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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."
*thud*
-- The Princess Bride
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
It made Microsoft a lot of money at one time, but they are simply not the only game in town, and the software has matured enough that the concept of making hwolesale changes in look and feel both isn't enough, and too much to handle at the same time.
I get all my Operating systems free already, so using a Microsoft one is just an added and sometimes unpleasant expense.
Welcome to 2015 Microsoft, you might actually like it and do well here.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Remember that part when Microsoft announced that there will be free upgrades to windows 10 for everyone, even pirated copies, and then boom, the next day some "clarifications" about the legitimacy of these upgrades were released? Same thing here.
The engi will say whatever he wants, the final decision is taken by accounting/legal departments and, yeah, they *love* open source stuff...
Steve Ballmer warned us that Linux was a cancer. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
Now the mothership itself in infected. Open source??? OMG. 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.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
MS has been doing a good job lately of saying things that are obviously non-committal (or seemingly committal but actually not when someone digs in and notes a complication and MS won't clarify).
This one goes extra far by conflating Linux open source and how it functions and therefore if Windows were open source, then migration from Linux would be a no-brainer. Of course without promising that but getting that into the 'hearts and minds'.
Of course, I have a hard time blaming them for this. The tech media has all but written eulogies for Windows and have painted MS as a company that is only barely relevant by way of Azure and related cloud services. Despite the fact that they earn about twice as much revenue as Google and their biggest money makers are *still* Windows and Office (by revenue and by an even wider margin by profit). However the story that MS is still one of the biggest tech companies and mostly because of the same stuff that made them big 20 years ago isn't such a sexy story. The revenue and margin on traditional Windows and Office are staggering. Traditional Office revenue dwarfs Office 365 and Office 365 is lower margin.
In short, no they won't be ditching their cash cow to compete with the open source vendors with combined revenue that doesn't match Microsoft's only income. There's two tech companies with more revenue than Microsoft, and neither builds the meat of their business on open source (IBM and Apple). Yes they will continue to feed the media confusing rhetoric to help create false impressions to counteract the media's love of inventive explanations and extrapolation. The biggest risk to MS as a business is getting too caught up in their own smokescreen (e.g. Windows 8 Metro UI).
Of course, I'd rather have less Microsoft in my life, but the likely candidates (ChromeOS, IOS and Android) are not what I would consider an improvement. OSX and Linux desktop distributions I find nice enough, but there's no signs of those superseding Windows.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
In a world where everyone is practically required to carry a telescreen which tracks them at all times, which spouts approved government "Amber Alerts" and panicky National Security Alarms -- devices which you can be imprisoned for "jailbreaking" -- will Microsoft become the lesser of the evils?
Under which license? Is Microsoft going to allow forks and multiple Windows distros?
And how long before Poettering notices and ports systemd to Windows?
Have gnu, will travel.
What a fellow says at a technical conference and the gilded intent of a multinational corporation couldnt be further from each other. Microsoft has proven in the past that it prefers to milk open source with a blend of strategic patent litigation against manufacturers, not participate. Its embrace-extend attempt with 3 of its own open source licenses fell flat with the usual day-late-dollar-short microsoft approach to competing in the marketplace, but that was partly because Redmond didnt understand the whole point. Open source was a categorical departure from microsofts business model, it was a cathartic rebellion from coders who were sick of a cloistered elite being given access to the source. It was an uprising against the idea of software as service only.
so as far as this opinion is concerned, it boils down to an obvious assumption. As the turd swirls the drain anything is possible. Windows could become open source, or it could become cloud, or it could become freeware, but as Microsoft sees fit to drive it Windows has only become more aggravating and less relevant. Nowhere is this truer than in XBox, where the successful game console has in true Redmond fashion been hobbled to the uncertain, haggared burro known as Windows 10 in a desperate attempt to pre-emptively save it. The real question is between surface, phone, azure, and the microsoft market how much more XBox cash can microsoft use as a salve for products they dont care to change and insist must be a part of a market that doesnt need them
Good people go to bed earlier.
Who wants to download buggy, ugly, insecure stuff?
That's popular among Linux guys... ;)
Mark Russinovich is the guy who made the Sysinternals suite of programs, which are highly valuable utilities for your system. I've gotten great use out of Filemon and Procmon so many times.
Come on, do better than that. Of course any individual can play with Linux all they want. We're not talking individual here. We're talking a behemoth corporation with long standing corporate policies and a legal department dictating licensing on what the collective can use on a day to day basis with an auditing department to enforce them and an onsite security team to give personal escort service to those who break those policies. It's highly doubtful that they would have authorization to "play" with Linux on their systems arbitrarily without first having a policy change coming from above.
As an example I work for a company that only has Windows installed on its workstations, you think I can wipe its hard drive and put my favorite Linux Distro on it so I can "play" with it here while using it to build .NET programs for the business? Not unless I want to have a personal escort carrying me out of the building 2 minutes later. In the 3 years I've worked here, we've lost 2 employees this way.
So the engineer is right. If the customer is using Linux technologies that the Microsoft Employees cannot by corporate policy play with - and by extension provide professional support - then they can't be a customer of Microsoft... unless there's a major policy change that comes down the pipe from above.
I don't find Windows 10 to be buggy at all anymore. The latest version is completely solid.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
In the 3 years I've worked here, we've lost 2 employees this way.
Well, if you haven't noticed yet, your employer's doing something wrong. You need to give developers a bit more freedom if you want decent bits.
That is all.
Why would anyone adopt the Linux kernel (encumbered by the GPL) when they can use (and sell) the unencumbered FreeBSD one free?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Which won't by them anything.. They throw out their singular primary advantage (backwards compatibily for decades of application) for.... well actually not much of anything. The Linux kernel can do tricks that Windows kernel cannot, but in the scheme of things not something that will boost MS revenue. The BSD kernels are already roughly at the same functional level, so no new function from that area.
It made sense for Apple because they had only their classic OS which was clearly ill-equipped in fundamental ways and it let them skip the investment of doing it from scratch. MS had already spent that money, so they don't get to skip anything.
If MS started doing a linux distro, it probably would do more harm than good. Distrusted by the target market with a value add that would probably amount to making it easier to manage linux *like* windows, but at that point why not just run Windows? I'd personally be more swayed by the ability to muck about with Windows in the same style as linux, but I recognize that would be a bad idea for Windows.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
No company permits 'arbitrary' software. Many companies do trust the employees to understand licensing and 'play with' free software. They generally have an education course on how to find licensing terms and to read the license more deeply for signs of 'commercial use clauses' and what GPL means versus BSD and so on and so forth.
IBM doesn't bat an eye when if an employee puts Fedora on a company asset. They have your ass if you put any open source code into any product without legal review, and also if you use a partner's source code and contribute anything open source based on that. So yes, a long standing large company that is very very very careful about software licensing will go along with it.
Not all 'playing with' is for personal gain. Some of it enables advancing your companies agenda/saving costs/etc. I would not use my personal resources for exploring things that would advance my company without much gratification for me on a personal level.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I dual-booted slackware with Linux 0.97-pl2 on my testing machine at Microsoft, and nobody gave a damn.