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Open Source Windows

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the something-to-think-about dept.

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).

1 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. Open Source useless in this and similar cases by Cassius · · Score: 4

    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.