is only 10 months away, so if Windows is going to be "as dead as CP/M", it had better get started.
On the other hand, a lot of the predictions in there do seem to be in the process of coming true. For instance, when Tarpit was written, MS never bothered to pay stock dividends because investors were always more than pleased with just the stock's growth. That has changed, and now they are having to pay a relatively huge dividend just to keep stockholders happy. This is the classic sign of a http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/money_co/2009/01/microsoft-stock.htmldead growth stock. To top it off, TFA makes a lot of the same predictions. Both have as their thesis that Microsoft will have to OpenSource to survive. The main difference in tone is that Tarpit's author thought they probably wouldn't, and TFA's author thinks they probably will.
You could argue that their logic is just as much BS now as it was a decade ago. Could argue it well in fact. However, one could also argue that Tarpit's main flaw was in trying to "extrapolate the exponential" in the optimistic way it did, and that the rest of the argument is sound and in the process of becoming reality.
It'd be a really really bad idea to release the source code for the most widely attacked OS. Considering it is already heavily under attack from hackers because of its ubiquity (and er vunerability) it would be a worldwide security disaster to release source code on top of that. Microsoft is already rather slow to patch even with tight control of code and spec.
What you first need is the coding community to maintain it. This is rather the reverse of software that has emerged from OSS circles rather than been thrown to it as is (which is fine for a company abandoning something that is still Good but not Profitable). I don't think the author really grasps this amongst all the other rather obvious challenges he fails to address that face moving a completely proprietary stack to a free licence.
It's nice to imagine Windows being free as in beer, but beer really isn't free unless you steal it or brew it yourself.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
nor will they ever. The best you can do is ask Microsoft to open up every API call that Windows XP and below uses so that WINE and ReactOS can be made to support more API calls to be more compatible with Windows XP and people can write their own open source Windows XP compatible operating system while Microsoft moves on to Windows 7.0 8.0 9.0 using new undocumented API calls.
Why Microsoft won't open source Windows, it is not in their business plan. Microsoft is experimenting with open source with smaller projects to see if they can profit from smaller open source projects.
Microsoft still wants Windows pre-loaded with most PCs sold so that they can keep their OS Monopoly via those OEM contracts. They bundle MS-Office, Internet Explorer, Media Player, MSN Network client, Windows Live services, etc with each pre-loaded PC. This is all part of Microsoft's business plan and it works so well that they dominate marketshare and got the DOJ and EU angry at them for pre-loading software and shutting out competitors.
Unless Microsoft can figure out a new business plan that makes money off open sourced Windows, I really doubt they will go that route. ReactOS is your best bet at a Windows XP/2003 compatible open source OS, or use WINE with Linux.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
> Fortunately most chipsets do not take well to waterboarding and the system is soon out of it's misery.
Actually, they use mineral oil instead of water, but the word mineralboarding sounds funny.
If the hyperbole and creative spelling doesn't do it, and if the suspicious links don't, either, then this might.
Windows has consistently failed to deliver what customers want, but free software does that by definition
What, fail to deliver what customers want ?
And Coca-Cola should open source their recipee too! Cause they already have such a big market share that it would be impossible for anyone to beat them... C'mon!