Microsoft Engineer: Open Source Windows Is 'Definitely Possible'

An anonymous reader writes: Speaking at ChefCon, Microsoft Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich talked briefly about the prospect of some or all of Windows going open source. He said, "It's definitely possible. It's a new Microsoft." Russinovich acknowledged the reality that most developers and IT workers have embraced open source software to run some or all of their machines, and that means Microsoft needs to adapt. He also noted that Microsoft is beginning to adopt a strategy familiar to open source vendors: give away the software, and then sell support and related products. "It lifts them up and makes them available for our other offerings, where otherwise they might not be. If they're using Linux technologies that we can't play with, they can't be a customer of ours."

Comments

BWAH HA HA HA HA HA

[mrflash818]

*thud*

-- The Princess Bride

Re:It's that damn cancer!

[bulled]

But really, if real programmers ever got their hands on Windows under a GPL, they would just strip out anything of value and add it to Linux. Really.

So that kernel would look remarkably like the one we have today :)

Re:Its all about the app store

[jones_supa]

Who wants to download buggy, ugly, insecure stuff?

That's popular among Linux guys... ;)

Re:It's that damn cancer!

[binarylarry]

OR we could add Systemd to Windows in an unholy marriage of awful!

Winning!

Re:It's that damn cancer!

[Billly Gates]

Have you used SystemD?

It is quick and wonderful. Only hate is from trolls who like to start flamewars which he is since he went on about VS and Apple and system administrators who do not want change and have thousand line rc filed which are really programs with logic and data together with nested if/else which reference other scripts in a unholy mess of thousands threads that boot at startup who see nothing wrong with that??