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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
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
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.
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