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Open Source Windows
Kazen sent us
a link an an InfoWorld story where Balmer talks about
Open Source for Windows 2000.
Is he serious? What would it mean? Betcha it would mean
YAOSL (yet another Open Source License).
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This article at the SJ Mecury site gives a little more insight into Microsoft's thinking on the licensing issue, in short, licensing and royalty payments are being considered. Methinks BP and ESR should fire up their text editors and get busy firing off some preemptive letters warning about the use of the term "Open Source."
From the article:
`There would be all kinds of issues that we would need to address first,'' noted David Cole, vice president of Microsoft's Web Client and Consumer Experience Division. ``We would have to find out how willing companies would be to give us the code they developed, how we would incorporate that code into our products, and what the licensing and royalty payments might be.''
slashdot broke my sig
"thinking with great interest" about opening up Windows source code means that they are happy to grab some positive publicity by talking about nice friendly concepts without actually putting a time frame on any activity or specifying what that activity will be.
Ballmer said there were some drawbacks to making Windows code widely available because he wants to make it sound like his main concern is for the customer. Microsoft's main concern, of course, is how to leverage, decommoditise, cut off air supplies, and rake in millions, and going truly open source will undoubtedly cause more substantial problems for these corporate goals than the horrors a typical corporation faces by receiving source code to software it already uses. Microsoft is well aware that for the purposes of PR, one must pretend not to have such introverted concerns, especially if they might not be in perfect harmony with the good of the customer.
He offered no further elaboration because it might have meant actually committing to a concrete course of action, rather than scoring cheap positive PR points.
They are looking at opening the Windows NT kernel, which means they aren't so foolish as to make the source to an entire operating system available. They know the value of secrecy, and they aren't going to give away more secrets than they feel will be best for them on the whole. Opening up the entire operating system would merely attract hoards of programmers who wanted to make a free compatible version, a la WINE.
Valentine characterized Linux as "momentum without a lot of design wins," because (and this information comes from a highly reliable source -- my imagination) it is official Microsoft policy to mention Linux only in the context of FUD, combined with the reassurance that they are making all the possible real advantages of Linux available in Windows, only better because it's Microsoft in control.
If the company continues to see Linux "popping up everywhere," Valentine said, it will move to keep its competitive edge. This is a shot across the bow to Linux-boosters, of course, but it's real significance is not directed to us. The main reason for it is that the market likes to be reassured that their bazillion dollar investments in Microsoft software (and stocks, for that matter) are in no danger of being marginalised. "Please, Microsoft," says the market, "speak words of hope and reassurance to us," and Microsoft only too happily obliges. "Can't they see that Linux is better for them," you may ask. Have you met some of these people? But I digress...
There are all different types of ways you can do open source, such as making the source available to people who already have the license for the software, but under strict nondisclosure and with no right to give away "derived works". That isn't "Open Source", of course, but one could call it "open source" in some plain English sense, just like you could call Internet Explorer "free software" in a plain English sense. Didn't IBM used to provide source to their mainframe operating systems? Didn't this cause troubles because local "fixes" weren't necessarily compatible with IBM's future releases? The systems weren't Open Source, of course, which was part of the problem. This, no doubt, is what Mr Ballmer was referring to when he talked about the disadvantages of open source, which may in turn give us some clues as to how he's thinking.
Executive summary: Linux FUD, and weasel words.
Pardon me memory, but I seem to recall that at the trail they claimed that many lines fo source code we lost for good. It is not really possibal for them to open source something they don't have source for is it?
The most chilling comment is at the end of
the article that M$ is "looking to get into
open source initiatives"...
...I interpret that chilling comment as:
"We're going to see if we can f*ck with the
Apache group and maybe throw a few wrenches
into Perl and the Linux kernel..."
I say let M$ stay the way it is so it can
die a natural death -- otherwise if we
encourage them they'll keep pumping crap
into the market and being the same damn
nuisance to us all.
This is an excellent point. This is Microsoft at its "innovative" best.
What IF Microsoft released the source to their OS under an NPL-like licence?
That sure is going to tear up a lot of people who claim they're in favour of open source for the "moral aspects" of it.... I think that if Microsoft does this, we're going to see a lot of flaming akin to the KDE vs. GNOME battle - no matter how much one side tries, the other side continues to aimlessly flame away.
Microsoft is a very competitive company with some questionable businesses practices, and some "less than innovating" products...so what - that doesn't exactly make them evil. I don't like them, nor their products, but I do understand that they (Ballmer especially) are *bright* people. If they see business benefit with open source, they'll use it.
-Stu
So actually, they're using it as a bludgeon against Sun and more precisely Jini, not just for PR purposes.
Looks like M$'s getting some good backing for it though.
This will help developers, and especially accademia. Imagine being able to highlight examples in lectures (be they good or bad) by pointing to the Windows Source code! I know you can do this with Linux, but Windows is still the most popular desktop OS, so makes a better example (IMHO :-)
Another advantage is if they release the source for somehting like the NT kernal. AFAIK, and I may be wrong, but the NT kernal is pretty well designed (by that I'm refering to the modularity of the thing). As a researcher in a University working on OSs, I'd be very interested in seeing this.
As for comments that "no one will understand it as it's so large" well, if the day ever happends (and I'm very skeptical) then expect thrid party books on the matter to appear very soon afterward. Imagine having "NT Kernal Internals" next to "Linux Kernal Internals".
-- DougalPlease note this in the message you were responding to from Cassius:
It wold be impossible to comprehend and modify in a useful way unless you had a team of literally thousands [...]
Debain has over 400 developers which mostly just maintain packages. Each of those packages have upstream developers who do most of the non-debian specific work. Think of the number of upstream developers for the Linux kernel, glibc, gnome, XFree86, KDE, gcc, etc. So, Debian does have litterally thousands of people working on it.
That being said, Cassius finishes the line with "[ ... ][ working in very close conjunction with you (i.e. in the same building as you 8 hours a day)." which clearly Debian doesn't have. So, I guess in someways you are both right. You would need litterally thousands of people, but they wouldn't have to be in the same building.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
Of any of the above things - I can't really imagine this doing anything bad for Linux. I can however see it as being very bad for Microsoft - their business model just doesn't fit well around open source, and so they are hoping that it will be a magic wand to make the Justice Department leave them alone. I hope the JD aren't that naive.
Matt.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Highly doubtful. Possible, I suppose, since the biggest money-maker MS has is actually Office, not Windows. But even if they did release it, their license would probably make the APSL look like the GPL by comparison.
Note that I still condiser the APSL to be Open-Source, though no GPL (I don't support the FSF's move to specifically exclude APSL by changing the definition of free software), but since it seems many zealots here don't agree I figured the comparison was still valid.
To quote a great statesman:
/., far more than APSL, which will waste time and energy from more productive pursuits for about 72 hours.
"The only thing we need fear is fear itself"
Why do people get into such a frenzy about every statement coming out of Redmond? Should we really care? I think not.
Scenario 1 (most likely):
M releases the W2K kernel source code under highly restrictive licensing to major corporations only. PR move only - see, they say, you have the soruce code too so you can feel warm and fuzzy.
PR Impact on GNU/Linux movement: Positive (hey, Microsoft is confirming the "business model")
Real Impact: 0. No programming talent will be diverted.
Scenario 2: (possible but Less likely) Microsoft releases the W2K Kernel source code under YAOSL
PR Impact on GNU/Linux movement: Ibid, but even more so. Of course, when no one jumps on the bandwagon, M will declare Open Source a failure and that may have some FUD impact. (notice how little permanent FUD impact wassisname's noisy resignation from Mozilla has had).
Real Impact: -.01 Alot of heat and flames on
Prediction: ESR embraces Microsoft YAOSL as true Open Source. In which case up this to -.03
Scenario 3: M releases W2K kernel with an NPL-like license. Likelihood: In this case, I suggest you all stack up on survival kits, 'cause Armagaddon will surely come and the dead will rise from their graves.
Note I have the only code mentioned at all is the W2K kernel. M might release some other minor, useless stuff (like DOS 2.1) using YAOSL. The impact in this case will be similar to scenario 2 above.
A small group of developers have brought forth the idea that because the Netscape code for Netscape Navigator was so large and pondersome to comprehend that a minority of programmers wanted to help on the project, much less than Netscape had planned on, and this was because the code was so large and so complex. If the same is true for Microsoft code, who is ever going to want to use it? Besides, who would want to taint Linux by using Microsoft code ..
Stan "Myconid" Brinkerhoff
SB.
Didn't Bill give like $3 million to some world fund to vaccinate children in third world countries a while back? :-)
(By accepting this vaccine you agree to have your brain replaced by Microsoft Brain Explorer 5)
Stan "Myconid" Brinkerhoff
SB.
That'd be the day.
:)
Last I heard, MS just buys out a company when it wants to roll their code into Windows. What's this "MS licenses stuff" crap?
What worries me about "Windows 2000 open source" is the idea that Microsoft would try to retain intellectual-property rights to the entire codebase, so you COULD submit changes etc.... you just couldn't use any MS code, even as a reference, in your own projects - which makes it worthless for stuff like WINE (good from the MS perspective).
Nothing worth doing is worth doing today.
We all seem to forget that we have the source code already available to us ... albeit in x86 assembly. That's right, use the Microsoft executable DEBUG.EXE on any binary with the (U)nassemble command, you get a dump of all of the neato-bandito asm instructions which make the system work.
:)
Sure, it's huge, but so is 35 million lines of C++. And from what I hear, most of those 35 million lines become nop instructions anyway =).
Moreover, Microsoft can't sue you -- assembly instructions are self-evident in the machine code, and any parser to translate asm-to-C (not that any work worth a damn) would make drastically different code in appearance, although similar in functionality.
Personally, I'd like to run the Windows instructions through gnu as to see what would happen -- but oh wait, I've got better things to do with my time
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
One of the most valuable aspects of having the OS source is application and/or driver development. I don't want to modify it--I just want to know how to make my code painlessly interact with it.
I can't tell you the number of times I didn't bother with the Linux man pages and just dropped straight into the code to see the structures I needed to pass down. Linux driver development is much easier when you don't have to fight the OS along the way.
There are times with Windows development where you run into crap that's either so badly documented or completely undocumented that you wish you could just peek at the source to see what the @#!$ they expect you to pass as parameters.
Also check out a similar story on The Register.
http://193.122.103.82/990408-000001.html
(The Register is on a temporary IP address while moving to a new ISP.)
Simply releasing 30 million lines of code out to developers isn't going to be of much use to anyone.
It wold be impossible to comprehend and modify in a useful way unless you had a team of literally thousands working in very close conjunction with you (i.e. in the same building as you 8 hours a day). In other words, unless you are working at Microsoft, it is unlikely your organization will be able to make sense of the code.
As for individuals downloading the code, 30 million lines of code might as well be in hex. You'll never comprehend it in your lifetime.
This is a similar dilemma to Mozilla - developers have very little interest in delving deep into cruft, whether it be documented or not.
In other words, this is obviously a PR move.
don't get fixed. If M$ lost the source code, you can't very well fix and improve it! But, you can ADD to it. Hmmm.
I haven't read through all of the comments here yet, but my impression is that the M$ Windows is stuck in it's own paradigm, that it would be difficult to move in another direction than M$ has been taking it. I feel that Linux so much farther ahead and designed in a better paradigm (IMHO) that there is not much motivation to look into the Windows source (aside from curiousity reasons).
I'm curious to know how long it would take some other company (already established or startup) to learn the source code and develop a new Windows "distribution". Is that really possible? Will people really buy it if it doesn't look the same as M$-Windows?
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
OTOH, M$ working methods would have to be drastically altered. It all seems like a very long shot for these reasons alone. Would they continue with daily builds? Would these be posted? Near the end when stabilization is the preeminent concern, would they really want outsiders opinions about the hack vs. fix trade-off decisions? How would they handle the product readiness and release to manufacturing decisions? Openly? That would be rich. The outside tinkerers and perfectionists would certainly be an irritation at the endgame. That's one phenomena the Mozilla crew has yet to face.
This is why closed source open source transitions don't work very well for a while. The code in place just isn't designed for distributed development. It's generally full of get-me-to-market hacks, rather than well-thought stable design.
Open Source is more than just releasing code -- it requires setting up an infrastructure where that code can be used/modified.
As an aside, I'd say that Mozilla *was* cruft. Now it's just a really big project. But hopefully it (is | will be) broken down enough that modules can be hacked easily.
pooptruck
According to www.openresources.com, Debian 2.1 is over 70 Million lines of code. And that's managable by a group of volunteeers.
(Not quite an apples-to-apples comparision with Win2000 because Debian's number probably includes all 300 window managers and so on. But Win2000 does include IIS, multi-user, routing, and unix services.)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I'm sorry but this one ranks up there with "MS Linux" in the paranoia factor. Microsoft's SMB file sharing backwards compatible with 15 year old networking products from IBM.
Could Microsoft break Samba in some subtle way? Probably, but they'd also be breaking WfW, DOS clients, OS/2, and everything else that's ever used SMB. Microsoft's customers would form a lynch mob.
As for hiring lots of genius programmers, MS may not produce the best products, but they produce lots and lots of products. (Compare this to various grand plans from Netscape, Apple, Lotus, etc. that never got out the door.) I doubt there is a computer company in existance that doesn't compete with at least one MS product.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
AT&T's "LanMan for Unix" product (now resold by Sun and SCO) goes back to the Microsoft OS/2 1.x days in the 1980s. Back then MS only had like 10% of the file-and-print market so it was reasonable to licence the SMB protocol and Domain security stuff to anyone who wanted it. Not much has changed protocol-wise since then.
IBM owns this code too, and could do the same thing in theory. Me wonders why they don't.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Hmmm - this is from Microsoft's web site:
o mplete/boes/bo/winntas/technote/implemntin tegra/dnswp2.htm
Some people might ask, what is the Microsoft DNS and why should I use it? Well let's start out by telling you what it is not. First, the Microsoft DNS server is not a port of the Berkley BIND code (which is currently at revision 10.4 as of the writing of this paper). We made a conscious decision to not port the BIND code, but rather write our own code that was fully RFC compliant and compatible with BIND.
http://technet.microsoft.com/cdonline/content/c
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Gates has given 100s of millions away. The fact that people don't know this only shows that he hasn't been doing it for PR purposes.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Right on. The mindset it takes to believe that Microsoft would intentionally break their own server-client "solution" is pretty bizarre.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Remember, those 30 million lines of code are actually an awful lot of smaller programs running together. It almost certianly includes IE, DirectX, COM, Notepad, Minesweeper, Wordpad, Hyperterminal and 5000 other small programs and DLL's.
That would make it a lot easier to play around with than Mozilla was. You could just modify the TCP/IP stack, or just the Direct3D code, or whatever.
My Journal
I wanna get my hands on that DNA strand and fix a few bugs.
IIRC most of the money he's `given' to Third world nations has been for the dubious prospect of `population management'. One classic quote from Gates I read in the Journal stated that he believes that `overpopulation in the third world is the biggest problem to face America'. While that may sound nice, I think it boilds down to `I-like-my-big-house-and-segregated-neighborhood-a nd-there's-too-many-dark-skinned-people- in-the-world-anyway' mentality. If I were a native of the Third world, I would view mass sterilisation drives (such as armies of nurses to implant IUDs) as a masked form of genocide. Rather than stopping reproduction, introduce the changes to society that give us the American system where people reproduce at a moderate rate.
--jon. Postel is dead. May we all mourn his, and our, loss.
That's spooky, besides, why would MS do this? Well, best guess is that it's a tactic to for the DoJ! Besides, who would wanna see MS sourcecode anyways? I bet the WINE guys couldn't use it... I'd be willing to bet no one will be able to use it...
People do read the code and find GPL or BSD code in there
Don't need to read the source code to prove that. Just take "ftp.exe" from Win95 for example:
%strings ftp.exe
[...]
GetModuleHandleA
KERNEL32.DLL
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
All rights reserved.
ascii
script name = %s
[...]
Obviously from BSD code, but there's nothing in the BSD license that prohibits this.
-- Alastair
The phrasing is usually "Microsoft hires the best talent they can find". The phrase "they can find" carries the implication "that are willing to work for them for what Microsoft is offering".
Well, doesn't every company do that? ("Best" being a somewhat subjective measure here.) Anyone know of any companies that set out to hire the second best talent they can find, or the worst talent?
It's just more of MS is best at: marketspeak.
-- Alastair
With all the hoopla in the press about Open Source, people outside of Slashdot are beginning to take notice. This includes the opportunists. Even Al Gore is joining in without first considerring the consequences.
First off, there is nothing inherently good about Open Source unless it is practiced correctly, just like democracy. Haphazardly claiming every project should be open source without basic redesigns is as dangerous as throwing out an incumbant government in favor of a new democracy.
Without proper treatment, such a farce could lead to anarchy, or worse. Such is the fate of projects (like mozilla) and companies who would attempt to go to open source without changing their business model.
But, just like China, Russia, and even Nazi Germany claimed they were "democracies" , bad people and misguided people will claim the Open Source movement for their own purposes. Make no mistake about it- these opportunists have come to slay Open Source, not to join in and change themselves.
Now, enter Microsoft, which has built an empire on "proprietary information", meaning patenting their software, and "licensing agreements" meaning lawyers and legal tactics. How much can we doubt their intentions? Did they help shareware or freeware by making IE free (as they claimed)?
Did they help the industry in ergonomics by adding that? Do they wish to help anyone but themselves by stealing and deprecating the hard-earned work of others?? No.
They will seek to destroy Open Source by weakenning the definition. They see Apple and Al Gore (stupid blunderrers in the path of a giant) as test subjects for the subjugation of Open Source, and indeed, of proprietary software with a universal tax to Microsoft.
Is this for real? Is it even possible? Yes, and yes. This is exactly the business model Bill Gates has laborred to set up. We may even see more of it in our lifetimes, if the government doesn't step in. Truth is, only the government can stop Bill Gates.
-Ben
"There are all different types of ways you can do open source," Valentine said. "We are looking into whether we should get into open source initiatives."
All different types of ways to do open source? I translate to mean "We plan on creating our own proprietary open source license that only applies to Windows and controls the use of the source code just as we control your desktop, your banks, and your lives."
Is it possible that MS would release the source code to the kernel only? For example, the low level stuff such as the HAL, and the code that interfaces with it (Leave out the GUI stuff). This way, they could open source it, it really wouldn't be of much use to anyone, and the DoJ gets off their backs because they wouldn't know the difference anyway...
get nemulator